by Alex Wagner
And anyway, since most of Henry’s adult life was spent in America, it figured that America was likely to have the longest paper trail. I widened the search—and came across two documents that gave me pause.
Among the digitized records available online at Ancestry.com (the King Kong of digital records archives, and, not coincidentally, accessed through a pay portal) was a naturalization certificate for a man named Henry Wagner dated March 1, 1886. I knew this had to be him because it was signed in French Creek, Allamakee County, Iowa. (The county had been settled only three decades earlier, and the Norwegians who did most of that work numbered only five hundred or so in the whole county; it was not exactly a bustling metropolis.)3 There could be no other recent immigrant named Henry Wagner in a place that small (right?).
I was surprised at the date: 1886, by all accounts, was a good fifteen years or so after Henry had first set foot in America.*1 After his first children had been born. And, presumably, after he had opened Wagner’s Bar and Grocery on Main Street. To imagine him still a citizen of the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg—and even possibly an undocumented immigrant in America!—for such a prolonged period of time, during such formative years of our family history, complicated my conception of our American beginnings. As it turns out, up until 1906, there was no formalized recordkeeping around immigration, or the naturalization process; it wasn’t until 1906 that the Bureau of Immigration and Naturalization was even created. The process of becoming an American changed to some degree from the post-colonial era up until 1906, but, effectively, would-be Americans had to have resided in the United States for at least five years, and in their home state for one. (These requirements increased and decreased through the decades, depending on the political climate of the day.)
When they applied for citizenship, immigrants had to prove they met the residence requirements; they were asked to renounce allegiance to any foreign governments, pledge their loyalty to the United States, and take an oath. It did not seem like a particularly arduous process—but, perhaps more interestingly, there was no apparent mandate that it even take place. No deportation task forces were on the hunt for Luxembourg illegals who were theoretically pilfering off the largesse of the American government. There was no mandatory period in which immigrants had to file for citizenship; some did so as soon as they could, while others, like Henry Wagner, waited almost twenty years.4
In fact, the process of becoming American seemed relatively open, unless of course you were a Chinese laborer—in which case you were specifically barred from even entering the country, thanks to the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882—so there were some aspects of the process that would be familiar to a twenty-first-century American. Of course, these were the most disturbing parts.
In the absurdist here and now of America today, when the suggested deportation of eleven million men and women without proper paperwork has an inherently brown subtext, Henry Wagner’s belated naturalization is an urgent reminder that the “illegals”—those tax-avoiding, coattail-riding outsiders—from two or three generations ago were mostly white men and women. And American law enforcement, it seemed, was pretty relaxed about it. Henry Wagner, whatever his immigration status, was a token of that reality. Most every white American family—even those urging the construction of a wall to keep “Them” out—has a Henry Wagner in its past. If only they knew.
But mostly, this piece of paper (this scan of paper) stirred my heart. Laying eyes on my great-grandfather’s 130-year-old naturalization certificate reminded me of the thing we constantly say but never seem to realize: We are a nation of outsiders. I always knew this as it concerned my mother’s side, because her arrival story was never not with us, never not with her. I was reminded of it by virtue of her very being: She was Burmese and then she became American, and you could see that history in her face, hear it in her voice, feel it in her conception of the world. But I had never really understood the same to be true on my father’s side. His whiteness, his American ordinariness, masked the fact that he, too, came from someplace else.
In this moment, it became quite clear to me (as obvious as this was, it was still revelatory) that any claim anyone—who wasn’t a Native American!—made to being a true American was a lie. To say that you were the “real” American and that someone else—an outsider—was not wasn’t some sort of bright-lined immigration policy. It was merely a power grab: Everyone in this country was an outsider.
Henry Wagner and his white descendants were allowed to lay claim to the title of “American” because somewhere along the way, the country had decided that white American outsiders, if residents for a sufficient amount of time, were not outsiders; they became, simply, Americans. But brown American outsiders were—and would always be—brown American outsiders. They could (eventually) be ennobled with the “American” title, but only in hyphenation: African-American, Burmese-American, Mexican-American, as if the hyphenation clarified that these people were not exactly full Americans.
