The following is the testimony of Frank Jagger, my great-uncle.
Louis Frederick Jagger was born Ludwig Friedrich Jaeger on 15th March 1852 at Kunzelsau, Wurttemberg, Germany, the son of Georg Heinrich Jaeger, a Stonemason, and Marie Christine formerly Heschel. Their particulars and those of their parents and children, are given in the attached record extract from the town archives of Kunzelsau, which I obtained on a visit there in 1953. From this data and that given above it becomes apparent that I am the eldest son of an eldest son of an eldest son, and the first one to be conceived in wedlock.
Ludwig, as I like to call him, was a pork butcher. He presumably cleared out from Germany in the early 1870's to avoid being conscripted, got as far as the West Riding, fell in with Ruth and settled. He is said twice to have had his own business and failed. Following my father (Thornton) he and Ruth had six other children, Mary, George Henry, Louisa, Lily, Freda and Louis. Ludwig subsequently twice married widows with families of their own but he had no more children. The first was at Nelson in Lancashire, where I spent a month's holiday with him as a small boy during the 1914-1918 war, and the second at Southport in Lancashire, where he died at the age of 77, still working. He was in the mess-room of the abbattoir where he worked at dinner time and flung the rinsings of his pint pot of tea into the fireplace. As he did so the pot flew off the handle and crashed into the hearth. He looked at the handle remaining in his hand with a grin, said "It's like me, it's buggered" and slumped into his chair and died. A proper way to go.
― Electric Universe (wherever that is) (acoleuthic), Thursday, 7 January 2010 01:27 (fourteen years ago) link
eleven months pass...