Margaretha HAUSER 1832-?
Margaretha was the fifth and last girl born – on 5th April 1832 – into the family of Johann Jakob Hauser and Elisabetha nee Haub. The first two daughters, Anna Margaretha and Katharina, arrived before the marriage of the parents on 5th January 1823.
Each side of the family had suffered from changes in the ownership of land in the village and their father (like each of their grandfathers) earned a precarious living by offering his labour on a day to day basis to the managers of the agricultural agglomerates which had replaced the farmlets they once worked under a heritable tenure system. This offered a dismal future for Margaretha’s brothers Johann Jakob and Konrad and they decided to go to Victoria, in the hope of striking it lucky on the goldfields at Ballarat; Margaretha arranged to go with them.
The three siblings joined a party of thirty villagers who booked to sail on “Glenmanna” from Liverpool. With Johann Jakob was Henrich Henkelmann, thought to be the illegitimate son of Margaretha’s sister Katharina Hauser. “Glenmanna” weighed anchor on 28th October 1854 for a voyage that ended in Melbourne in the searing heat of the Victorian summer 110 days later. A day later “Fulwood” arrived in port with a dozen more emigrants from Nieder-Weisel. A week later “Luisa”, 135 turbulent days out of Hamburg, added twenty-two more. The 65 villagers, with unfamiliar names such as Schimpf, Haub, Seip, Studt, Riegelhuth, Richter and Knipper, went west to Ballarat in search of their El Dorado.
Just how many of the group were successful is not on record. Many of the emigrants returned home in the next several years; these possibly included Margaretha Hauser.