The church in Andau...

After visiting Weinbau Sattler on Thursday we went to Andau and looked at the Catholic church there. I think it has an interesting architecture but Martin Sattler would say at dinner the next night that it "looks like a factory". I suppose it does, but I still like it.


The door to the church was unlocked - this surprised us since in the US it seems that churches are only open when services are being conducted.


Here is a mural on the ceiling of the church.


In front of the church there is a memorial to the Andau dead from WWI and WWII. It seems as if every town has at least one of these. There are 8 Sattler dead from WWI listed, and 20 from WWII. These numbers, from such a small village, is staggering. I know that the Martin Sattler killed in WWI is related to me since my aunt has a card, in German, with details of his death.


The surnames Peck, Pelzer and Thell are also in my Sattler line (as the maiden names of Sattler wives).

Meeting more of the Sattlers...

On Friday evening we had arranged to meet Martin Sattler for dinner. Martin is a member of the Burgenland Bunch - as I and my cousin Rick are - which has a web site devoted to researching family genealogy in Burgenland.

Martin Sattler is a common name in my genealogy, and is the name of both my great-grandfather and great-great grandfather, both born in Andau.

We were to meet at 7 PM and since we were a little early we decided to walkl through the little Illmitz cemetery that was just across the street from the restaurant. We had just entered the cemetery when Kathy heard a group of people speaking English and struck up a conversation. It turned out to be a group from Minnesota - from St. Paul no less. They were Gartners and were researching their family history in Burgenland. Al Gartner was the patriarch of the group and he is from Rice Street and knows my uncle Frank Tischler. Al's brother is Jim Gartner who ran the St. Bernard's bowling alley when I was in grade school and in a league there. Small world!

We met at the Presshaus restaurant in Illmitz, just a few doors down from our hotel (and, as noted, across the street from the cemetery). Martin brought his uncle Alfred with him. Martin spoke pretty good English but Alfed didn't speak any. Both men seemed genuinely interested in genealogy and we talked for three hours about the Sattler line and how we might be related. Unfortunately, we can't find the exact manner of how we might be related, and more work is required. I did find out that a Sattler left Burgenland for China in the 1920s and ended up farming 60,000 hectares, which is almost 150,000 acres. I may ask for more details from Martin about this since I am sure it is an interesting story.

It was a great evening. The company was wonderful as were the food and the wine at dinner. I also told Martin about Rick's probable visit next year. I have a feeling that we will meet Martin again.

Meeting the Sattlers...

Our first stop on Thursday after we settled into our hotel was the Weinbau Sattler, a little winery run by Erich Sattler in Tadten, just a couple of miles from Andau which is the area where my Sattler family came from. I assume there is some relation between me and Erich but don't know for sure.

I had looked at the Weinbau Sattler web site but had not contacted Erich ahead of time. We found the winery which is on the main street through Tadten - we had expected something out in the country. We brought with us the article from the International Wall Street Journal from February that had reported on the great Austrian wines and noted a Weinbau Sattler red as one of the best.



The sign for the Sattler winery on the main street though Tadten. In the background is the memorial for the men from Tadten who died in WWI and WWII. There are many Sattlers and a couple of Tischlers listed.

We went through a big wooden door from the street and entered the compound. We didn't see anyone and so continued to the back where we found the tasting room. We also found the door to the wine storage warehouse and rang the bell. After a few minutes an older gentleman came out and we tried to explain that we were looking for Erich. He didn't speak English but we understood that he wasn't in now but would be later. We thanked him and left to explore Andau.

We returned a couple of hours later and this time found Erich at home and I explained that I was doing some genealogy research on Sattlers and thought we might be related. His English was quite good and he graciously invited us to sit and have a chat. He brought out some of his wine (and apple juice for Noah) and I showed him a summary of my Sattler line and asked him if he recognized any or thought we were related. His answer, with a shrug, was "All Sattlers in Burgenland are related". He is a low key guy and I got the impression that he didn't really see the point of trying to find old relatives. Kathy sees a family resemblance, and I guess I do as well in the weak chin (which is nice way of saying no chin).

I asked him if business had picked up after he was mentioned in the Wall Street Journal article and he had a blank look. He was not aware that one of his reds was proclaimed one of the best in Europe by one of the best known papers in the world. We gave him the copy of the article that we had brought with us and he seemed proud and happy.

We bought 13 bottles of his wine and then returned the next day and bought 8 more. The prices were very reasonable. The red wine mentioned in the Journal was listed at $32 a bottle at retail, but at his winery it can be had for about $12 a bottle. Again he brought out wine and apple juice and we had another nice visit.


