Johann Henrich HAUB 1834-?
The farm-hand Konrad Haub III married in 1836 Maria Katharina Dambruch from the Grunberg region. They had two sons – Johann Heinrich on 23rd November 1834 and Johann Georg on 19th March 1843. There was nothing to hold the boys in their unhappy village when they reached manhood and, although the emigration from Nieder-Weisel to the gold-fields in Victoria was petering out, Johann Heinrich decided to follow the 300 or so villagers who had already taken part in the mass exodus.
Johann Henrich left his hometown in the spring of 1857 and journeyed by rail to the busy seaport of Hamburg. There he took a berth on the tiny barque “Dorothea”, with 70 other passengers who chose to endure its discomforts in order to avoid the much higher cost of a passage aboard one of the larger and roomier vessels operating out of Liverpool.
Johann Heinrich disembarked at Melbourne on 2nd September 1857. Here he met up with a group of nearly thirty of his compatriots, who had just been brought across Bass Strait from Hobart Town, and accompanied them to Ballarat. His time in Victoria must have been very limited, as he was back in Nieder-Weisel by late 1860. On 4th April 1861, he married Katharina, a daughter of Wenzel Hauser and his wife, Katharina Hildebrand; their son Jakob was born in August of that year.
Johann Heinrich’s brother, Johann Georg also went to Victoria, where he spent the rest of his life, but it is not clear when he left the village – it may have been as a consequence of the report that his brother brought back.
View Johann Henrich's Family Chart
