Georg JUNG 1830-1907
The name Jung was not specific to Nieder-Weisel – Georg’s father Ambrosius Jung was from Hausen, in the foothills of the Taunus Ranges to the west of Nieder-Weisel. He spent some time as a journeyman cabinet-maker in Nieder-Weisel, where he met Anna Margaretha Hildebrand, daughter of Johannes. They had a son, Christoph in 1821 and a daughter, Anna Elisabetha, two years later. The little girl died in March 1824 and the couple married three months later. Five other children – all boys – were born in the next 12 years; Georg, born on 10th April 1830, was the third of these.
The cabinet-making trade became over-crowded when apprenticeship rules were eased and Ambrosius was forced to look for an alternative way of making a living. In 1837 he moved his family to London and became a trader. Georg was confirmed in London at Easter in 1846 as his two elder brothers had been when they reached the age of 14. Ambrosius moved back to Nieder-Weisel where his eldest son was to be married at Christmastide that year. Georg, who was then 16 and getting close to military age, wisely elected to remain in England, where he found work in the industrial town of Hull. There was quite a gathering of Nieder-Weiselerns here and, in about 1848, Georg met and began to live with Katharina Giehl, one of three daughters born out of wedlock to Konrad Giehl and Maria Katharina Bill; she was only 16.
In 1849 Katharina gave birth to a son, Christoph. He was the first of three boys and a girl born to the couple over the next seven years. Georg then decided to join the many villagers who were going out to the Victorian goldfields. However, several months weeks before their planned departure date, Katharina became pregnant. Nevertheless Georg and their eldest son sailed from Liverpool aboard the “Crimea” on 17th March 1857, whilst Katharina awaited the arrival of her second daughter, Katharina, in Nieder-Weisel; the baby was born in August.
Georg and the boy reached Melbourne on 22nd June 1857 and went via Ballarat to the diggings at Bendigo. (His elder brother Johann Georg, who had migrated to North America from England, was in Smythesdale with his wife and family but there is no evidence that the brothers met in Victoria). Katharina got to Bendigo about twelve months after Georg.
Georg’s youngest brother, Jakob, had also come to Victoria in the late 1850s and he made his way to Bendigo, where he later married and established a home. Georg and Katharina had seven more children in the next fifteen years, making twelve in all. They were shocked to learn in 1878 that Johann Georg was dead, killed in a vain effort to rescue a workmate in a mine collapse; he also had twelve children. The third brother, Jakob, would live for only six more years.
Georg managed to accumulate sufficient capital to set himself up in business as a cab owner. He and Katharina and the younger children settled in the Kangaroo Flat district. He received his naturalisation papers on 1st November 1897 and lived as a British, then Australian, citizen for the last ten years of his life.
The long association between Georg and Katharina, lasting almost 60 years, ended with her death in their Kangaroo Flat home in 1905; Georg followed her two years later.
View Georg's Family Chart
