George Jäger 1814-1900 father of
George Jäger Junior 1845-1903 father of
George Harold Jager 1877-1954 father of
George Jager 1910-1992 father of
George Christopher Jager 1944-

Notes by GCJ on the family's German heritage

George Jäger Senior lived in England from the age of 12. There is no reference in his memoirs of any return visits to Germany, though we know from other sources that he must have done so on more than one occasion. Though he does not explicitly say so, the German community in Liverpool was heavily involved in sugar refining, which would have been useful when he first ventured into that area of business.

His son did not learn to speak German until he was an adult. The account of his Holy Land visit mentions him practicing his language skills on German fellow-tourists.

However after his death in 1903, the public's attitude towards Germans changed. A family member who was a young child at the outbreak of World War 1 recalled stones being thrown at their house by people who thought they were German. Around that time the family changed its name to remove the umlaut. My grandfather, who served in the army in the First World War, clearly didn't want anyone to think he was German, and there are various derogatary references to "Huns" in his writings.

It was different however with my father. He was involved in reconciliation projects after World War 2 and worked hard without success to get the first George's memoirs published. He clearly felt a great deal of affinity with him, as I do, and researched the story as much as he could, right down to finding his details in workhouse records. His big regret was that he was unable to visit Sommersdorf, George's birth place. The village was in East Germany, but very close to the border with West Germany, and the authorities did not give permission for western visitors. By the time the border came down, he was not well enough to visit.

However my mother and my sister did go there in the 1990s, and in 2004 when I was staying with a family in Braunschweig, my host drove me to the village. In the churchyard were at least two relatively recent graves of people named Jäger, who might well have been our relatives!