I still don't know for sure if Erich and I are related or how, but I will keep looking with the help of my cousin, Rick. Rick and his wife plan to visit Burgenland next year and I let Erich know that he would probably be having more visitors. We also got the name of Erich's distributor in the US and we hope to be able to buy more of the Weinbau Sattler wine when we get back home.

Off to Burgenland...

The three of us are leaving this morning for eastern Austria, which is the area known as Burgenland. This is the land of my Sattler ancestors - my dad's mother was Barbara Sattler. Anyway, I have some good information on my Sattler ancestors going back to around 1800 and had formerly posted on the topic here and here.

While we are there we are going to have dinner with Martin Sattler and we will try to figure out if or how we are related - I have a high confidence that we are kin. We are also going to visit the Sattler winery, which was lauded in the International Wall Street Journal a few months ago as having some of the best wine in Europe.

We are staying in what looks to be a nice hotel, the Hotel Zur Post, in the town of Illmitz, just east of lake Neusiedl am See. The town of my forefathers is Andau, and is located about 15 miles east of Illmitz on the border with Hungary.

I will report more but it will likely be when we return on Saturday.

Sattler wines...

I was reading the Weekend Journal from Friday's Wall Street Journal and there was an article on Austrian wines. Accompanying the article was a list of the top ten rated Austrian red wines. Eight of the top ten red wines came from the Austrian region of Burgenland, which is the area where my Sattler ancestors came from (on my paternal grandmother's side). Surprisingly, one of the best wines from Burgenland is Sattler Reserve 2005. Priced at $31.99 a bottle, the description of the wine is "Looks dark, smells dark and, at first, tastes purple [?] and dark, but then the grapefruit-like acidity kicks in and it's light on its feet".

I actually knew that there was a Satter vineyard, but had no idea that it produced such quality wines. A visit to the Sattler vineyard is now on our list of sites to see when we visit Burgenland in the spring, and I hope to carry back several bottles to share with family. Here is a link to the Sattler web site (and, surprisingly, it is in English).

The Sattler estate.

Uncle Son...

No one would think that I and my cousin, Rick Tischler, are related. He is well over 6 feet tall and lanky while I am (generously) 5'6" and, as I like to say, stocky. He is a couple of years older than me and while we saw each other often while growing up - particularly at out grandparents' home - we were not extremely close. I was closer to a couple of other cousins who were my age and also attended St. Bernard's (grade school and high school). Rick grew up in Moundsview - the suburbs.

I only found out later that he ended up in the same field as me - government contracting. That's quite a coincidence when you think about it sine it is such a specialty. The same as if we had both become proctologists. When he and his wife moved back to Minnesota from Iowa several years ago we started getting together occasionally for lunch, and we also both attended functions of the local chapter of the National Contract Management Association.

More recently we have both been working on our family genealogy, and we correspond by email almost daily.

Rick's father - and my uncle - Ray (aka Son), passed away unexpectedly on Friday. He was raking leaves and they suspect that he had a clot in the artery in his neck and passed very quickly. Our grandmother also died from the same cause type of stroke.

My dad passed away in March, although he had been frail for some time and when he took his final turn for the worse, I was able to travel from Prague to his bedside before he passed. I was thinking about the two very dissimilar ways that these two brothers - my dad and Rick's dad - passed. Ray passed very quickly, at 83, without any suffering. He was active until the very end. My dad, while I don't think he suffered, has been in declining health since suffering a stroke several years ago (a stroke that occurred on the same day as the funeral of a 52 year old former son-in-law, Frank, who had been married to my sister, Chris, who passed away from cancer in 1994).

For the last few years every time I visited my parents I would kiss my dad on the forehead when I left and told him I loved him. I had hoped that we could move to Prague for three years and get back to Minnesota with things no worse than when we left. Sadly, that didn't happen.

It's Sunday night, Kathy and Noah are in bed, and I am having a couple of beers (the big .5 litre bottles, not those wimpy 12 ounce dealies) so I am feeling philosophical and a bit morose. It is the natural order of things that parents mostly pass on before their children, but no matter how long and active a life they have lived it is still very, very painful for those of us left behind.

We will all end up taking the same journey as Al and Son, of course, so it's best if we act around our loved ones as if we could go at any time - because we can.

I offer my sincere condolences to my aunt, Audrey, of course Rick, and his sister Deb and the rest of their family.

Tischler Geneaology - Part II...

I signed up to ancestry.com again on Saturday. I had been a member a few years ago, but I eventually lapsed because it was fairly expensive, about $100 per year, and I only worked on genealogy in fits and spurts so I felt like I was paying for something I wasn't using most of the time.

