Peter Nash en route to Shanghai in 1939
Julius Paechter is the missing link
I discovered the vivid article about the arson at the Paechter store on the Geni web site attached to an elaborate family tree. According to the Geni records, Isaak Paechter, the storeowner in the article, was married to a Friederike Paechter, of all names. Their two children were Rosa and Kurt Julius, and the family later relocated to Berlin.
This sent me down a rabbit hole of leads that went nowhere. Yesterday I asked myself why did I know Friederike was from Tiegenhof. The death record had that information, but I had only just found that. I've known about Tiegenhof for years.
It was right there in this blog. Here is my article from August 23, 2018. Leopold Wohlgemuth marriage in 1863.
The image and extracted information is from the metrical book of marriages of the Jewish community of Preussich Stargard, where our Wohlgemuth family originated. Among other data, it names the wife as Friederike Pächter from Tiegenhof, the daughter of Julius.
That is when I learned about Tiegenhof, and it is also when I did not properly take note of the father's name. I did not capture that tidbit into my master family tree.
When I went back yesterday, I saw that I had overlooked the information about Julius. I began to theorize that maybe Julius was another brother of Isaak and Meier Pächter with the department store.
I searched for him in all my usual places without much luck. Ancestry had lots of Julius Paechters but not the right one. Then I ran a search in Ancestry for anyone named Paechter, and tried to narrow it by Tiegenhof or Nowy Dwor Gdanski, which is the modern name of the town. Those filters didn't help for some reason, even though I noticed there were a small sprinkling of results showing a location of Tiegenhof. I realized I could do a word search on that term on each of the many pages of Paechter search results, and thus find a needle in a haystack.
I found one Tiegenhof record on the first page, another on the third and on page 6 was this beautiful listing: Germany, Select Marriages, 1558-1929
MARRIAGE & DIVORCE
Record information
Name Rosalie Paechter
Spouse Jacob Kleemann
Father Julius Paechter
Birth 1850
Marriage 7 Dec 1874 Tiegenhof, Westpreußen, Preußen, Germany
There was the familiar Danzig couple, Rosa Paechter and Jacob Kleemann. It showed they were married in Tiegenhof, and it showed the bride's father was Julius Paechter.
Q.E.D. Friederike and Rosa(lie) were both the daughters of Julius Paechter of Tiegenhof. I soon figured out that their mother was named Rachel.
And that we are indeed third cousins once removed from Peter Nash. That's him in the photo as a youthful refugee in Shanghai.
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