My Identity Crisis
Monday, July 23, 2007 at 04:40PM 
Those of you who know me, know that I've always considered myself a proud German. I sure have a Germanic temperament. I've long thought of myself as one of the few Germans in a federation of men, most of whom are of Dutch ancestry (the URCNA).
Ten years or so, ago I became interested in family history. Over time, doubt started creeping in about my German ancestry as the evidence began to point away from Germany (even the Palatinate, i.e., the region around Heidelberg) toward Switzerland and those Reformed families, who, as refuges from Roman Catholic persecution, relocated to the Alsace along the Rhine in the 1680's. I could live with that. My family might have lived in France, but they were not French, they didn't even speak French at first, and they liked France so much that within a generation at least one of them had emigrated to America.
In genealogical research, the creed is document, document, document. Here's what I know for sure. The first of my kin in America was one Christian Redelsberger, who arrived in Philadelphia on September 29, 1733 (Click here: Riddleblog - Old Family Photos and Documents - chrrsig.bmp). The vessel which brought him sailed from Rotterdam six weeks before.
I also know that Christian Redelsberger moved to South Carolina in 1742 and that he was one of the founders of the "Dissenting Protestant Church" (whose confessional documents were the Walloon [Belgic] Confession, the First Helvetic Confession and the Augsburg Confession of 1540). The founders of the Dissenting Protestant Church didn't much like the pietists among the Swiss Reformed, nor did they like the very anti-Reformed Lutherans, who happened to live just to south (across the Savannah River, in Georgia, of all places).
It always troubled me that Christian would choose the Walloon confession. If he were a Palatine, he'd be a Heidelberger. If he were Swiss Reformed, he'd be a Helvetic man. One of the other founders of the Dissenting Protestant Church was Swiss, which explains the use of the First Helvetic Confession. The fact that they lived among mostly Swiss and Germans (in the Saxe-Gotha region of South Carolina!), probably explains the use of the Augsburg Confession.
Then there's the surname. People often stumble over "Riddlebarger," but that is the highly anglicized version! To date, I have found 51 different spellings for Christian's surname in PA and SC. Many have a "Rhetels," "Rhedels" or "Ricktels" variant. Since people recorded Christian's surname phonetically in public documents, we don't know what it was originally. We just know how it sounded to the English ear.
That leads to my identity crisis. In a moment of writer's block, I did a quick google search for "Riddelsperger" (the way Christian's son John spelled his name) and to my amazement got a hit for a Christian "Retlispergh" (and a number of other obvious family members) in a European church register in 1703. I'm not yet sure this is our guy or not--it needs to be documented, which means looking through rolls of microfilm of church registers and going blind in the process--but for a whole bunch of reasons I won't bore you with, this is the first time I have ever had a concrete lead on my ancestors in Europe. This may well be the real deal. We'll see . . . document, document, document.
Here's the catch. The name appears in a church register (Catholic) in Broekhuizen. Broekhuizen is in the province of Limburg in what is now the Netherlands . . . OK, you can stop laughing!
The problem is that if this is where Christian's ancestors lived before he set sail to the New World from Rotterdam in 1733, the region was not under control of the Dutch at the time, but a mixture of German, Walloon, French and who knows what else. Broekhuizen is but a couple of miles from the modern border with Germany. Between 1600-1800, the region was ruled at various times by Spain, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany and Austria.
To add to the difficulty of documentation, Limburg even has its own dialect ("Limburgish" and no, I am not kidding) which is recognized by the EU as an official European dialect! Some combination of German and Limburgish might explain the odd spelling of our surname (it is probably not German), as well as Christian's otherwise strange allegiance to the Walloon Confession.
Now comes the crisis--how am I to behave if I am a Limburger? I know what Germans do, but what about Limburgers? Will I have to learn Limburgish? I have never even met another Limburger . . . Have you?
I feel lost and confused . . . but I will find some way to carry on . . .
Reader Comments (22)
I haven't seen your blog in a long time. This is funny stuff. Talk about LOL!!
What is ironic about this story of your questionable ancestry is that today I bought beer to bring to tomorrows gathering: An expensive six pack of Stella Artois (appealing to your fussy French/ Belgium roots) and it's a Lager(there's your German) I wonder if you'll identify with the name or the taste;-)
C'est la vie;-)
In all seriousness, I used to think I'm welsh, but it turned out our family merely stopped in wales a couple of generations after coming from germany... So I have an angry german side... and an angry welsh side <:-o