Chapter 3
Life in Germany, pre1600's

Gensungen Church Records

One day in November of 2020, I was doing some repeat searching on the net to see if I might find anything more of interest concerning Gensungen and the church there. Somehow the following photos and information concerning the Gensungen (Himmelskirche) Protestant Church suddenly appeared. The center of the church was first erected around 802. It was given its name because of the ceiling mirrors made of three circular paintings (sun, moon, and star) and a glass painting from the 1500's of the Apostle Peter.

The first photo is of the church in the midst of the village of Gensungen. The second is of the oldest central part of the church. The third includes the fortified tower added around 700. The fourth photo shows the church as it was expanded and still stands from about 1524.

War

I suppose that in my mind I pictured our family living in a quaint little village amidst a landscape mixed between a white clay area where bricks were made and an extensive, peaceful, bucolic green meadowland backed up by a mountain peak and castle. I imagined happy. hardworking families such as our Liphards surrounded by friends and relatives and joined in a religious Protestant church congregation which may have been the center of their lives. Suddenly, I happened across some shocking information that turned my imaginings upon their heads.

Just a few years before our Liphards came to Gensungen, the pastor, Conrad Geisel, who began ministering to the people at the Gensungen Protestant Church in 1622 died (October1635). I found a note that he was "killed by the Croats." This information not only shocked me but threw me into the realization that at that point Gensungen appeared to be invaded by a hostile force I knew nothing about. With a little research I learned that 1635 was in the midst of the continent-wide Thirty Years War, an era when Catholic France employed what I found described as the most vicious mercenary force in Europe, the Catholic Croats, to decimate Protestant Germany. Our Lipards, like most Hessians, were living amidst a vicious war that finally after unimaginable deaths and many destroyed homes and other buildings ended with a few years of peace in 1648. Hans Frantz evidently moved to Gensungen after about ten years of peace from somewhere else in Hesse that probably was as decimated if not more so than Gensungen.

As an aside for all the Lippard/Rumpel cousins, our immigrant ancestor Johannes Rumpel's mother Maria Magdalena was a Geisel from the same area (Calw/Stuttgart, Wuetemburg) as the pastor Conrad Geisel. It will take more research to determine if those two Geisel families are related.