Entry #41

Christian Ruwolt is now my most distant Mecklenburg ancestor. Earlier this year I was able to confirm that Friederica Catharina Diederica Ruwolt and Friedrich David Schatz were the parents of my great, great grandfather, John Schatz. There was a very lively discussion about my Ruwolt relatives in the 1819 census for Satow, Bad Doberan, Mecklenburg. My genealogy Facebook friends Dolly and Fritz had some vastly differing opinions about who might be related and how. There were Ruwolts everywhere in Satow in 1819 – far too many to deal with at the time. Recently, I took the time to use a DNA clue, along with Grit Ende’s valuable online resource (http://www.ende-genealogy.de/) to ferret out my Ruwolt ancestors.  (Unfortunatley, Grit Ende has given up her website, so I will need to provide sources from the original records!)

My DNA match was with and individual who is descended from Margaretha Elizabeth Christina Ruwolt, who was born 22 Nov 1801 in Satow, Mecklenburg. She married Johann Peter Mundt there on 24 September 1824. I felt pretty confident that there must be a relationship between my Friederica and their Margaretha. It was easy to use Grit Ende’s index of select individuals to find both women. I was able to enter both into my family tree on Ancestry.com and work back until they connected. They did connect, but not directly along their paternal lines as one might expect with a shared surname. I was not surprised to find so many Ruwolts in Satow, but lest you think that it is a common German surname, it doesn’t even fall into the top 100 German last names, which can be viewed here.

Further, the relative distribution of Ruwolt (or more commonly Ruwoldt) is very localized to Landkreis Bad Doberan as illustrated in the following map generated by Christoph Stoepel’s surname distribution map for Germany. Check it out is you are trying to determine where your German ancestors originated, especially if you are blessed with a surname that isn’t on the top 100 list.

So, here is what I found when I followed Friederica’s parentage. Her grandparents were both Ruwolts, although I could not determine how close a kinship they shared. Margaretha’s grandparents were also both Ruwolts, and, again, there was not enough information to quantify the kinship, although I postulate that there is one. For both women, it was their father’s mother that make the Ruwolt DNA connection between biology and historic records. The most recent common ancestors for Friederica and Margaretha were their mutual great grandparents, Christian Ruwolt (born 1700) and his wife Anna Schumacher (born 1707). Friederica and Margaretha were second cousins.  The following trees show the ancestry of each individual:

Tree for Margaretha Elizabeth Christina Ruwolt

Finally, I want to thank the participants of the Facebook group for Mecklenburg Genealogy. It is a great place to jump start your Mecklenburg family research!