Our 'Indiana' Saalman ancestors, Christian and Dorothea Saalmann, immigrated to the United States from Germany in the early 1850's. One of their sons, Joseph Christian Saalman, left southern Indiana for Chicago in the late 19th or early 20th century. Joseph Christian Saalman was the grandfather of my father, Howard Joseph Saalman.

As a teenager, Howard worked in his Dad's auto body repair shop picking up and dropping off customers' cars. Dad got in some repair and paint work too, but it was his father, my Grandpa, Benjamin Franklin Saalman, who was the artist, hand-painting and striping cars, carving wood to replace rotting, wooden struts used in car roofs at that time, making those damaged cars look as good as new.

Maybe he was living out a teen-aged dream of owning cars like those that 'Pop' Saalman made beautiful, but from the mid-1950's to the mid-60's, Dad loved a shiny new car, buying one every two or three years. His favorite vacation was a road trip with the family. It still is today.

In the late summer of 1992, dad decided to drive to nearby Birdseye, Indiana -- the birthplace of his father -- to do a little exploring. Just down the road is French Lick, hometown of former NBA star Larry Bird. From tiny Flora, Illinois where dad retired, Birdseye was only a few hours drive away.

In Birdseye, dad picked up a local phone book out of curiosity and looked up the name 'Saalman'. To his surprise, he says, a dozen or more Saalmans were listed, none of whom he knew. (A few years later, however, Dad recounted to me that as a teenager, his father had taken him to southern Indiana to visit relatives he'd never before met. He still felt a connection to this place.)

He drove to one of the addresses listed and was told by a young man there that it was Uncle Marion Saalman, the family historian, to whom he should speak, and was given directions to an address in the nearby town of Tell City.

In Tell City, Howard knocked on the door and introduced himself to the husky, farmer-tanned man who appeared.

"Hello. My name is Howard Saalman. I'm looking for a Marion Saalman."

The man replies, "Well, I'm Marion Saalman. I guess you got my letter!"

Dad scratched his head, "What!?"

A few weeks earlier at a gas station in Albion, Illinois, Dad uses his credit card to make a fuel purchase. The transaction goes to a regional credit card processing center where a woman works who thinks it's odd she doesn't know him since they have the same, 'rare', last name.

She decides to give Dad's address to her Uncle Marion Saalman, the defacto family historian in these parts. In an unlikely coincidence, Marion's letter of introduction was en route to my father's mailbox at the very moment Dad's knuckles rapped on Marion's front door. 

Marion's straight-to-the-point letter made us feel like the Prodigal Sons come home. His grandfather was the brother of my dad's grandfather. He and his kin had done a good job of maintaining records of the Saalman family and its roots. It became apparent to us that our branch of the family -- the Chicago Saalmans, as it were -- were an offshoot of the main bunch in our Saalmann clan rather than I don't know what -- the the other way around? That is, had any of us Chicagoans even been thinking of these things.

(Come to think of it, I guess I had. When a teenager, I received a baptismal Bible that contained in the center, a fold-out genealogy tree chart. I asked both my grandmothers to write in the names of their ancestors, aunts, uncles and siblings that they could remember. Both grandmothers remembered back to their grandparents' time; not a great amount of detail, but a start. I still have that bible and recall feeling a little disappointed with the lack of detail. Later I found that one of Grandpa Roberts' cousins had compiled a great deal of Roberts family genealogy dating to the early days of the Massachusetts colony; I had nothing like that from the Saalmans.)

But Marion's family possessed not only details of the American Saalmans since the days of their immigration, but also the key ingredients for further Saalman research: the name of our ancestors' village in the Old Country and the date of their migration to the New World.

Marion shared much information with me by phone and post, and put me in touch with a distant cousin by marriage living in Massachusetts, who was preparing an account of Saalmans in the American military, based on Marion's records and recollections. I proposed that Dad and I visit Marion in Tell City, Indiana to further our acquaintance with him and his cousins, now our cousins, and to see the countryside where our ancestors and relatives planted their roots and crops.

We did so in 1994 and met with both a considerable hospitality and a number of cousins whom we had not known and who were as delighted to meet us as we them. Besides stuffing ourselves with home-cooked country food made by Antoinette, Marion's wife, and later listening to a Blue Grass band recording of some terrific Saalman musicians, Marion proudly showed us around the house he'd built with his own hands, and many of the beautiful fiddles he'd made in recent years.

