newjerseynewsroom.com

BY JOE TYRRELL

NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM.COM

Like many Americans, Dave Stroebel of Freehold Township wanted to learn more about his immigrant forebears.

What he found "has all the earmarks of another 'Anastasia,'" fraught with mystery and romance, he said. Stroebel's new book, "The Cannon King's Daughter," is newly released on Lulu.com. That's not the full title, but we don't want to get ahead of the story.

"Anastasia" was a mystery of another generation. In 1922, a young woman who had been hospitalized in Germany following a suicide attempt was proclaimed by some to be the Grand Duchess Anastasia, youngest daughter of Tsar Nicholas II Romanov of Russia.

Bolsheviks had slaughtered the Tsar and his family in a basement in Ekaterinburg. Not all the bodies were accounted for, though, and rumors persisted that some had escaped.

Anna Anderson claimed to be Anastasia long before DNA testing. But as Stroebel learned, even in the Internet era, getting reliable genealogical information can be a challenge. Official records are often lost, haphazard, difficult to decipher. Many mangle family names.

And for much of American history, there was always the promise of new land just over the horizon, waiting to be stolen from the natives and turned into a new farm, a new town, a new start and often a new name.

"My father only knew that his grandfather had lived on Palisade Avenue in Jersey City," after arriving from Germany, Stroebel said. "No one in my immediate family was familiar with the story I uncovered."

Stroebel is experienced at researching and explaining complicated histories. For 13 years, he wrote about air and ground operations as a member of the Air Force Reserve Command History Program.

He provided constituent services for former state Sen. Joseph Bubba, and served as a sergeant-at-arms for the Senate. Besides his years as an Air Force Reserve command first sergeant, he currently works as a civilian technical writer for the Army at Fort Monmouth.

Still, his family history project began uneventfully, going through Census records on Ancestry.com. After uncovering what he could in the official sources, Stroebel began reaching out to relatives, trying to find someone who could tell him more.
Some elderly relatives in Albany told him his great-grandparents had a connection to Kaiser Wilhelm I of Germany. Trying to flesh out this suggestion, Dave was on the phone to an elderly second-cousin in Lakehurst.

She was telling him a decades-old story about a cemetery manager who was rude to her when she went to visit the grave of their grandfather, John Stroebele. Then she dropped a name that was unfamiliar to him.

"John Stroebele, he married that Bertha Krupp from the big ammunition family in Essen," she told him.

"No her maiden name was 'Arnold,'" Dave replied. "It says it on her death certificate."

But she was insistent that their great-grandmother was German, part of a famous family, "the ones who made the Big Bertha gun." Moreover, they had gotten into trouble, she told him. Wanting to make sure he had heard right, Stroebel called her back the next day. This time, he recorded the conversation. Then he went on-line to look up the Krupp family.

"I almost fell out of my chair when I read about them," he said.

Since then, he has been trying to establish a family connection with the Essen munitions manufacturers, at one time holders of the largest commercial fortune in Europe. Stroebel's theory provides the rest of the book's title, "Banished from a dynasty, the true, untold story of Engelbertha Krupp."

After researching archives here and in Germany, Stroebel became convinced that his great-grandfather married a Krupp heiress in a Catholic Church in Sigmaringen, Germany, in August 1875.

Any of that would have been sufficient to get Engelbertha Krupp disowned and written out of family history, according to Stroebel. The groom was poor, a shoemaker from a common background, and a Catholic.

The absence of another Krupp heir might well have shaped world history, for the family members running Krupp in the 1930s and 1940s became Nazi supporters. Their armaments fueled the German war effort. Alfried Krupp von Bohland und Halbach was convicted of crimes against humanity.

Stroebel's evidence includes a Krupp family photo that includes a young woman who resembles the others, but is identified as the wife of composer Clara Bruch. A Bruch expert has rejected this idea, Stroebel said.

At the time, Jersey City was a terminus for German steamship lines and a major port of entry for immigrants, so it was no surprise that his great-grandparents settled there. But Stroebel turned up some tantalizing hints that they were something more than impoverished immigrants.

He emphasizes that this is not some quixotic attempt to claim a fortune. The male Krupp line died out, and he has not even attempted to contact his presumed cousins in the von Bohland und Halbach family. By not soft-pedaling the Nazi angle, Stroebel is hardly endearing himself to relatives.

The Krupp firm eventually merged with Thyssen AG, and so he "sent Thyssenkrupp a letter informing them of my book, and that I do not seek, nor will I accept compensation from them," Stroebel said.

Of course, after her death, genetic tests revealed Anna Anderson was a Polish factory worker, not Russian royalty. Stroebel wants German authorities to examine the possibilities.

"All I want is for us to work together to find out more more information about my great-grandmother," he said.

For this writer, pursuing a historical mystery is its own reward.

Joe Tyrrell may be reached at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it