Anna Juliana (1837-?)

Anna Juliana HEINZ 1837-?

Anna Juliana and Katharina Elisabetha came to Victoria as part of a family plan to resettle, leaving their home just outside the northern gate of the village, on the Butzbach Road, where generations of their Heinz ancestors had lived and worked at their trade of shoemaking since about 1600. They came to join their father, Johann Konrad Heinz, who had preceded them by eighteen months to make arrangements for their arrival. However, when the two girls, still in their teens, disembarked from “Mindoro” at Melbourne on 14th July 1856, they found that their father had died, victim of a dysentery epidemic.

Fortunately the girls were travelling with others from Nieder-Weisel and were able to stay with the group as it travelled to Castlemaine, where their father should have been waiting for them. The men in the group went prospecting on the busy Fryer’s Creek diggings while the girls quickly found work as domestics.

Almost as quickly, Anna Juliana found a husband – an immigrant from the village of Maibach, several km southwest of Nieder-Weisel. On 30th December 1857 Anna Juliana, a few weeks past her twentieth birthday, married Jakob Roth in the tiny Wesleyan chapel at Fryer’s Creek. To Anna Juliana’s great delight, her elder brother Johannes arrived from Germany just in time to give her away. This happy occasion was made even more memorable by the fact that two of Anna Juliana’s Nieder-Weisel friends, the sisters Elisabetha and Anna Elisabetha Reuter, were married during the same ceremony. Elisabetha had travelled with Anna Juliana on “Mindoro” and Anna Elisabetha had been in the same group as Johann Konrad Heinz on “Luise”.

The Roth couple remained in Fryer’s Creek and had two children there, Catherine in 1860 and John in 1863. This is the last record of them in Victoria. Anna Juliana’s mother died in Maibach, suggesting that the Roths went back to Jakob’s home village. This deduction is supported by the fact that John Roth, 20, of Maibach, sailed from Bremen for New York on 20 April 1883.