My Sixteens - Why They Matter

The traits that Helena and Adam Sulzbach passed down repeat to this day

@Genealogy Matters Storyteller Tuesday Challenge

It was a cold but sunny morning in April when the call came. My mother answered the phone and settled herself in the kitchen chair like she always did to talk. Interestingly, the caller spoke with an accent.

stock photo from Shutterstock

He introduced himself; he was calling from Germany, he said. “May I speak to Albert Sulzbach, please?” The name my mother was listed under in the phone book.

“He can’t come to the phone right now,” my mother replied smoothly.

It wasn’t a lie. My father had been dead for forty years by that time. When your name, address, and phone number are all available to strangers, no woman feels safe if a female name is the one in the phone book. Certainly no woman would unwisely admit to being home alone. “This is his wife. Can I help you?”

“I am calling from Rockenberg, Germany,” the stranger explained. “I am in charge of planning a celebration for the 150th anniversary of our singing group, the Concordia. It was founded by a man named Jakob Sulzbach. He later emigrated to America. If I could find a descendant, that would be wonderful for our celebration.

“I looked in all the phone books in the New York area,” the caller continued. “Albert is the only Sulzbach listed. I wish to speak to him to see if he is descended from the Jakob who founded the Concordia.”

By this time my mother believed the stranger was legit and no threat. She admitted she was Albert’s widow and tried to help. “Well, I don’t know anything about a singing group. I do know my father-in-law’s name was Jacob Sulzbach, but he owned a silk dyeing factory. However…”

The family stories my mother had heard many times on visits to my father’s relatives began to emerge like the harmony to the caller’s melody. “I don’t know Albert’s grandfather’s name, but it could have been Jakob. He did come to America from Germany. And the family always said he was a teacher, a musician, and a dreamer. So he could be the same one.

“My daughter does genealogy,” she continued. “You need to talk to her.”

My mother always, infuriatingly, sat on important news and pretended she was actually delivering it as soon as possible. Did she call me that day or the day after, or even give the man my number? No. She waited three months until her next visit to tell me in person, because it was so important, she explained, it needed to be entrusted to me face-to-face.

So it was a hot summer afternoon when I spoke with the German celebration planner who knew the details of my ancestors.

Cue the sound effects:

Thunder rolls across the background. Leafy debris whooshes wildly in the wind. Electricity crackles, flashing on and off. In one great burst of lightning, the audience can see The Great Discovery Is Made.

I knew my great-grandfather’s name was Jakob Sulzbach and he had immigrated to New York in 1871 as a schoolmaster. And the family stories repeated, in exact order, that he was “a teacher, a musician, and a dreamer, who had no head for business.” He had come to America because he lost all his family’s money thru bad investments. Such a man, a musician and a dreamer, would be just the sort of man to start a singing group!

The two Jakobs were a match!

We had found each other…on opposite edges of the ocean. Now for the first time, I knew where my family was from.

Not that I had had absolutely no idea. We had an idea, but it was proven false in the summer my teenage self traipsed all around Frankfurt’s suburbs with my cousin, looking for the hometown in vain. Rockenberg was one of about fifty villages we hadn’t tried.

A singing group? Of that we had no inkling. One that still performed? A hundred and fifty years later? Incredible.

The German man had other family information, which I scribbled down hurriedly, trying to keep up. Overwhelmed with excitement, I didn’t ask any questions.

A week later, my husband died. The notes I had taken on the Sulzbachs in Rockenberg were put who-knows-where.

They stayed who-knows-where for a decade or more. One mild fall morning while cleaning the attic, I found them. The who-knows-where turned out to be a small plastic bin of loose paper scraps and notecards marked Important. Attic cleaning came to a halt for that day. Instead, each loose paper was reverently transcribed into the family tree.

February 24 · Why They Matter - Helena and Adam, my father Albert’s father Jacob’s father Jakob’s parents

The following information comes from the German man who called my mother twenty years ago, looking for a descendant of his town’s musician.

My great-great-grandparents, Helena Kiefer Sulzbach and Johann Adam Sulzbach, were the parents of Jakob Sulzbach the Concordia founder. Who were they that they produced a musical genius?

Jakob was born, not in Rockenberg, but in a town with a cozy name that means Small Rooms, Klein Zimmern. I looked for a town named Big Rooms close by, and sure enough, Gross Zimmern is a quarter-mile away. They are in the district of Dieburg in Hesse. That is the Kiefer hometown.

What was Adam doing there? What was his occupation? Teacher.

What? I am a teacher!

In fact, my mother, aunt, and uncle were all teachers. Of all the occupations a man could have in southern Germany in the early 1800s, Adam had the same one as I do.

And what subject did my mother teach? Music.

Do we see any matches here?

In her spare time, my mother directed a chorus, sang in the church choir, and held season tickets to both an opera and a concert series. My aunt and cousin played in the local band and soloed in church and a choral society. We hosted regular sing-a-longs: Mom played piano, Auntie sang soprano, and I turned pages. However, that is my mother’s family, not my father’s Sulzbachs.

My father and his brothers were engineers. They didn’t hold the music education gene. But wait…my grandfather may have been a patent-holding factory owner, but my father did have musicians in his life. His oldest sister was a soprano vocalist whose leading lady performances were reviewed in the newspaper. His mother claimed to have sung at the New York City Opera House. The teacher-musician-dreamer tale must have been familiar from annual re-tellings at the holiday dinner table.

I like to think that when my father met my mother, he recognized the musical educator piece of his family in her, and that was part of the attraction.

The School, 1823¹

At some point Adam made the trek to Klein Zimmern on the other side of Frankfurt, 86 km away. It wasn’t close, and I feel like the reluctance to pass Frankfurt was something like the reluctance to cross the river that separates Richmond into Southside and Northside. It does not seem hard, but people just don’t do it.

Still, something brought Adam there. It may have been a job, as I cannot imagine Rockenberg needed more than one schoolmaster.

Helena and Adam met somehow and were married on 4 September 1829, when they were 23 and 28 years old. Their first child, named Jakob after Helena’s father, was born at the end of March. He may have been premature, because he only lived six weeks.

They named their second son Adam when he was born the following March. Twins Heinrich and the next Jakob were born in March 1833.

Adam moved his family back to Rockenberg sometime before their first daughter, Katharina Barbara, was born in October 1836. Perhaps a teaching job opened up.

Helena gave birth to a child every three winters. Maria Theresia, named after the famous Austrian monarch, succumbed to an August disease. Then Klara Helena arrived, named after her mother. Next, Augustin. And then Johann Georg Franz.

Something…the three-year interval…the winter birth that ensured a robust six-month-old before the summer germs came…led to a good infant survival rate. She only lost two babies out of nine.

I haven’t researched this family further, so I don’t know if they all felt the call to music or scholarship. I do know at least one, Jakob’s twin Heinrich, was a teacher.

But there are enough educators in Helena and Adam’s family to spark the belief that my chosen profession is not a coincidence.

1. The School (1823), published in: German History in Documents and Images, <https://germanhistorydocs.org/en/from-vormaerz-to-prussian-dominance-1815-1866/ghdi:image-1363> [February 06, 2026].