When I learned my immigrant ancestor Nicolaus BECKER was from Hesse-Kassel, I had to wait patiently for years until his home parish of Flieden digitized its records for online viewing. That happened in 2021.

It was the middle of COVID-19 when the churchbooks landed on Matricula in early 2021, and I used the ‘stuck at home’ excuse to spend hours transcribing records on evenings & weekends. Not only did I find my own family, I went much further learning about the other families of Flieden. (I have many of them indexed on WikiTree here.)

I learned very interesting things along the way. Hesse-Kassel was part of the Holy Roman Empire, and Flieden itself was built along a famous roadway known as the Via Regia. This “Royal Highway” stretched from Moscow to Spain, and a lot of trade & transportation was done along it. It was also a common road during wars, and it’s been said Napoleon’s army stopped in Flieden. Because of all this, Flieden needed inns. And it needed innkeepers.

I learned that many of the ancestors of Nicolaus BECKER were innkeepers, both on his father and mother’s sides. Most of the inns were in 3 towns that were part of Flieden Parish – Magdlos, Flieden itself & Rückers.

On a map, they’re less than 7 kilometers apart (less than 5 miles). But they were all close to the Via Regia, which today has become a major highway in Germany (shown on the map).

I learned that the innkeeping families all married into each other. They witnessed each other’s marriages, they served as godparents to each other’s children. And they did plenty of match-making. An innkeeper’s daughter commonly married another innkeeper’s son. It kept innkeeping blood in the families and the inns passed down from one generation to the next.

Six of those families, all of which I descend of, were HAAS, BLUM, GROB, BECKER, SENG and KLUG. The HAAS & BLUM family each ran an inn in Flieden in the 1600s and 1700s; the GROB & BECKER families ran the Magdlos inn from the 1600s to the 1800s; and the SENG & KLUG families ran the Rückers inn in the 1600s and 1700s.

I gave each of the families an icon based on their surname, and created a “Game of Thrones-esque” family tree tying the ‘houses’ all together and showing how my immigrant ancestor Nicolaus BECKER (born in 1807) connects. Here’s a chart with my direct ancestors in blue and innkeepers denoted by an (I).

Click here or on the image above to enlarge it

Related: Flieden Families: Catholic Parish Transcriptions

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