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Recollections Of My Life: The Memoirs of Ernst Eduard Werner Village Head of Gruibingen in Württemberg 1809-1897
Paperback
Historical FiguresGerman History
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: Aug 20 2026
Pages: 142
Weight: 0.78
Height: 0.37 Width: 7.00 Depth: 10.00
Language: English
A memoir written by a Swabian village mayor in his eighty-seventh year - and a mystery his own descendants spent twelve years trying to solve.
In 1896, Ernst Eduard Werner sat down in the small village of Gruibingen, Germany, to record his life before he lost the strength to write it. He had been village head there for nearly half a century. He had buried a wife, a father, and a daughter. He had been shot at in his own bedroom by men who called him a reactionary. And in his eighty-seventh year, he was still climbing a hillside every day to plant trees he knew he would never see grown.
His memoir survived - printed in 1897 by his own son's press in Akron, Ohio, one of four sons who had emigrated to America, and read by almost no one since.
A century and a quarter later, one of his descendants set out to find her own missing grandfather - an Englishman named William Fairbairn Abel who vanished from the historical record around 1906 and was never seen again. The search for him led, unexpectedly, backward: into Fraktur script no machine could read, into a Harvard library archive, and into the full, unabridged voice of the great-grandfather-in-law none of the family had ever known existed.
This is that voice, translated into English for the first time.
Recollections of My Life is Ernst Eduard Werner's own account of a childhood shaped by Napoleon's wars, a career spent dividing common land and building roads no one else wanted built, a first marriage ended by sudden death, a second marriage begun out of plain necessity, and four sons who sailed for America while he stayed behind. It is also the account - added by his own children - of what became of them: a Cavalry sergeant, a Harvard-trained dentist, and a printing magnate whose presses produced this very book.
Werner's faith runs through every page of it. At his first wife's deathbed he reaches for the words of Job - the Lord gives, the Lord takes away - and he closes his life's account the same way he lived it: certain that the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, and that a man who will not see his own trees grown should plant them anyway.
This edition includes:
The complete memoir, translated and annotated for the modern reader A gallery of the family's surviving photographs Family trees tracing the line to the present day A chronology of Werner's life and its long aftermath An epilogue on the search for William Fairbairn Abel - a mystery this book does not solve, because it could not be solved, and says so plainly
For readers of family history, German-American emigration, nineteenth-century faith, or anyone who has ever gone looking for one ancestor and found an entire world instead.
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