Book Review: Our Daily Bread Gaining Insight into German Village Life
I’ve been working on “A Hacker-Hocker Family” recently and decided I needed to add flavor to the narrative. I wanted to provide some social and historical context to help bring my ancestors to life as real people.
Since most of my ancestors were German and continued their customs and traditions, bringing their way of life to the New World when they immigrated, I needed to understand life in a German village. Unfortunately, while there are scads of information about historical events and personages, I wasn’t able to find much on the day-to-day lives of the common people—people like my ancestors.
Until, that is, I found Teva Scheer’s book Our Daily Bread: German Village Life, 1500-1850 (affiliate link). The author created a fictitious village called Hochfeld am Neckar in southwestern Germany and tells the story of village life through the events in the life of her main character, Johann Adam Mann, his family, ancestors, and neighbors.
The book sets the groundwork in the first three chapters, covering peasant status, religion, and war. It, then, expands to cover family, “the daily aspects of villagers’ lives: their families, livelihoods, inheritance customs, self-governance practices, and village institutions such as the school.”1 And finally, the author wrote about the immigration experience, both leaving Germany and settling in America.
Although as the author claims, “this is not an academic work,” she does provide extensive footnotes throughout the content and a bibliography at the end. While most of the events she wrote about occur in the 1800s, they are still applicable to earlier generations. Nor does she ignore earlier historical events that shaped the villagers lives—the Reformation, the 30 Years War.
The book was both informative and easy-to-read. I bought the Kindle ebook, but it is available in paperback, as well. I would recommend it to any genealogist with German ancestors.
Buy Our Daily Bread: German Village Life, 1500-1850
This is an affiliate link. If you purchase the book by clicking this link, Amazon will pay me a little money. It won’t affect the price you pay.
Footnotes
- Teva J. Sheer, Our Daily Bread: German Village Life, 1500, 1850 (North Saanich, British Columbia: Adventis Press, 2010), Kindle edition, location 372 (approximately page 3). ↩
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Kris Hocker, "Book Review: Our Daily Bread Gaining Insight into German Village Life," A Pennsylvania Dutch Genealogy, the genealogy & family research site of Kris Hocker, modified 13 Jan 2016 (https://www.krishocker.com/friday-find-our-daily-bread/ : accessed 24 Nov 2024).
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2 Replies to “Book Review: Our Daily Bread Gaining Insight into German Village Life”
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Thank you for this post! I’ve just ordered the book!
Glad you liked it; hope you like the book, too! I’ve used what I learned in writing about my ancestor who lived from 1646-1702 in a small German village, as well as his son. It made me realize that our German ancestors did not share the basic freedoms we take for granted.