Laura Bozzay (Andris researcher)

As with many of my genealogy connections, I met Laura Bozzay through her finding my genealogy website and then sending me an introductory email. Laura has an avid interest in not only her direct line but glassmakers in general. She gets a lot of her information from a group of descendants of French Glass and Crystal Makers from the Eastern part of France, Western part of Germany, and parts of Belgium and Switzerland. Laura has helped me to better understand my Andris family history.

As a "Christmas present" in 2000. André Darquennes provided me with a chart for "Jean ANDRES ° ca 1655 X ca 1674 Marie FALLER" that listed as descendant my grandfather "Arthur Louis Nicolas ANDRIS, ° 05 Apr 1873 Binche X Victorine DORVAL. Naturally, I was grateful for this information and accepted it more or less uncritically.

Then in 2003, Jean Jacques Lannois provided me with a short general history of the Andres name, which I translated from the French. According to this history, couple Joseph ANDRES and Ursula HOCQUEMILLER had four sons: Melchior, Balthasar, Jean and Antione. They moved to the Saar region of Germany around 1725 and established a glassmaking industry there. This Joseph Andres was also listed in the Darquennes chart as the son of the Jean Andres who married Marie Faller.

The upshot of these two communcations was that I came to believe that I was descended from the third son of Joseph and Ursula Hocquemiller Andres, i.e., Jean Andres. What Laura Bozzay did was to provide an enormous database of Andris genealogical records that show, at least in her opinion, some uncertainty about this result. Perhaps the best way to understand this is to present to you a snippet of a dialog that I had with Laura in March of 2004.

I said this to her after examining her large database of Andris records:

I looked over the section of your spreadsheet on Jean Andres of the 17th Century, and there are these references to a birth time of 1636 and also 1655, but across these, a marriage to Marie Faller, b. 1674. This, of course, is very confusing. Is it father and son, but then how could that be with the same wife? Of greater interest to me is how certain is that relationship between the Jean Andres that Andre Darquennes thinks is my direct ancestor and the brothers Melchior and Belthazar that Jean Jacques was kind enough to send me a little description of (which last paragraph you translated for me).

Laura says this (in part) in reply:

I totally understand you confusion about Jean Andres. There is a lot of controversy on the list right now about that very issue. … I think the Jean of 36 and the one of 55 are not the same person [referring to her database] and that only one of them was actually married to Marie. … I do believe that all the Andres in the same area are related.  How is the questions.  Brothers, Cousins, Fathers / Sons?  That is what we are trying to figure out.  Those folks moved around a lot and because of the guild and the ties to nobility there are thankfully quite a lot of records. 

Since I have not got access to a reliable GEDCOM file, and have not seen much of the original data on which it might be based, I am at this point concluding the following, which is satisfying to me in some degree. I am very probably descended from this early community of glassblowers that was formed in St. Ingbret, Saar around 1725. The fact that my dad's uncle Louis (Bronzé) was a master glassblower and that grandfather Andris was a window glassblower helps to confirm this, too.

So, even though I have yet to discover royalty in my ancestors, I perhaps have discovered some aristocracy.