Sussman-Laabs

Notes for: Augusta Jane Sauerbrei

Other information: Much of the information for this line (Augusta’s children) was provided by William Cary Shasteen from Shasteen and Reynolds family records. Her father was Johann Wilhelm Sauerbrei & mother Theresa Dental. Per the 1880 census, she and her parents were all born in Germany and they immigrated in 1869 per the 1900 census

ASHORC, daughter of William and Lena Sauerbrei

His third wife was Augusta Sourby who was a "Mutterbach" or black German per Martha Gerber Rittenger article. (No definition. Best as I have found it refers to the following: Schwarze Deutsche or Black Germans, found along the Danube River in Austria and Germany, in the Black Forest and, to a lesser extent, along the Rhine River, have dark hair and eyes, unlike the fairer people both north and south of them. Their descendants in America may be called either Black Dutch or Black German. The origin of their dark coloration is ancient, from the Roman army in the third and fourth centuries, C.E. The Roman army of this time period was mostly made up of German mercenary soldiers, but along the German border, the Romans preferred to station non-Germans. The army on the Danube was largely drawn from Numidian and Nubian soldiers, especially Garamante Numidians. The Garamante (called Tubu now) were Black Africans from the central Sahara. Now the Tubu live in northern Chad, eastern Niger and southern Libya. They are not usually found north of Marzuk in Fezzan or Kufra in Cyrenaica now, but in Roman times they ranged north to the central coast of Libya and to Ghadames in southern Tunisia. As well as Garamante, there were some Iranic people stationed on this frontier, especially Sarmatians (called Ossets now) and Scythians (Ashkenazi in the Hebrew Bible) from southern Russia and the Ukraine (Ashkenaz, the old Hebrew for Scythia, has been used for Germany in modern Hebrew by Ashkenazic Jews trying to ingratiate themselves with Germans and Austrians or trying to hide their Khazar ancestry). These African and Iranic soldiers left many descendants who tend to have black, heavy hair and dark eyes even yet. Beethoven http://www.mdcbowen.org/p2/sf/faq068.htm and Hitler are two famous examples of this group (Peanuts http://www.geocities.com/melungeonorigin/peanuts.gif). It is interesting to imagine Hitler's reaction to someone telling him he probably got his heavy, black hair from Black African ancestry. Since this was so long ago, with population movement and inter-marriage, all Europeans must have some ancestry from these Black African soldiers. In sixty generations, a person could leave 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 descendants with just two children per person each generation so long as no descendants married each other. Obviously, after a time, many descendants will marry each other, but still it works out statistically that most people from that long ago who left descendants at all are ancestors of everyone in Europe today. The tendency for people to stay in their own community explains why we can see the effects along the Danube and in the Black Forest in the people with black hair and dark eyes but do not see it far away like Iceland. The concentration is far greater at the point of origin, but the dispersion radiates out to everywhere given enough time.