Alsace Emigrants

By Eilene Lyon

It’s time I shared a bit about a neglected line on my family tree, the Arbogasts of Alsace. They immigrated from a tiny village or commune in the Bas-Rhin department of France called Rittershoffen. The prefecture (capital) of Bas-Rhin is Strasbourg, a major city on the Upper Rhine River. Rittershoffen is about 25 miles (39 km) north of Strasbourg.

Jean and Magdalaine (Wagner) Arbogast (my 4^th great-grandparents), with all their surviving children, left the little village in the summer of 1840. They traveled to Le Havre to board the ship Nile taking them to New York City.¹ What prompted them to leave?

The Alsace region has sometimes been part of Germany, but was always French during the residence of these two generations of Arbogasts. However, they did identify with Germany on some U.S. census records and they probably spoke German, as was traditional among Alsatians. All their births were recorded in France. The family line goes back in Rittershoffen at least to the mid-1600s, and Arbogasts still live there today.

The surname is endemic to Alsace and southern Germany and may date from the arrival of a missionary by that name in the seventh century. He is now known as Saint Arbogast. St. Arbogast is credited with bringing Christianity to the Alsace and he was appointed Bishop of Strasbourg.² The name could also have derived from the earlier Germanic common name of Arbegast.

(Johann) Jean Arbogast and Magdalaine Wagner were both born in 1794, shortly after the French Revolution.³ Alsatians generally supported the revolution, turning on the feudal lords in Strasbourg. But some Protestants favored the monarchy. Jean married Magdalaine in 1815, the same year as the defeat of Napoleon I. Alsace was then put under military rule for several years. The massive influx of soldiers and horses had a detrimental impact on the economy.⁴

As the population of the region swelled, economic opportunity dwindled. Between 1820 and 1850, many Alsatians left, some for Austria or Russia, others for America.⁵ Once the Arbogasts arrived in America, they migrated to Tuscarawas County, Ohio, a county largely settled by German immigrants and German descendants from Pennsylvania and western Virginia.

The Arbogasts made their home in Jefferson Township in an area that was alternately known as Stone Creek and Phillipsburg (now Stone Creek).⁶ It is not far from Ohio’s oldest settlement, Gnadenhütten, founded by German Americans of the Moravian Church in 1772.

Two families in Tuscarawas County, the Oswaldts and Drehers, were also from Alsace, and Jean and Magdalaine’s oldest son and daughter married into those families. Though they did not travel on the same ship, it seems these other families arrived around the same time as the Arbogasts.

At the time of their migration, there were seven surviving children in the Arbogast family (though there are errors or misrepresentations on the ship manifest):

Philippe, age 23; Magdalaine, age 21; Henry, age 17; John, age 12 (appears on the manifest as “Joan” age 10, f); Fred, age 10; Louis (aka Lewis), age 7; and Jacob, age 2. The manifest also has a 19-year-old Erhard Arbogast directly above Jean, and another Philip Arbogast further down the page. I have not connected them to Jean’s family.

Based on an 1836 census, it appears that Jean was a weaver in Rittershoffen, but I have not been able to learn more about his work there.⁷ In Ohio he took up farming and anglicized his name to John.⁸

Magdalaine (Wagner) Arbogast passed away in her new American home in 1859.⁹ John (Jean) died intestate in January 1868. His estate consisted of some cash and loans he made, primarily to his children.¹⁰ The Arbogasts are buried in Stone Creek Cemetery. Clearly they had a long-lasting connection with this tiny community, as the most recent Arbogast burial occurred in 2013 per Find A Grave.

Feature image: Traditional costumes of Alsace by P. Kauffmann (Wikimedia Commons)