The Vine-Keeper's Crossing

Harlan: Every family has a door it came through, and if you walk back far enough up the Hooker line — back past the farms and the fathers and the sons who carried the name — you come at last to a German woman named Maria Eva Weingartner. She was born in the year eighteen hundred, and she died in eighteen seventy-one, and she is, as near as the record can show us, the old-world root of this whole American family. She is the door we came through. Harlan: Her name tells you something before we even begin. Weingartner. In German it means the keeper of the vines — the vineyard-tender, the one who knows the slope and the sun and the patience a grape demands. It was the kind of name a family earned by what it did with its hands, generation after generation, on the hills of some German valley. We don't know the exact village. The record is silent there. But a name like that doesn't come from nowhere, and it's fair to picture her people the way such people were: rooted, hardworking, tied to a particular piece of ground the way a vine is tied to its stake. Harlan: And then, in her lifetime, the ground moved out from under all of them. Harlan: The Germany of Maria's middle years — the eighteen forties and fifties — was a hard place to stay. The old states were crowded and poor. Harvests failed. Taxes pressed. And in eighteen forty-eight a wave of revolutions swept the German lands and then collapsed, leaving behind a generation that had reached for something better and been told to sit back down. So they did a thing that must have felt like tearing a vine up by its roots. By the hundreds of thousands, Germans sold what they had, packed what they could carry, and walked toward the sea. Harlan: Most of them walked toward Bremen. Bremen was the great emigrant port, and it had earned a decent name — as early as the eighteen thirties the Bremen Senate had laid down rules for the ships: that they be sea-worthy, that they carry a doctor, that there be food enough and space enough and a sanitary inspection before a soul went aboard. It was not comfort. Nothing about it was comfort. But it was a little more mercy than an emigrant could expect most anywhere else, and that mercy is probably part of why so many of our German ancestors came out through Bremen's harbor. Harlan: Now here is where we reconstruct — carefully, and only the likely. The record doesn't hand us Maria's ship or the year she sailed. But we know where this family came to rest, and we know the current that was running in her lifetime, and the two fit together like a tenon in its mortise. Because in those very decades, a society of German men had organized to carry their countrymen to one particular place: Texas. The first of their ships reached the Texas coast in eighteen forty-four. By eighteen forty-six, something like seven thousand Germans had come ashore at Galveston, carried over from Bremen and then ferried down in smaller boats to the little port of Indianola, and from there hauled inland by oxcart to build new German towns in a new German Texas. By eighteen sixty there were thirty thousand of them. Harlan: So when we place Maria Eva Weingartner in that stream — a vine-keeper's daughter crossing from Bremen to Galveston in the great German wave, carrying the old knowledge of soil and patience into a raw and enormous country — we are not inventing her. We are setting a documented woman down in the documented river that was carrying her whole people, in exactly her years, toward exactly the part of the world where her descendants took root. The likely, not the certain. But a well-founded likely. Harlan: And somewhere in that crossing, or on the far side of it, the name began to change. Her line comes down to us not as Weingartner but as Hooker — through her son, Leopold Hooker. How the one became woven into the other, the record doesn't plainly say; immigrant names were smoothed and shortened and re-spelled all the time, at ports and in churches and by clerks who wrote down what they thought they heard. What matters is the thread held. The vine-keeper's blood ran on into a boy named Leopold, and Leopold into Sebastian, and Sebastian down through the Murnons and at last to a man named Tommy, and to his sons — to us. Every Hooker alive carries a little of a German woman who tended vines and then let them go, and crossed an ocean toward a country she had to take entirely on faith. Harlan: She died in eighteen seventy-one, an old woman by then, in a nation she had not been born into and had helped, in her small and unrecorded way, to build. We don't have her voice. We don't have her village. We have a name that means the keeper of the vines, a pair of dates, and a river of history we can prove ran straight through her life. Harlan: Sometimes that's all a family gets of the one who opened the door. And sometimes, if you tell it right, that's enough to remember her by.