I have been working with my cousin Rick on Tischler and Sattler (my dad's mom's line) lineage. Rick went to Calvary cemetery on Front Street a couple of days ago and found the grave markers for my gr-grandmother (Anna) and gr-grandfather (Martin) Sattler as well as our grandparents (Tischler). I had found them back in 2000 and still had the locations on maps that I scanned and sent to Rick. He took and sent nice digital photos of the markers. My dad's grandpa Frank Tischler doesn't even have a grave marker so we might look into getting one.

With this flurry of genealogy work I decided that it would be good to have the resources of ancestry.com available to us. I went to the web site to sign up and was amazed that now a year subscription to their service is $299!. I can't afford that, so I just bought a month for $29, and we'll see how far we get.

But here's the thing. In the few years that I have been away from ancestry.com they have greatly enhanced their services. They have a great search function, and they show documents like copies of census records and passenger logs of ships that came over from Europe in the 1800s as part of the result of a name search. They also search all of the family trees that are listed in the ancestry.com web site to see if someone has already done the leg work on researching your family.

That isn't always the case. On my Tischler line I have been stumped for years on Frank, my dad's grandfather. My dad had said that he only remembers seeing his grandfather a few times even though Frank lived in St. Paul for most of his life. The last time my dad saw him was about the time my dad went into the service. I have Frank's death certificate and it shows he died on February 13, 1946. It also says that he died of "cancer of the rectum" - I really hope THAT'S not hereditary! Anyway, we are still trying to find the one piece of information that will break us out past Frank to the rest of our Tischler lineage.

However, on some of my other lines - on my mother's side - in 48 hours I have found relatives back to the 900s - more than 1200 years ago! I find this to be simply amazing. I was lucky enough to find relatives back far enough to where I then tied into very distant relatives who have already researched our common line. I can go back farthest with the Thomas line. Thomas is my mom's maiden name, and her parents were divorced when she was very young and she only got to know her father when he was elderly. So it is ironic that it is this line that I can take back the farthest - 27 generations. It goes like this - me, my mom, her dad (Roy Thomas), James Monroe Thomas, Elija Thomas, Henry Thomas, Daniel Thomas, Simon Thomas, Tristram Thomas, Tristram Thomas, Christopher Thomas, Tristam Thomas, Edmond Thomas and as Yule Brenner would say, "et cetera, et cetera, et cetera".

Anyway, the picture here is a Minnesota census record of my gr-gr-grandfather, Martin Sattler, and his wife, Magdelina.

Tischler Genealogy - Part 1...

I started working on my family genealogy back in the 1970's not long after the Roots TV mini-series came out. I remember spending hours in the main St. Paul library and visiting city hall looking for records associated with my dad's side of the family - which were certainly more numerous than my mom's side. My mom was an only child and her mom moved around a lot.

Back in the days before internet - or even the computer - research was time consuming and you really had to know what you were doing to make any significant progress. Which is why I didn't make any significant progress, and put genealogy aside for a couple of decades.

About 10 years ago I started looking again. With the internet you could take advantage of the research of others quickly and easily. There were some good premium web sites (that are still around) like ancestry.com, and I even joined one or two of them for a time. There were also great free resources like the Mormon (Latter Day Saints) genealogy web site. Mormons believe that if someone converts to Mormonism they can save their ancestors, so the Mormons are very big into genealogy. As it turns out, my mom's great-great grandmother (Phillipa Andersen) came over from Denmark as a convert to Mormonism and took a wagon train to Utah, eventually setttling in Nevada. I know all this thanks to the LDS web site.

So although back in the 1970s I had expected my dad's side (Tischler and Sattler) to be easy to research and my mom's side (Thomas and Roth) to be very hard to research, the reality was quite different.

I received some Sattler documents several years ago, I think from my Aunt Eleanor. They were documents in German with English translations and showed two generations of Martin Sattler (father and son) both born in an area called Burgenland in very eastern Austria.

Now for the most recent developments. My cousin Rick Tischler sent an email last week asking if I could send him some of the Sattler information I had, so I went about trying to find my genealogy box that we had moved from Minnesota, but I hadn't looked at since being here. I was lucky and found the box quickly and brought the documents Rick wanted to work to scan and email to him.

It had been a while since I had looked at them so I saw again that the Sattlers were from Austria. Since we had just visited Vienna a couple of months ago I was curious where Burgenland was. As I have said before, Google is a wonderful thing, and in a minute I had thousands of web sites at my disposal with information on Burgenland.

Then I tried the combination of "burgenland, sattler, genealogy" and had scores of web sites to look at. One of them was a site run by a group called the Burgenland Bunch that specializes in researching the genealogy of families from the Burgenland area. And, to my surprise, one of the people from Burgenland who helps with research is Martin Sattler. It's hard to tell yet if he is a relation, but I am hopeful.

The Burgenland in about an hour east of Vienna, so it is 5 hours by car. We may make a visit there while we live overseas since it is so easy compared to if we lived in the US.