Johann Fredrich Seidler (1744-1813)

Johann Fredrich Seidler was born 5 Apr 1744 in Germany. The papers I inherited do not mention a place, but they do state that he was a pastor at Elben in Kurshessen (now prob. Elbenberg near Naumburg). I wrote about his wife Wilhelmina before. He is my son-in-law’s fourth great-grandfather.

The sources I have are typed extracts, but most don’t state who typed them, and from which documents they were extracted. They were part of family papers, that I was able to scan, but they are short on important details like places.

Familysearch is not too much help, as they don’t seem to have filmed many records from that area. Also they are frequently mislabeled in the search results: for instance they label the Zivilstandesambt register for Großenenglis (Civil Registration) as “copy of Evangelische Church book,” including Jewish records. Also the covered time periods are mostly very short, in this case 1808-1812; not too useful (at least for me.)⁽¹⁾

So for the moment there are still a lot of unknowns, and Johann Frederick is a dead end. It is unknown where his ten children are born, or where they married and died. Only for his youngest son Heinrich Wilhelm (my son-in-law’s third great-grandfather) is a death place known, he died in Großenenglis on 5 Apr 1866, exactly 120 years after his father was born. But there are no records online to prove it.

(1) I ran into somewhat of the same problem with other German areas: see Martha Mayer. There the indexers designated the date of the civil registration as a christening date for Jewish births! At least there the time coverage was better.