It’s only been a few weeks since the Würzburg Diocese church records began appearing online, and already, here’s a significant discovery: I’m distantly related to Werner HEISENBERG, the world-renowned theoretical physicist, scientist & quantum mechanics pioneer.

When I wrote about finding my brickwall ancestor Magdalena SPAHN in the Würzburg area parish records, little did I know that HEISENBERG himself is also a SPAHN descendant. It’s through his maternal grandfather, who was born in Gänheim, the same place Magdalena’s paternal grandparents married. After reviewing the parish records, he traces back to the same SPAHN family.

But he is also a BAUER descendant, making us double cousins. In fact, the BAUER link is the shortest route to a relationship, with our Most Recent Common Ancestors (MRCA) being Johannes BAUER, who served as Mayor of Gänheim for 20+ years, and his wife Maria GEHRET. The exact relationship is 5th cousins, 3 times removed, and it’s confirmed with the Gänheim Parish records.

Johannes BAUER (1707-1779) and Maria GEHRET (1714-1770) had a daughter Catharina BAUER who married Georg SPAHN. They are Magdalena’s grandparents, and they’re also confirmed in my family’s DNA. Older relatives of mine are DNA-matching descendants of another child of Catharina and Georg, Margaretha, while we are through their son Michael.

Johannes and Anna Maria also had a son Johannes BAUER, who married Veronica SPAHN, first cousin to Georg SPAHN. They are the direct ancestors of Werner HEISENBERG. Veronica’s grandparents Andreas SPAHN and Elisabeth ZIEGLER represent our second pair of common ancestors, and that relationship has us as 6th cousins, 3 times removed.

How did this discovery come together? It started with a Google search. One of my more reliable research methods when I find a new branch of ancestors is to search their names in Google, along with the names of their villages. When searching Gänheim, which translates roughly to “Home of the Geese” [heim = home, gän = geese], by the way, which is kind of fun, along with names like BAUER, GEHRET, and SPAHN, I landed on a website that had these families documented (see this page here in particular).

Each of the relevant family pages have a link at the bottom “Return to Heisenberg,” which leads you here. It quickly became clear this was a family tree for Werner HEISENBERG. His link to Gänheim is through his mother Anna WECKLEIN (another Gänheim surname). Her father Nikolaus WECKLEIN was born in Gänheim.

You may have seen HEISENBERG depicted in the recent Hollywood film Oppenheimer (2023). The website where that family tree is hosted says it was created after another depiction – that of Heisenberg in the Broadway play Copenhagen (1998). His family wanted to set the record straight on his integrity and dedication to humanity, and they provided documents to prove it, along with the family tree.

The link to HEISENBERG is on my Mom’s side, through my great-grandfather Howard GRUNDTISCH. He was born in 1899, just two years off from Werner himself. Howard’s great-grandmother was Magdalena SPAHN and Werner’s great-grandmother Barbara GRIESBAUER was her 2nd cousin. Their parents, Michael SPAHN and Apollonia BAUER, were 1st cousins.

Here is exactly how we’re related, focused on that Most Recent Common Ancestors line:

Common Ancestors: Johannes BAUER (1707-1779) & Anna Maria GEHRET (1714-1770)
My 7th great-grandparents and Werner’s 4th great-grandparents

Let’s Connect: Twitter, Bluesky, Facebook, LinkedIn or 📧