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| Plath ancestors. Sylvia's complete family tree is at FamilySearch.org. |
Used to be that the Plath family tree went back only to 1826, the birth year of Sylvia's great-grandfather Johann, the man who disowned his grandson Otto. That's 200 years. It wasn't enough.
I recently added two generations to Plath ancestry, back to the 1700s.
Johann Plath and wife Caroline, who was Polish, came to the U.S. from Prussia in 1885, bringing two young-adult children, Emil and Marie. According to locals, the Plaths arrived in Wisconsin "very poor people."
I figured because Caroline was Polish she and Johann fled what was in 1885 very active persecution, in Prussia, of Poles. Johann's brother had died in 1884 and Johann took over his Wisconsin farm. When Johann retired he sold the farm and rented a house. In 1899 he was able to pay his grandson Otto's passage to America and the boy's tuition at a college preparatory school and then college. The string attached was that Otto had to promise to become a Lutheran minister. When Otto, college graduate, told Johann he'd rather be a teacher, Johann crossed Otto's name out of the family Bible and disowned him.
Otto might not be the only offspring Johann disowned. Either he or Caroline told the 1910 federal census-taker that they had eight children, five still living. [1] Documentation shows only two of the eight were dead: a son who died in childhood and Marie, dead in 1895. Johann, maybe along with his wife, considered one of his six surviving children dead to him. And then his grandson Otto, who in 1910 was 25.
If the census didn't make a miscalculation it offered more of a sense of how Johann's love and money were contingent on family members doing his will.
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| They said out of their eight kids only five were living. |
U.S. records say only that old Johann's father's name was Julius, and there the Plath family trail went cold. There were many ethnic-German "Julius Plaths" all over Prussia, and none a match.
A Plath descendant had met with this same genealogical "roadblock," and last year I promised I would scour German/Prussian records to find our man. I found Julius and a bonus -- his parents' names and their wedding date.
Born in Luebbersdorf in northern Prussia, Julius Plath (1791-1847) was baptized Andreas Julius Plath, after his two baptismal sponsors. Other local records call him "Andreas Julius" and "Julius Andreas," but he went by "Julius" and he was buried with that name.
From what I have gathered, Julius was copying his own father, Johann Heinrich Plath (born 1766) who amid the tons of other "Johanns" in the Grand Duchy of Mecklenburg-Schwerin chose to be called "Heinrich." Below is Julius's 1791 baptismal record. Heinrich's name starts beneath the inkblot, and the entry ends with his wife's name, Regina Maria Schroeder (b. 1763) whom Heinrich married in 1785. [2]
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| The name "Heinrich Plath" starts on the line below the ink blot. |
I have formal genealogy training in courses taught by professional genealogists, have been coached in searches by members of the Church of Latter Day Saints (Mormons) who operate Familysearch.org, the genealogical site that requires you to link your findings to documentary evidence. I have spoken and corresponded with Plath family members. I read German. Since 2023 I have successfully traced histories of other families including Sylvia Plath's s maternal line (Sylvia was part Bohemian and part Hungarian). When I make errors I correct them. Applying my experience got the above Plath family ancestry result. Another genealogist in 2025 on FamilySearch sent me an angry message and erased my extension of the Plath family tree, reverting it to her own, which goes back only as far as great-grandfather Julius, who had been my starting point.
The land that in Otto's time was the Polish Corridor has twelve (yes, a dozen) towns and villages named "Grabow." Via the Julius inquiry, I was finally persuaded that Otto Plath's birthplace was the "Grabow" specifically in district Mecklenburg. It is the most populous of the twelve Grabows and in Otto's North German ancestral home district. Then I tried finding a record of Otto's birth there in FamilySearch's billions of genealogical records and other German-language databases. The record books in Mecklenburg's Grabow covering Otto's birth year, 1885, and a few adjacent years, are missing, were never photographed or microfilmed, and that's what genealogists call "hitting a wall." I have eleven more Grabows to look into.
[1] United States, Census, 1910," FamilySearch (https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:MPVY-J66 : Thu Mar 07 18:28:20 UTC 2024), Entry for John Plath and Caroline Plath, 1910.
[2] I replaced the umlauts in the text with the "ue" and "oe" just for now.