When, for example, had I ever heard the Wagner family referred to as Luxembourger-Americans? Precisely never. And yet my black friends who had families here for centuries—some for long, hard centuries—before Henry Wagner alighted on this land would forever be known as African-American, occupying a slightly lower place on the American power grid. And so it went. I didn’t forgive this injustice, but it did make me wonder about the inverse: What did it mean to suddenly conceive of my white, Western, Wagner European roots as something out of the “ordinary”? To place them in the same bucket as my Burmese roots? What exotic, Luxembourgian strangeness did I come from?
When I discovered that my great-grandfather was naturalized in 1886, I had my first important notch on the family time line. Now I began to look for other, earlier milestones so I could start to plot out a story that explained this man. After going bleary-eyed over archives and records to scrape together the little I’d discovered thus far, I wanted to find the answer to a salacious unknown, one that might shed some light on Henry Wagner’s ethno-religious background: When (and how) exactly did he marry Anna Wagner? Could she have been Jewish, too? Was their marriage one of convenience? Was it religious? Where did it happen? In the Old World or the New?
Cousin Karl had mentioned that he thought Henry Wagner had taken his wife’s name, in part to disguise his identity after the Franco-Prussian War (where Karl believed Henry may have engaged in treasonous activity), but I secretly thought that maybe Henry had taken his wife’s name to disguise his true, Jewish background. I wanted to see what the records showed about their life together and went on the hunt for census data, which would give me information about their marriage and the children born from it.
I first found census records from 1880. In curlicued English script, they accounted for Henry Wagner, a self-described thirty-two-year-old farmer from Allamakee County, born of parents from Luxembourg stock and married to a twenty-two-year-old woman named Eva Wagner. I had always been told that my great-grandmother’s name was Anna, but Eva seemed close enough—and if Henry had been alternately referred to as Heinrich, maybe Eva was some Teutonic derivative of Anna (a stretch). Or perhaps it was her middle name (less of a stretch), or maybe whoever was taking the census was one of those name takers who inadvertently altered future generations of American families by virtue of crappy handwriting or bad hearing or just plain Yankee laziness (likely).
Anyway, I went with it, and did so because the math mostly fit: I knew Henry had been born roughly in 1848 or 1849. According to this census record, he and his wife had three children, a two-year-old son named Heinrich and two daughters: one year-old Catharina and six-month-old Mary. And I knew from our family records that the eldest of my great-aunts and -uncles were Henry, Catherine, and Mary. This was the Wagner clan.
Once I was able to pinpoint the names of a few key family members (Eva Wagner was known as Anna Wagner, Catharina as Catherine, and so forth) and establish a timeline to work with (Henry and
Eva/Anna were having children by 1878, so they must have married before that because children out of wedlock in the nineteenth century seemed like something that simply was not done), I was able to narrow my search for other biographical documents, including, most important, a marriage license. It wasn’t hard to find.
Dated April 4,1877, Allamakee County records showed the wedding of Henry Wagner to Eva Wagner. It did nothing to point me in the direction of the Tribe. Henry and Eva/Anna had married officially in the state of Iowa, and with the blessing of the Catholic church—no synagogue in sight.
But weirdly, unlike so many other marriage records, the bride was not listed by her maiden name. Unless her maiden name had happened—also—to be Wagner. This might explain why my millennial cousin Karl believed that Henry had changed his name to hers, perhaps to disguise his identity after the Franco-Prussian War (where, again, Karl insisted something had gone very badly wrong), or perhaps because he was trying to hide his Jewish identity in the New World (which was my preferred operating thesis). Or perhaps they had just been born with the same last name.
