! ! ! Kost&Lang&Schaefers&Traun!families! ! by! ! Winifred!M.!Schaefers!! with%Earl%Schaefers% 1970! ! Streator,!IL:!Sigma!Press! *** PREFACE *** Several years before his death, John E. Schaefers persuaded his son, Earl, to begin research on the history of the Kost-Lang-Schaefers-Traun families. With a marked sense of history of his own and an amazing memory for names, dates and anecdotes of the past, John believed a permanent record of these Minnesota pioneers and their descendants would be of real interest to the present-day Kosts-Langs-Schaefers-Trauns and to future generations. In March of 1970, as the book was nearing completion, John Schaefers asked that he be allowed to pay for the research and publication expenses connected with the book, so it would be a gift from him to the various Kost-Lang-Schaefers-Traun descendants now living. In carrying out his father's early wishes, Earl Schaefers spent three thousand hours sending out questionnaires to old timers and contemporaries alike, and reading up on pertinent German and American history. Before he was finished, he had compiled two heavy binder notebooks full of family facts and related ones. Earl turned these and the writing of the book over to Winifred M. Schaefers, Harold's wife. Winifred has spent most of four winters on the final phases of the task. Both Earl and Winifred apologize for any errors of fact that have crept into the narrative or the genealogical charts. So many of the older family members now rest in peace and so many of the younger members are scattered inaccessibly all over the country, that it has been difficult for us to verify every statement. We ask you to forgive us and, if von will, to make corrections and additions on your own copies, or to notify Earl Of any missing links we have not supplied. Our fondest hope is that some of you will be travelling one day to Trier, on the Mosel River near Luxembourg, or to Swabia in the Bavarian Alps, and chance upon the exact beginnings there of the Langs or Kosts. It is our greatest disappointment that we could not unravel these mysteries for lack of specific natal places. We have had much help from most of the relatives appealed to, for which we are grateful; and we owe special acknowledgement to John E. Schaefers for his many contributions; Clemens Kost and his widow, Theresa; Carl Weis and his mother, Anna, and to Ben C. Lang. Without their invaluable aid these pages would be far scantier and far less informative. June 14, 1970 *** KOST *** Benedict Kost was born in 1790 in Baden, one of the lesser South German states then, officially, within the confines of the Holy Roman Empire dating back 1000 years to Charlemagne. (Although as Voltaire said, it had long ceased to be holy, Roman or an Empire). He was born into a world of upheaval and unrest. The Bastille had just fallen and the American Revolution had made George Washington the Father of a brash new country. The Early Industrial Revolution was well under way though hardly observable yet in a Germany that still retained aspects of feudalism. The Hohenzollerns of Prussia and the Habsburgs of Austria (the two giant German overlords of all the little ones) were greedily carving up Poland as if it were a piece of pie; and the Prussians were rattling their sabres in preparation for the eventual nationalization of Germany. The future didn't look too bright for an infant boy, especially, but then, when has it ever been safe to he born? If we were able to consult local birth records of the time we could probably pin down the day and the month and the names of his father and mother... and add a generation or more of ancestors, We feel sure there must have been birth records in Baden at that time because modern genealogy (the keeping of written instead of oral records) had begun in the 16th century in Western Europe, with the rise of national monarchs whose aim it was to obtain an accurate count of ALL their subjects for the purposes of taxation and military service. Apart from the fact that he was a male, a Swabian and a Roman Catholic, (Luther had never cut much ice in the Southern German states) there is very little we know about this earliest forebear. He was probably the son of woodsmen or at most of petty tradespeople. The first ironclad fact we know about Benedict, named for the wise head of the Benedictine monks (an order that was to play a large part in the lives of future Kosts) is that he married a girl named Monica who was five years his junior. Monica's maiden name? Who knows? In those days when a woman married, she assumed her husband's name to the complete exclusion of her own. In this case, apparently, she even failed to pass the knowledge of it on to her children or her children's children. This is sometimes true even today, especially among the lower and lower-middle classes. It is only to nobility and the wealthy upper classes that one's inheritance from one's mother is considered important enough to preserve the use or memory of her maiden name. An odd circumstance, it would seem, considering the fact that hall' of one's self, good or bad, 1 comes from one's mother and HER bloodline. Their son, Clemens (1827-1892) told his son, Clemens (1878-1964) that he was a "Schöb" or Schwabian which means that he and his father before him were born in Swabia, an ancient province squeezed between Baden, Bavaria, Switzerland and France. In a Special to the New York TIMES on May 21, 1967, Philip Shabecoff described Swabia as a small region of Southwest Germany known for its Romantic poetry and spatzle (noodles), as well as its long history of democratic liberalism. Most of what was the medieval duchy of Swabia lies within contemporary Wurttemberg in the State of Baden-Wurttenberg. True to its political traditions, Wurttemberg was the very last German area to be incorporated into the Second German Reich; its citizens fighting the despised Prussians to the end. Even after the Nazis won, they were less popular in Swabia than in any other area of Germany. Swabians like to tell of the time Hitler came to speak in Stuttgart, when some unknown hero cut the loudspeaker cable. Hitler never returned. It is often said that Swabians "feel more comfortable in Paris than in Berlin"... Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, the Desert Fox of World War II, who was a Swabian, always kept a picture of Napoleon on his wall rather than one of Hitler... Native Swabians of note include the poets Schiller and Holderlein and the exalted mathematician Albert Einstein. A good Swabian, Shabecoff reports, possesses what are regarded as the cardinal virtues - intelligence. industry and Gemütlichkeit (charm). Even today when the once-pastoral Swabia is highly industrialized, most Schwabs retain a patch of land for raising vegetables! Not pompous about their virtues, they like to make jokes about themselves, particularly about their reputation as slow and careful thinkers; and their reluctance to part with money (according to an old saving, "A penny should be held twice in the hand"). Their love of adventure and travel has caused many Swabians to emigrate to America, bringing their customs with them. Those of us who remember the generation of grandchildren of Benedict and Monica are sure to have recognized most of these characteristics in Grandpa Gregor, Uncle Clemens and others. We have not been able to extract authentic dates but we can assume that Benedict and Monica were married young - say in 1812 when the French under Napoleon made their disastrous retreat from Moscow - because they had had 11 children (one of the first died very young) before 1840 when they set out with the remaining ten for the new world. Their names were, according to the "Early History of Stearns County", Feliz, Lawrence, Joseph, Susan, Peter, Gracene, Mary, Clemens, Katherine and Leopoldina. The only one whose birth date we know exactly was Clemens, who was to be the lineal ancestor of our clan, the maternal great-great-grandfather of Carl, John and Scott Schaefers. The fact that we have the day, month and year of his birth, October 18,1827, is just another proof that families understandably tend to preserve more vital statistics about lineal ancestors than collateral. What Benedict and Monica did besides rearing their large brood we can only conjecture. They must have worked very hard, gone to church every Sunday and Holy Day and, in all respects, lived the lives of thrifty, God-fearing peasants. We can be pretty sure that their surroundings were beautiful, with vistas of hills folding unto hills, distant mountain peaks,.majestic forests and well-tilled valleys. They must have been frugal to be able to pay 12 passages to New York City, no matter how modest their shipboard accommodations. It appears they did not have much property to keep them in Swabia: and they probably had heard alluring tales of the freedom and opportunity in America. If Monica and Ben, at 45 and 50, were beyond chasing the will o' the wisp of fortune, their oldest sons and daughters were of precisely the right age For adventure. Even Clemens. at 13, must have read of America's Indians and its great forests and rivers teeming with game. There seems to have been a further incentive toward emigration: busy Benedictine priests and monks.