When Is Your Surname Not Your Surname?

(This was originally posted in the "Robyn's Echo" blog on November 5, 2009.)

My father's side of the family has been doing research on the surname line the past year. My first cousin, once removed, and his wife were expecting a little boy after four girls in his family, and wanted to know more about the Hobusch surname.

I helped start the search by finding out what I could about the family once they arrived in the United States. One thing I could not find was a record of the great-great grandfather Carl coming to the United States. My great-grandfather was born in Aken the year the German Republic was formed. Before, the territory where the family lived was part of Prussia, and the family considered themselves Prussian rather than German.

Gebhardt - Hobusch Marker - Salt Lake City Cemetery

Cousin Kristine and her husband went to the cemeteries for us and confirmed what I suspected from researching the family records. There was a familial connection to another family with the surname of Gebhardt. The research of this family line also confirmed that, except for this little boy less than a year old now, there was no one else in the younger generation of our immigrant ancestoral line to carry the Hobusch surname forward.


Once I found out what I could about our Hobusch line in the United States, the information was turned over to a German researcher. What she found in the church records in Germany is that the great-grandfather, who has been known as a Hobusch on all the records in the United States starting with his arrival at Castle Garden, was born as an illegitimate child and given the surname of his mother: Schuster. My great-great

Carl Hobusch - Johanna Schuster

grandmother married Carl Hobusch the following year, and later another son was born and named after his father. From what the German researcher explained, based on the practice of the time, if my great-great grandmother had married the father of her first child, the records would have been changed to list him as the father and the child would have been "legitimized". Being a legitimate child was very important in the society of that time and place. So, the fact that the records do not show that this happened meant that the man who is listed on all the U.S. records as being the father of my great-grandfather is, in actuality, not.

And, I and my cousins should probably be known as Schusters.

I was surprised how disconcerting it was to discover my surname was not really my surname. Even though I have changed my surname twice since I was born, being a Hobusch has been a big part of my self-identity. Based on pictures we have of my great-grandfather, my father appears to have inherited the appearance of his German--excuse me--Prussian line. I inherited quite a few physical traits and abilities from my father, so I have always identified strongly with my German--excuse me--Prussian surname, even though by heritage I am mostly English (not Scot, Welsh or Irish--English). I looked at my grandchildren and baby pictures of other family members over the years and, if they resembled my baby pictures, I invariably said, "Yep, s/he is a Hobusch." Now it is not really so anymore.

I feel disenfranchised.

Johanna Hobusch Headstone

I would have been just as happy with the surname Schuster. After all, I always have had a certain feeling of affinity for this great-great-grandmother even though I knew extremely little about her other than her name up until a year ago. When I found that my great-grandfather was illegitimate and the surname came from his mother, I would have considered it as one of those interesting "skeletons in the closet" situations. I would have been just has happy to look at those family babies and said, "Yep, s/he is a Schuster." It is just that I have not lived with Schuster being my surname and part of my self-identity the same way Hobusch has been.

All may not be lost on the Hobusch surname situation. One of the puzzles we as a family are trying to work out is that family records state that my great-grandfather's father's name was William or Wilhelm Edward Hobusch, not Carl A. Hobusch as appears on U.S. records. Could the father of my great-grandfather have been a family member of the man my great-great grandmother ended up marrying the year after her first son was born? After all, she was not a young, immature teenager who may have been seduced by an older man when she had her first son. She was a month shy of being 27 years old. Since she was a single 27 year-old with an illegitimate child, she probably was not "marriage bait". So, how did she meet Carl Hobusch who was four years her junior? One explanation could be that he knew her because of his familial relationship with the natural father of her child. If the father had deserted her or been killed in the conflicts of the time, that may explain how those two met and eventually married. We are hoping to find a Wilhelm Edward Hobusch somewhere in the area. It would not prove anything--only give the family some comfort that MAYBE we connect to Hobusch lines back in Germany.

Okay, I know our surname is still Hobusch. A lot of people changed or anglicized their given and/or surnames at the time they immigrated. The surnames put on the immigration records when they came to the U.S. and then got passed down to their descendants are the legal names of the descendants. Still, it would have been nice to know that the surname I was born with--the one with the interesting traditions attached--is more than four generations old in my generation of the family.

All we really know about the father of my great-grandfather is from the Y-DNA test we have, thanks to Cousin Rick. He was probably Prussian, since the test results show his ancestors were more slavic and came from regions such as the Ukraine and Romania. That is different than the Teutonic German Y-DNA found in many of the people native to Germany. There are a large collection of surnames who share the Y-DNA of our family. One is a Busch, but none of them is Hobusch.

Okay, I have got to get past this. Yep, I'm still a Hobusch, okay?