I knew I needed professional help—of all kinds, which was abundantly clear. Specifically, I knew I needed professional help for this project. Through exhaustive and specific Googling, I stumbled across Anne Kenne at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minnesota—there was a limited number of Luxembourg experts in the United States, apparently—who was a university archivist and the head of the school’s Special Collections department.
From my Internet research, I could see that Anne was America’s de facto Luxembourg whisperer, and so I sent a rather feeble email to her, begging for help. She suggested a few books and Web resources, but most important, she turned me on to a site called Luxroots.org. Who knew there was enough of a community of Luxembourger genealogists to warrant its own site? Before long, I would realize of course there’s a community of Luxembourger genealogists. But at the moment, I was aware only of the peaks of the world of genealogical research, not the massive mountains below the surface.
Luxroots.org has the organizational chaos of an early ’90s riot grrrl zine, which had the net effect of both confusion and heightened expectation. It was effectively the Web equivalent of the bargain bin: You were sure there was a treasure buried in there, somewhere—something that might fit the bill for whatever you’d been searching for. In this case, that thing was a name: Jean Ensch, a man who I will dub the Sherlock Holmes of Luxembourger detective work. Ensch monitored the site and acted (as far as I could tell) as the wizard behind the grand duchy’s genealogical forum.
Again, I sent a rather feeble and desperate email into the unknown. Could Mr. Ensch help me in my search? I was looking for information about my great-grandfather Henry Wagner of Esch-sur-Alzette: specifically, if he tried to change his name or otherwise alter his identity in the wake of the Franco-Prussian War, reasons unspecified (to Ensch) but quite clear (to me): I wanted to know if my great-grandfather had been Jewish. I crossed my fingers.
Ensch did not reply.
I waited.
I waited longer.
Eventually, I gave up hope.
More precisely, I went where any good Inter-nerd on the verge of losing hope goes: to chat rooms, specifically genealogy chat rooms where various self-styled ancestry experts are waiting to comment or reply to all manner of inquiries. On Ancestry.com—where most of my key digitized records were available to me, as long as I was able to afford $29 a month in subscription fees—there happened to be a particularly chatty community of amateur genealogists, and so I posted my query: I was looking for any records pertaining to a certain Henry Wagner, born circa 1849 in Esch-sur-Alzette, Luxembourg, and/or his marriage to Eva/Anna Wagner.
Someone from Aurora, Illinois, with the handle chi1k responded within four hours. chi1k found birth records on FamilySearch.org for someone named Henri Wagener, born July 31, 1849, in Esch-sur-Alzette. Amid several lines of terrifyingly medieval Germanic script, I found the handwritten name “Heinrich.”
I couldn’t read any of the rest of it, but chi1k, already the most useful and generous virtual stranger I’d ever come across, explained that He(nry)(nri)(inrich)’s mother was a twenty-two-year-old named Anne Wagener. As with “Anna” and “Eva,” or “German” and “Luxembourgian,” online genealogy research tips told me that “Wagener” could have eventually become “Wagner”; specificity was sanded down through the generations, especially when it came to immigrants who were both leaving so much behind and trying to assimilate into a new culture (and/or had a new culture foisted upon them). Anne’s father, Peter (also known as Pierre) Wagener, sixty-six, was the only other male name listed on the document. There was no record of a father for the newborn.
Meaning: He(nry)(nri)(inrich) Wag(e)ner was an illegitimate child.
Supporting that point was this piece of evidence, scrawled in the margin of the birth certificate, according to chi1k:
Michel Mueller of Grevenmacher and Marie Anna Wagener married in Esch-sur-Alzette on 28 Aug 1856 (making Henri a legitimate child of the couple).
Not that I necessarily needed further proof of this, but chi1k then posted a census document from 1867, which showed Michel and Anna Mueller, née Wagener, and their son Henri Mueller.
By the year 1871, another Luxembourg census revealed that Henri was no longer living with Anna and Michel Mueller. But of course he wasn’t: He had already left for America—and was on his way to becoming Henry Wagner (again).
