SophiaWEngel.JPG
portrait of Sophia 
Wurzberger 
Engel
 Our ancestor, Siegfried J. Thannhauser's father's mother's father, Joseph Engel was born ca. 1775 d: June 26, 1850 in Munich, Bavaria. He married Sophia Wurzberger and according to family lore had 14 children, of whom 7 came to America. Our family stayed close to the children of Isaak who lived in Boston and this portrait came from the last of them, Aunt Sylvia, to Aunt Trudi Beyer who has it today. Listed at the bottom of this page are the children of Joseph for whom we have records, click on the underlined name to go to the record for that person.

Below are the portraits that our ancestor Joseph Thannhauser referred to as his "Engel Aunts", the sisters of our ancestress Henriette Engel. These hang in Stasi Thannhauser Dunau's Dining Room. Unfortunately we do not know which one is which. There is a family story about them not getting into King Ludwig's gallery of beauties because they were Jewish which I doubt the veracity of for two reasons 1) they are not pretty enough 2) there is a Jewish woman in that gallery (which I visited), the daughter of a "Court Jew." Click on any one picture to get a larger version in a separate window.
EngelAunt1.JPG EngelAunt2.jpg EngelAunt3.jpg

According to family lore, Joseph and his wife rescued Lola Montez, the king's mistress, from a crowd of angry demonstraters and received the right to live outside the Jewish ghetto from the grateful King Ludwig as a result. There is a story in her biography of how she climbed the wall of the shop she was in in order to escape angry student demonstrators and then was rescued by the people on the other side, but no names were mentioned.

The document of the marriage of our ancestress Henriette ("Retta") to Joseph Thannhauser show her as 33, quite old, when she married. Family lore is that she died in childbirth, but the records indicate she died 11 months later, perhaps it was complications resulting from childbirth. Aunt Trudi says the large Thannhauser head always gave the women problems. Henriette died at 35, after being married a mere 2 years. She is buried in the Old Jewish Cemetary, ThalkirchnerStr 240, Munich, Germany.

Her father, Joseph, is buried in the Old Jewish Cemetary.Their records are the source of his death date and approximate birth date since he was 65 at the time of his death. It is interesting how many of our ancestors lived into their 60s, 70s, and 80s back when this was uncommon.