Felix Astor

"Deutschland Heiraten, 1558-1929," database, FamilySearch (https://familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:VCY8-WBN : 11 February 2018), Felix Astor and Eva Dorothea Freund, 27 Jun 1713; citing Evangelisch, Walldorf, Heidelberg, Baden; FHL microfilm 1,189,119.

"Deutschland Heiraten, 1558-1929," database, FamilySearch (https://familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:J4KJ-1KQ : 11 February 2018), Felix Astor and Jusanna Renckertin, 08 May 1725; citing Schwetzingen, Baden, Germany; FHL microfilm 1,192,246.

"Deutschland Heiraten, 1558-1929," database, FamilySearch (https://familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:J4YV-971 : 11 February 2018), Felix Astor and Jusanna Renckertin, 08 May 1725; citing Schwetzingen, Baden, Germany; FHL microfilm 1,192,246.

Familie Astor, Article in German language, Rhein-Neckar-Zeitung dated 04/15/2013

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John Jacob Astor America's First Multimillionaire By AXEL MADSEN John Wiley & Sons, Inc.Copyright © 2001 Axel Madsen. All rights reserved. ISBN: 0-471-38503-4

Chapter One

The Hard Years

At a time when most people lived and died within a hundred miles of where they were born, John Jacob Astor's birth in the German territory of the margrave of Baden-Baden was almost accidental. The Astors—the name was variously spelled Astore and Aoster—were Italian Protestants from the Alpine village of Chiavenna high above the northern end of Lake Como. A medieval ancestor was supposed to have been Pedro de Astorga, a knight from León, in northwestern Spain, whose coat of arms featured a goshawk—azor in Spanish—and who was killed in Jerusalem on the Fourth Crusade in 1203. Tracing the lineage back to the Castilian grandee was the genealogical handiwork of John Jacob's great-grandson, William Waldorf Astor, when the latter pressed his case for British peerage. The first documented ancestor is Jean-Jacques d'Astorg, who embraced the Reformation. He and his family are assumed to have been followers of the persecuted Waldensian Puritan faith originating in southern France and existing chiefly in Savoy, a small duchy in northwestern Italy. The religious wars, which broke out in 1618, resulted in brutal persecutions. Like most subjects of the duke of Savoy, d'Astorg spoke French and Italian, and answered both to Jean-Jacques and Giovan Pietro Astore. The duke of Savoy was a boy of ten and a vassal of Louis XIV in 1685 when the Sun King revoked the Edict of Nantes, which for nearly a century had protected French Calvinists and Lutherans. The massacre of Protestants in Valtellina high up in the Adda Valley sent d'Astorg-Astore, his wife, and their two children fleeing north across Switzerland to Heidelberg, the old university town and Calvinist stronghold where freedom of worship was respected. The family was uprooted again in 1693 when the troops of Louis XIV razed the town. They settled in Zurich, the birthplace a century earlier of Ulrich Zwingli's Reformation. Astore found work as a silk maker and changed his name to Hans Peter Astor. He died in 1711 at the age of forty-seven. His grandson Johann Jakob moved north to Nussloch in Baden, one of the three hundred German principalities, duchies, free cities, and estates forever changing shapes and allegiances as a result of wars and dynastic marriages. Records show that Johann Jakob and his wife, Anna Margaretha Eberhard, had only one child, Felix Astor. He, too, moved. After Felix married Eva Freund and came into property settled on his wife, the couple established themselves in Walldorf—from the German words Wald and Dorf, meaning literally "wood village"—a community of a thousand souls on the edge of the Black Forest twenty miles south of Heidelberg. Baden was a long strip of territory stretching from Mannheim to the Swiss border on the south and on the west facing French Alsace across the Rhine. Baden was divided into two states, Catholic Baden-Baden and Protestant Baden-Durlach, a rift that provided little incentive for commerce and industry. Because the Catholic and Protestant halves had pursued diverging policies, Baden had been left helpless during French expansion across the Rhine. Towns and citadels had been destroyed. Felix Astor bought a vineyard in Walldorf in 1713, but he and Eva were never part of the landowning class, although he achieved the honorable position of churchwarden. They were enterprising in commerce. Johann Jacob chose to stay while his half brother Georg Peter—one of the six sons born to Felix Astor's second wife, Susannah—sought his fortune in England. Johann Jacob became the town butcher and, in 1750, married Maria Magdalena Volfelder, when she was seventeen. Five sons and one daughter were born of the union. The first boy died in infancy. Georg Peter, Johann Heinrich, Catherine, and Melchior followed. The future empire builder and founder of the Anglo-American dynasty was the fifth and youngest son, born on July 17, 1763. Johann Jakob, as he was christened, was three when his mother died. The widowed butcher remarried, but his new wife, Christina Barbara, proved to be of little benefit to her stepchildren as she bore her husband six children of her own. The first set of children resented their stepmother and the second brood. The loathing was mutual. Perhaps because he was only three when his birth mother died, young Johann Jakob seemed not to have suffered the problems so often associated with boys and stepmothers. No letters indicating his affection for Christina exist, but as a mature man he hired an artist to paint portraits of his father and stepmother. Like modern-day police sketches, the portraits were painstakingly drawn from the adult John Jacob's memory. The portraits showed the elder Johann Jakob, toothless and scrawny, selling fish and game. Christina is thin and wrinkled. She holds up one egg from a basket of eggs in the Walldorf market square. Maria Magdalena's offspring left the overcrowded home as soon as they were old enough to fend for themselves—Catherine to marry, the boys to seek their fortunes elsewhere. There was little motivation for their father to keep them at home or for them to stay. Johann Jakob Sr. was a stubborn, careless, and optimistic man. After a few steins of beer, he could turn nasty and cruel. None of his children apparently liked him. But he ran Walldorf's leading butcher shop for forty years and after that enjoyed good health for another three decades. He was ninety-two when he died in 1816.

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Ancestry.com Germany, Select Births and Baptisms, 1558-1898 Name: Ancestry.com Operations, Inc.; Location: Provo, UT, USA; Date: 2014; @R1@

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Ancestry.com Germany, Select Marriages, 1558-1929 Name: Ancestry.com Operations, Inc.; Location: Provo, UT, USA; Date: 2014; @R1@

GEDCOM Source

GEDCOM Source

Ancestry.com Germany, Select Marriages, 1558-1929 Name: Ancestry.com Operations, Inc.; Location: Provo, UT, USA; Date: 2014; @R1@

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Ancestry.com Baden, Germany, Lutheran Baptisms, Marriages, and Burials, 1502-1985 Name: Ancestry.com Operations, Inc.; Location: Provo, UT, USA; Date: 2016;

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Ancestry.com Germany, Select Marriages, 1558-1929 Name: Ancestry.com Operations, Inc.; Location: Provo, UT, USA; Date: 2014; @R1@

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