The Search for Our Ardner Ancestors The Ardner family name was spelled Artener in the 18th century, Artener and Artner in the early 19th century, and Ardner in the 19th and 20th century. The Ardners are related to the Falters through at least two marriages but the direct line relationship is through Susanna Gengler, the wife of Cornelius Falter. Susanna's mother was Mary Catherine (Ardner) Gengler. She was Al Falter's grandmother and my great grandmother. The Search for the Ardner Ancestral Home The earliest known Ardners of the Falter line lived in Wustweiler, in the Bavarian Pfalz of Germany. Today that area is part of the Saarland. Uncovering that fact, however, was not easy. The search for the ancestral home was long, interesting, difficult, but ultimately successful. A number of Ardner researchers had been attempting to find the town or village from which the Ardners emigrated, and all were misled by a recorded phonetic error made by Jacob Ardner's son Nicholas. Nicholas stated his father had ived in, and he, Nicholas, was born in "Betzbach," Germany. The town where Jacob's daughter, Catherine, was born was stated in the family history of her husband, Johann Blasius Meyer, and was spelled Betzchbach. No researchers had been able to locate that town or village. This researcher rechecked all of the previous research. Consulting the 1912 edition of the definitive German gazetteer, Meyer's Orts und Verkehrs, was unsuccessful. No town or village of either spelling can be found anywhere in Germany. Searches for variations of the name Betzchbach revealed two villages named Becherbach; one near Kirn, and the other near Kaiserslautern. One is predominately Protestant and the other is almost totally Catholic. While our Ardner ancestors are known to have been Catholic, the available parish and vital records of both towns were examined. The earliest available civil records of the "Catholic Becherbach" began after Napoleon established the civil registry following the French Revolution. They date from 1809 and are recorded in French until 1815. Napoleon was deposed in 1815 and beginning that year, they are recorded in German. In 1809 there is one parish record entry that cites a person surnamed "Ardannier" as a witness at a wedding. This is a possible French spelling of the Ardner name. That individual is not further identified. The civil records of the "Protestant Becherbach" were also searched. They record births, deaths and marriages for not only Becherbach but the smaller villages around it, and no persons named Ardner, Artner, Artener or Ardannier were found. The final Betzchbach name variation was found during a second search for name variations in Meyer's Orts und Verkehrs. That town is Bexbach, and it is located in the old Bavarian Palatinate or Bavarian Pfalz, as it was known. It is called the "Pfalz" on modern maps. Bexbach is on the Blies River, a few kilometers north of the Bliesgau area where the Scharf, Kihm and Müller families originated. There are actually three villages of Bexbach; Niederbexbach (lower Bexbach), Mittelbexbach (middle Bexbach), and Oberbexbach (upper Bexbach). A short distance, perhaps two kilometers or so, originally separated them from each other. The villages of Mittelbexbach and Oberbexbach were predominately Catholic, and the Catholic Church was in Mittelbexbach. Niederbexbach, which was under the political control of the Protestant Duke of Zweibrücken, had a Protestant church. The few Catholics living in Niederbexbach attended St. Martin Catholic Church at Mittelbexbach. Most of our Ardner ancestors lived in Oberbexbach, although a few lived in Mittelbexbach. None are known to have lived at Niederbexbach. Today, Mittelbexbach is simply shown as "Bexbach" on most maps. Five Ardner families still lived in Bexbach as of 1998. An Interesting Coincidence A rather startling Ardner entry was discovered in the parish book of St. Bartholomeus Catholic Church in Erbes-Büdesheim, Hessen-Darmstadt Germany. While researching the Falter family genealogy This is the church which Philip Falter, his family, and ancestors attended before they immigrated to America. The parish book entry states that Johannes Nicolas Ardner married Elizabeth Stützen on 15 September 1831. This is intriguing, even eerie, for two reasons. First, since the ancestral town or village of the Ardners had not been located at the time of this discovery, it raised the question: "Is it possible that Erbes-Büdesheim in Hessen-Darmstadt was the original ancestral home of the Ardners?" The Ardners claimed to be from Bavaria. Nonetheless, it appeared possible they could have originated in Hessen-Darmstadt, considering the redrawing of state boundaries in the aftermath of the eighteenth and early nineteenth century wars and treaties. It was judged far more probable, however, that they actually came from Bavaria, since that state existed in the 1840s when the family emigrated to America, and additionally several family members stated on naturalization applications and in the census that they came from Bavaria. Those facts, plus the fact that marriages customarily took place at the home villages of the brides while the groom could have been from virtually any village, led us to conclude that the Ardners did not originate in Hessen-Darmstadt, although one branch of the Ardners may have lived there for a period. Our search continued in the Pfalz. The second reason that the Erbes-Büdesheim Ardner discovery was fascinating surfaced later. After the Ardner line was successfully located in the Pfalz in the villages of Bexbach and Wustweiler it was discovered that one of the family progenitors from Wustweiler was a Johann Nicolas Artener who married Elisabeth Stutz. With the exception of a variation in the spelling of Artener (Ardner) and two letters -en- on the end of Elisabeth's surname (Stutz), the families recorded by the entries in Erbes-Büdesheim and the Pfalz appear identical although separated by more than 50 years and 125 kilometers (75 miles). This dubious connection may still be worthy of additional research.