Love and War

On Apr 21, 1920, my grandfather, Heinrich Wilhelm Rötgens married my grandmother, Marie Julie Lootens. He was a German farmer's son; she came from an upper middle class urban family in Gent, Belgium. They had met during WWI when he was a soldier in the German army occupying Belgium. You can imagine my great-grandparent's dismay when their only daughter fell in love with an enemy soldier!

The wedding did go ahead despite their misgivings and I suspect that they may have kept their displeasure somewhat in check, for two reasons. One was that my grandmother was already 30 years old and they were probably worried that she might never find a husband. In the 1920s, this still mattered. And, secondly, they had already fallen out with their son who had also married someone of whom his parents disapproved: a young Frenchwoman whom he had met - you guessed it - as a soldier during WWI and married in Hull, England.

You may have noticed that my grandmother was, oddly, wearing a black dress with her white veil. The family was, in fact, in mourning. They had just been informed that my grandmother's above mentioned brother had been lost at sea when the ship he was working on as a cabin steward sank during a storm on a return voyage from New York. With only a few days to go until the wedding it had been too late to call it off.

I had heard the story growing up but it took me decades to work out what had really happened as some of the details had been passed on incorrectly. For example, I had always been told the young woman my great-uncle had married against his parent's wishes was English. It wasn't until I finally located their wedding certificate in England that I realised that she was, in fact, French. The story also went that my grandmother travelled to England to find her brother's wife but that the woman, having been rejected by her husband's family before, wanted nothing to do with them. She returned to France and married twice more, her second husband also having died young. I discovered this only because a living descendant posted a family tree online. It is strange to think that, because of the sharing of information made possible by the internet, I now know far more about my mother's uncle and his story than my mother ever did.