* * *
—
As fantastically helpful as chi1k had been, I was slightly worried that I was too reliant on his/her reading of the paper. No amount of magnification rendered the nearly two-hundred-year-old script legible to my farsighted eyes, and besides, I didn’t know any German beyond the kind of cutesy greetings you made to shop owners in Berlin boutiques so they wouldn’t think you were an uncultured American tourist. Was I too dependent on this random chat buddy’s explosive reckoning of our family history? Probably. I could imagine presenting the illegitimate origins of our forefather to my dad and his sisters, and then citing the source as someone named chi1k. They would likely frown or otherwise make clear that an anonymous online personage was not the person to trust with a significant rewrite of one’s own family history. I, too, had some doubts.
But then, six months after my initial email, the elusive Jean Ensch surfaced, like a submarine rising out of the dark sea at the least expected moment.
Apparently, the email address I’d used to contact him had been (essentially) shut down five years ago and was presently in use mostly as a “spam trap” (his description). I was lucky Ensch had even bothered to check it.
The wizard had checked the birth records of Esch-sur-Alzette and found the same one that chi1k had sent to me. He, too, concluded that my great-grandfather had been born a bastard:
Peter Wagener declared that his daughter Anna Maria Wagener, aged 22 years, had given birth to an illegitimate child, whose given name was Henry. A marginal note specifies that a recognition of fatherhood and a legitimation by marriage was performed at the marriage of Michael Muller and the mother Anne Marie Wagner (spelling now Wagner in marriage record), which occurred 28 Aug 1856 in Esch sur Alzette.
Henri Wagner was henceforth known—for some unspecific number of years—as Henri Mu(e)ller. As Ensch put it:
The groom recognizes the fatherhood of the child and allows that the child shall bear henceforth the name of Muller and have all the rights attached to the status of a legitimate child.
Knowing nothing about European social mores of the mid-nineteenth century, I hazarded a guess that it was not an easy thing to be a bastard son at that time. I further supposed that Ole Peter/Pierre Wagener was probably not puffing on a celebratory stogie in the newborn ward when he confirmed to the state that his daughter was an unwed mother. This presumed trauma, this illicit history, stood in stark contrast t
o what I knew about my great-grandfather, a patriarch who had fathered a Catholic clan of thirteen children who bore his (mother or wife’s) name. These children, in turn, fathered a next generation of Catholic sons and daughters who hadn’t even the faintest inkling that their grandfather himself had been born out of wedlock. And then adopted! With obfuscations like these, it wasn’t hard to imagine that Henry had perhaps been covering up other biographical details of kaboom-like quality: namely, Judaism. The introduction of Michael Muller would provide another branch of the family tree to explore as it pertained to Our Jewish Roots.
Furthermore, for a time—at least from the age of seven until he left for America—he was known as “Heinrich Muller.” It was unclear whether Henri Muller officially became Henry Wagner before he immigrated to America or after, when he wed Eva/Anne Wagner. If he did so prior to landing in the United States, it suggested something dubious. Perhaps he was, as Karl had suggested, shedding “Muller” for personal reasons; possibly, to escape his past. But if he’d taken his wife’s name upon marriage, then that was just sort of unusual—though by all accounts, it was also his original last name, so not entirely unprecedented. I paused in my research to grapple with a slightly less pressing issue: Did this mean, in some alternate universe, that I was really…Alex Muller?!
But back to the point: The women of Henry’s life—his mother and his wife—played a determinative role in his public identity, one that was completely ahead of its time. Women, after all, were the ones whose names were forgotten by history: They lost their maiden names after marriage, and their children bore their fathers’ names. In the Victorian era, the so-called spheres occupied by men and women were completely different (if complementary): Men were deemed the breadwinners, the leaders, and women were their helpmeets, keepers of the home fires. The Victorian subtext was, basically: You can’t change the world without a good wife (and indeed, it was the husbands who changed the world, not the wives).