We drove to Branchville and walked through Walker Cemetery there recording Marion and cousin Roseanna Gibson who talked about each of the Saalmans interred. We also met and recorded an interview with Mansfield Frakes, great-grandson of the Hiram Esarey who married the long-surviving Dorothea Christiana Rühling Saalman our founding, immigrant ancestress, and widow of Reinhart Gottfried Christian Saalmann, who brought our Saalmann clan to the New World. Frakes had remarkable recall of the Saalman family doings in the 19th and 20th centuries, and was himself delivered at birth by Dorothea, his step, great-grandmother, as midwife. [Recording transcripts.]

Why Joseph Christian Saalman, my father's grandfather, came to leave Branchville and finally reside in the Chicago area is not known to me or my father. Economic reasons seem likely. My Grandpa Ben Saalman's generation is gone now, the opportunity to know the how and why of the family schism fading. Dad regrets that he never spoke about this with his dad, Benjamin.

It is known that Joseph Christian's son Benjamin Franklin Saalman, my grandfather, worked for the railroad after he married my grandmother Rubie Orilla Geeding. They lived in a small, southern Illinois town called Fairfield. This train job seems to have moved them from Fairfield to Fithian, near Champaign, where their oldest son Hollis was born. The next three children -- Helen, Wilma and my Dad, Howard -- were born in Danville and the last two --Bernard and Lois -- were born in Harvey, a Chicago suburb, where I was born. Dad says they moved to Harvey when he was two months old. Did Benjamin's parents follow him there or the other way around?

To me, the most important memory preserved by Marion's branch of the family was the name of the village where our ancestors lived prior to their journey to the New World: Hoym, in Sachsen-Anhalt, a region of northeastern Germany, then, Prussia.

It was in late 1992, before I'd met Marion in person, that I wrote letters to public and church officials in towns near Hoym in the Sachsen-Anhalt area, hoping to locate additional family records. 

Finally, in late January, 1993, pay dirt was struck! A parson at the Evangelisches Pfarramt Schloßkirchengemeinde [the Evangelical Vicarage of the Castle Church congregation], a Lutheran church in Ballenstedt, wrote a key to us, identifying four earlier generations of Saalmans previously unknown to us, whose names he found in church records in his care.

Although I wrote back to the Parson several times to thank him and to ask for further information, he never responded to these inquiries.  But what had been learned was very exciting, indeed:  an additional century of family names in one fell swoop!  Notwithstanding this success, many avenues of inquiry still lay ahead for future Saalman genealogists. The church records in Ballenstedt await further study.

The origin of the Saalmann name, pronounced "zahl-mon" in German, is unclear.  The earliest spelling of Saalmann in our known lineage, per the parson Schröter (click the above, 'letter' icon), is 'Salomon', belonging to one Hans, from Danzig. This biblical name appears in Jewish genealogies from the region, but doesn't necessarily imply that Hans Salomon was of Jewish origin.

The spelling change from Salomon to Saalmann shown in the Vicarage office records could have been a deliberate one, a attempt to blend in as a Jew in a Christian country.  But spelling was not well-codified in the 17th century; it seems more likely that the record keeper merely wrote into the record what he heard pronounced.  Even in the 20th century, immigrants to the United States routinely accepted the re-spelling of their name as interpreted by immigration officials or even instigated themselves the anglicization of their names during the immgration process, for various reasons. Typically, Germans whose name ended in 'mann' dropped the final 'n'.

There are some German words resembling the two syllables of the Saalman name. 'Saal' means 'hall', in the sense of a large or prestigious hall, e.g., a banquet hall. 'Mann' translates as 'man', thus, 'Saalmann' would be the keeper of such a hall. Another word association is the river Saale, passing just east of Hoym through the town of Bernberg, and downstream joining the well-known Elbe river that flows through Hamburg to the North Sea, from which to derive a name. Locations and professions were common sources for providing last names in late Midaeval and Renaissance Europe.

A German genealogy book obtained recently (2008) by a correspondent of mine (and distant cousin, presumably), George Saalmann of Queensland, Australia, provides this explanation:

"The name, written Salman, Sahlman, Saalmann comes from 'Sala' or 'Salunga', gothic 'Saljan' – meaning, interpreting the ceremonious, the handing over of the 'mia-culpa' contract. 'Salman' is, according to old German law, a man whose mission is to hand over to a third party through 'Sala', a precious belonging, once a certain event has taken place, usually the death of the owner of the belonging. The 'Salman' therefore was the keeper and executor and representative of a last will."

I hope to have further translations and details from this source in the near future.