A fifteen-page Festschrift printed at Villingen im Schwarzwald in 1986, for the 150th anniversary of the Distel butcher’s shop in the Niedere Strasse. It was written in January of that year by Ludwig Distel, of the Villingen family, out of the family’s own papers and the records of the town.
It traces the line from the marriage of the saddler Christian Distel at Gunningen in 1636, the oldest exact record the family has, through the farming generations at Rietheim, the move into Villingen and the founding of the shop in 1836, to the fifth generation of butchers standing in it in 1986. It is the source from which the German side of this archive was built, and it is the document that explains, in a single paragraph, why there are Distels in Australia at all.
What it is, and what it is not
It is a business anniversary booklet, not a genealogy. It follows the shop rather than the family: sons who did not inherit get a paragraph each, and daughters get almost nothing. Where it gives a date, that is its author’s reading of the records in 1986, not the parish register itself. At least one of its dates is known to be wrong: the family’s own memorial card contradicts it.
All 15 pages are reproduced below, each with the German as printed and an English translation beside it. Click a page to read it.
The people in the closing pages
Some of the family named at the end of this booklet are still living. The booklet was printed and handed round in 1986 and is a public document, so every page of it is reproduced here as it was printed. What is not repeated is the detail typed out underneath: the pedigree on page 13 gives full birth dates, and the transcription there stops before it. A scan is not searchable; a web page is.
If you are one of the people concerned and would rather this were settled differently, please say so.