“Where did that come from?”… How many times our children have asked that question when Linda or I would repeat an expressive phrase that was familiar to our own childhood. “Katie bar the door”, “Raining blue dogs”, “That’s how the cow ate the cabbage”…..Obviously, such sayings were no longer a part of the times in which we found ourselves. History lost, if not for our memories of times gone by. And so it is with much of family history; small, or large, amounts of the knowledge of our fore-bearers lost forever with the passing of each generation.

My grandfather and my dad related lots of stories, many of which I no longer remember. I have promised my children that one day I would write down my memories so that they would have knowledge that can’t be forgotten. Since I hate writing longhand, I thank God for this technology which allows me to tell my story. Now, I pray He gives me the time to finish it all.

I will begin with a brief summary of what is currently known about the Nauck history. The Nauck’s are of German descent, a small family, even in Germany. So little is known of our heritage, because so little was written down and much of that lost to war over several centuries. And so many of the stories that were verbalized have been forgotten, or details skewed, by the passing of time and memory. Additionally, so many public records were destroyed in the first and second World Wars. In 1954, one of my aunts, Nona Nauck Hollis, enlisted the aid of her congressman to search for information as to our lineage back to Germany. My great-grandfather had immigrated to the United States, so we had very limited history in America, and nothing was known before him. She was successful in tracing back one additional generation in Germany, with very limited information, into the early 1800’s, to my great-great-grandfather of Berlin.

Thanks to Facebook, I was united with a “third-cousin” in Germany, whose mother was in possession of many old documents that have taken us much farther back in time. My thanks to Johannes Nauck of Stuttgart, for his desire to search for extended family in America, and for sharing information that extends our family tree back another six generations.

It is my hope that additional information may surface, but as of now, my lineage appears as follows:

Hans Georg Nauck, my 8th-great-grandfather, was deceased in 1621.

Johann Georg Nauck, my 7th-great-grandfather, served as town mayor, and was deceased in 1679.

My 6th-great-grandfather, Johann Christoph Nauck, 10/5/1658-1/26/1695, lived in Finsterwalde, in Lower Lusatia, where he was a municipal judge. He was displaced by the burning of Finsterwalde by imperial troops during wartime.

Johann Georg Nauck, 1690-1762, was my 5th-great-grandfather. He was a draper, apparently a retailer or distributor of cloth. As noted in one roughly translated document, he was Polish royal and princely chur-Saxon customs control. I’m not certain of just what that meant, but he was a wealthy man until the second “thirty years war” destroyed his properties and he fell into poverty, becoming a common soldier of Saxon dragoons.

My 4th-great-grandfather, John Abraham Nauck, was born to Johann on December 9, 1719 and died June 18, 1781. He served as a common dragoon and lost his left arm to a Prussian bullet. Because he could write well, he was not put out of the army, but was promoted to corporal and placed in command of Saxon cavalry horses of the Prince Sonderhausischen Regiment in Grasung. There he met his wife and had several children. He eventually took charge of an orphanage and apparently ran it until his death.

Johann Gottfried Karl Nauck 9/28/1764 – 2/15/1835, a son of John Abraham Nauck, was my 3rd-great-grandfather. He served as an apprentice in the orphanage bookstore. This may have been the beginning of a lengthy profession of book-selling and publishing that appears in scattered records of several generations that followed in Germany.

Ernst Sal Ludwig Albert Nauck 10/25/1815 – 1895, my 2nd-great-grandfather, was the owner of Albert Nauck and Company, a publishing firm in Berlin.

My great-grandfather is somewhat mysterious. According to my Aunt Nonie (Nona Hollis), Kurt Richard Nauck, 9/20/1844 – 11/2/1879, was a civil engineer in government service in Berwick and Morgan City, Louisiana, when a storm destroyed their home, and walking through the debris he stepped on a nail, resulting in lockjaw and death in 1880. His widow took their two children to New Orleans, where they lived until they moved to New Iberia, LA in 1897. However, Kurt Albert Georg Oskar Nauck 9/20/1844 – 11/2/1879, is remembered in a lengthy excerpt from German records; to wit, Kurt led a short but eventful life, full discomfort, deprivation and anxiety and poor in friends. He was fascinated by the profession of seaman as a child, and as a young man served briefly as an apprentice in banking before his father gave him permission to try sailing. After a short stint, he begrudgingly became an apprentice in a commercial business. In 1867 he went to England and once more fell in love with the sea. He served as a merchant seaman, sailing to Australia, the south seas, India, then to New Orleans, and Havana, returning to New Orleans and up the Red River into Texas. He went back to Germany for a while before returning to Natchez, Mississippi where he taught in the “Measure field”. He later worked as a surveyor in Brashear, then in Morgan City on the Atchafalaya, near the coast of the Gulf of Mexico. He married and had three children, establishing a farm, and owning a small freight vessel. He developed “modest prosperity” until the Hurricane of September 1879 destroyed towns, ships, and properties along the Atchafalaya. He and his family barely escaped the flood surge, losing everything they possessed. With all communication and transportation destroyed, help did not arrive for weeks. In the meantime, Kurt stepped on a nail while salvaging wood for shelter. Without medical aid, his wound became serious, and when help finally arrived he was transported by steamer to New Orleans where he died without seeing his wife and children again.

Albert George Nauck, October 7, 1874 – 1966, the oldest son of Kurt Nauck, was my grandfather, known affectionately by my family as Papa Nauck. He studied electricity and became a Master Electrician in New Orleans. Returning to New Iberia, he married Hulda Frenzel in 1897, and opened a grocery store. He later built and operated the first electric power plant in New Iberia and in Abbeville, installing the first street lights in both towns. His penchant for electricity led him to display “magic lantern” slides in a tent, then in a building. This evolved into “flickers” and later into “moving pictures” during the era of silent movies. (My dad remembered running the hand-cranked reel projector.) Papa and Mama had five children; Albert George Jr (1898), Kurt Rudolph (1899), Frenzel Howard (1901), Gertrude Hulda (1904), and Iona Amelia (1906). In 1916, he sent Kurt to the Sweeney Automobile School in Kansas City, where he learned “front end mechanics”. Papa opened the first modern automotive repair shop in Abbeville. With the outbreak of World War I, he moved his family to Beaumont, Texas in 1918, where he again worked as a master electrician, wiring warships at the Pennsylvania Shipyards. Shortly thereafter, he purchased 42 acres of land with a house and barns for $4000, and the family moved there. After the war Papa began a business raising and selling turkeys and chickens.