Plath Ancestry, Solved

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 confirmed generations to Plath ancestry, back to the 1700s.

Johann Plath and wife Caroline 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 they had fled German/Prussian persecution. In fact Johann's brother had died in 1884 and Johann intended to run his brother's farm. When Johann retired he rented a house. By 1899 he was able to pay Otto's passage to America and for the boy's tuition. The string attached was that Otto had 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 cut him loose.

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.

Which child? Don't know. But if this wasn't a miscalculation it offered more of a sense of how Johann's love and money were contingent on obedience, even from a grandson who in 1910 was 25.

They said out of their eight kids only five were living.

Of old Johann's father, U.S. records said only that his 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. Three weeks ago 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 his own kids didn't know otherwise.

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]

The name "Heinrich Plath" starts on the line below the ink blot.

Google Lens solemnly told me it couldn't read the above. So I applied my experience, and bingo.

The land that in Otto's time became 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, Otto's now well-documented North German ancestral home. Then I tried finding a record of Otto's birth. The books covering his birth year, 1885, and a few adjacent years are missing.

[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.

Sylvia Plath family tree at FamilySearch.org. 

Sylvia Von Platho

Baroness Charlotte Sophie von Platen und Hallermund (1669-1725)

Plath family lore says Sylvia Plath's paternal great-grandfather Johann, when he came from Prussia to America, gave his name as Johann von Plath, the "von" indicating descent from a line of nobles, specifically barons, who for 900 years had lived on land grants from Prussian rulers. An American official scolded Johann, "We do not allow titles in America."

Not contented to live the rest of his life as a common Wisconsin farmer, ten years later for his daughter Mary's death certificate Johann Plath gave his surname as "von Platho." His father and brother and his children and grandchildren were all from birth surnamed "Plath," none of them "von Plath," or "von Platho," which sounds like a made-up name anyway. But it's a real name.

Sylvia Plath's paternal line shared its home territory with generations of nobles surnamed von Platho, von Platen, von Plotho, von Plato (many scholars have that name), von Plathe -- all from the German root "plat," meaning "flat." The "plat"-rooted names were geographical, "von" meaning "from." So all those names, which in German sound much alike, mean "from the lowlands of northern Germany." That area's also called Pomerania, which is Polish and means "on the sea."

While everyone wishes to have noble or royal ancestry, and Johann Plath, Otto Plath's illiterate grandfather, was a status seeker, no evidence links Sylvia Plath with Prussian or German gentry. German chancellor Otto von Bismarck in the 1870s and 1880s liked handing out the "von" title to flatter and keep the loyalty of wealthy industrialists and parvenus, but Sylvia's family of farmers and small-town blacksmiths was unlikely to receive even that lowest of noble titles. [1] The surname "Plath," with no "von," is very very common.

[1] Spring, David, ed. European Landed Elites in the Nineteenth Century. Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977. 

In The Polish Town

My first trip overseas was to Poland and I'd move there except my house is Polish already, with a flowering meadow across the lane, etc. Finding Sylvia Plath's grandmother's Polish home address I Google-Mapped it. Ernestine Kottke Plath died in an Oregon mental hospital in 1919 but her childhood home still stands: 12, Strozewo (a village).

I saw the address in Ernestine Plath's Oregon State Hospital record.

Just six miles away is a Plath landmark town, under German rule spelled "Budsin," today in Polish spelled "Budzyn," population 2,000. It's Plath's grandfather's hometown. Sylvia called it a "manic-depressive hamlet in the black heart of Prussia." Theodor Plath married local girl Ernestine in 1882 and settled there. I think Ernestine gave birth to Otto in Grabowo because she had relatives there, but Otto grew up in Budsin, and tired of maps I wanted to see the place.

"Strolling" through the older part of Budsin I saw where the Plaths might have raised their children, not quite to their adulthood. The year Otto was born the German Empire's increasingly menacing army started cleansing the empire of Russians, Poles, and Jews. Masses of ethnic Germans like the Plaths were already leaving for the U.S., partly to escape conscription. Otto was 15 when he went to the U.S. His father, and then his mother and five siblings, ages 4 to 13, left Prussia the following year, 1901.

Traditional Polish houses are stone covered in paintable stucco. I learned Gmin means local government, and this is Budzyn's City Hall at the center of town.

Poles put flowers wherever they feel like it. It's a celebratory thing.

For the address of the Plath house in Budsin I'd need church or civil records not readily accessible. But I like Poland for itself and felt at home there. My mother's parents were Polish immigrants. They died when I was very small but I remember the Polishness of their house and ours. I hope you too grew up amid abundant cabbage-rose decor.

Sylvia's "Remote Mongolian Ancestor" and "Ariel"

People's Republic of Mongolia flag, 1939-45. Stalin suggested the emblem's design.

Sylvia Plath maybe did have a "remote Mongolian ancestor" as her husband Ted Hughes told his editor she did -- more than a year after Sylvia had killed herself. [1] Hughes said she wanted a heroic horse-and-rider image, as on the former Mongolian flag, printed small on the cover of her book Ariel; that she "prided herself" on this ancestry. As an alternative, Plath had suggested the image of a rose.

Neither image came to be. The publisher bound Hughes's edit of Ariel in the red cloth Sylvia had wanted, but without horse and rider or a rose.

Like many people, Sylvia wished for a heritage more interesting than her own. On her mother's side, records back to the late 1600s show Roman Catholic ancestors all baptized and married. The question "Was Sylvia Jewish?" is now settled: The answer is "No." Did she have a fortune-telling "gypsy (Roma) ancestress" as the poem "Daddy" said? Not in her mother's line.

But farther back, where there are no family records, 13th-century nomadic Mongolian armies on horseback harrowed Asia and Europe, conquering China, Kiev, Moscow and Baghdad, Krakow and Vienna; burned Pest to the ground and flattened Meissen in northern Germany, expanding their Great Khan's empire to four times the size of the Roman Empire.

It matters, I think, to Sylvia's poem "Ariel" that the Mongols controlled their horses with their heels and knees, freeing their upper bodies for deadly archery. They murdered, tortured, pillaged, and raped, leaving as a legacy their blood type, B, a genetic variant originating in the Himalayas.

The Mongolian empire's growth is echoed in today's geographical distribution of blood type B. CC BY-SA 3.0

How Plath learned about her possible Mongolian ancestry we don't know. [2] Except in rare cases, we are born with either our mother's or father's blood type. Aurelia Plath wrote on a health card that Sylvia's blood type was O. Aurelia Plath had type O. Aurelia's ancestors might have had some B, but Aurelia did not have it. Because Otto Plath's heritage was Polish and north German, he might have had type B blood, but as of now there is no proof. We know only that Sylvia cannot by her blood type alone be linked with Mongolia. Only DNA testing could rule it in or out.

Very likely her link was spiritual, as with the Jews she envied for their history and traditions, and her wish to align with the oppressed. During the fight of her life, the fury that inspired Ariel, Plath came to claim descent from one of a Golden Horde of ruthless warriors -- if what Ted Hughes said is true.

Thank you, Eva Stenskar, for sending me the question about Plath's claim to Mongolian ancestry, and the documentation, and the flag image.

[1] Ted Hughes to Charles Monteith, 7 April 1964.

[2] The link between Mongolia and Eurasians with blood type B was established in the 1940s, after Otto Plath's death, so Plath did not hear about it from Otto.