Hampel

Robert James Hampel was born on 9 August 1958 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin — the third generation of his family born in the United States. He grew up in a German-Catholic neighbourhood on the city's south side, where his grandfather had worked in the breweries, and he knew only that the family had come from somewhere called Silesia — a place that no longer appears on any modern map of Germany.

He commissioned this chronicle to find what that word actually meant. From his grandparents' generation onward the family is documented in Milwaukee; this research carries the line a full century further back, across the ocean, into the Catholic parishes of the Neisse and Oppeln districts of Upper Silesia, where the Hampel name is recorded in the baptismal registers from the early nineteenth century.

Josef Hampel was baptised on 2 February 1855 in the Catholic parish of Niklasdorf, in the county of Neisse — the entry survives in the parish baptismal register, the primary source on which this whole branch rests. He was the elder of two brothers in a family of small-holders.

In 1881, at twenty-six, Josef boarded a ship for America and settled in Milwaukee, where a Silesian-Catholic community had already formed. His younger brother Paul stayed behind on the family land in Niklasdorf. For more than sixty years the two branches grew apart on opposite sides of the ocean — but the same parish register that recorded Josef's baptism also recorded Paul's children.

Paul's branch was expelled from Silesia in the winter of 1945, when the region passed to Poland and its German population was forced west. This chronicle follows the parish register to the documentary horizon and marks honestly where Paul's line goes cold — the point at which only the family's own letters and papers could carry it further.

Maria Reimann was born in 1858 in the town of Neisse, the seat of one of the oldest church districts in Upper Silesia. The Reimann line is the most deeply documented in this chronicle: the Neisse parish registers reach back, without a gap, to a marriage recorded in 1820 — five generations before Maria herself.

She married Josef Hampel in Neisse in 1880, the year before they emigrated; the marriage entry names both sets of parents and so ties the Hampel and Reimann lines together with a single primary source. In Milwaukee she raised seven children and kept the family's Silesian German alive at home until her death in 1929.