1st About the Aldinger-Ostermayer family: Karl Aldinger and Hertha Ostermayer married on 24 January 1944. The marriage lasted over six decades. Only the death of Karl Aldinger in 2005 brought her to an end. The ancestors of the married couple were widely ramified and can be traced far back through the stored documents of the inventory. Due to the numerous traditional sources and many patient family history researches, they were deeply anchored in the consciousness of Karl and Hertha Aldingers. During the Second World War Karl Aldinger (1917-2005) was a soldier (last lieutenant). He then managed various agricultural estates (Staufeneck estate, Schafhof estate, Alteburg estate). In 1957 he took over the management of the youth hostel in Esslingen, which he continued to run until 1963. He then ran a guesthouse in Saig (Black Forest) until 1990, which came from the inheritance of an aunt of his wife. Hertha Aldinger (1920-2012) had undergone agricultural training and had been a teacher of agricultural household science since January 1944. After 1 July 1944, she no longer worked for the company, but devoted herself to her five children (one had died very early) and supported her husband in his various tasks. The family archive Aldinger-Ostermayer documents the ancestors of Karl and Hertha Aldinger in almost all lines back to the end of the 18th century. There are rich documents on the families Aldinger, Trißler, Unrath (ancestors of Karl Aldinger) and Ostermayer, Görger, Baur/Giani, Heldbek/Gaiser, Riedlin and Schinzinger (ancestors of Hertha Aldinger). The documents refer to members of the upper middle class in Württemberg and Baden. Some family members were soldiers in the First and Second World Wars (among others Eduard Ostermayer (1867-1954), Helmut Ostermayer (1919-1941) and Karl Aldinger) and have left photos, diaries and memories as well as letters from the wartime. The Aldinger family provided agricultural estate managers for several generations. There are numerous physicians from the family circle: Dr. Oskar Görger (1847-1905), who founded his wealth through his practice in Australia, Dr. Eduard Ostermayer (1867-1954), who was still practicing in his 80s and was thus known in the 50s as Stuttgart's oldest practicing physician, Dr. Karl Schinzinger (1861-1948), also a physician in Australia, and Dr. Albert Schinzinger (1827-1911), who began his career as a surgeon and after his habilitation worked as a professor of medicine at the University of Freiburg (about him Pagel: Biographisches Lexikon outstanding doctors of the nineteenth century. Berlin, Vienna 1901, Sp. 1499-1500). Also worth mentioning are the pastors: Karl Ludwig Heldbek (1756-1829), pastor in Scharenstetten, Christoph Erhardt Heldbek (1803-1877), city pastor in Weilheim, Emil Heldbek (1849-1884), pastor in Auendorf, and Dr. Paul Aldinger (1869-1944), pastor in Kleinbottwar, colonist and pastor in Brazil. The Ostermayers were merchants for several generations, initially locally in Weilheim/Teck and from around 1870 in the Württemberg state capital Stuttgart. Max (1860-1942) and Gottlieb Ostermayer (1871-1910) finally worked as merchants in India. The Heldbek/Gaiser family also knew merchants whose activities later extended as far as Africa (Lagos). The most famous is Gottlieb Leonhard Gaiser (1817-1892). He tried to found a German colony in Mahinland (east of Lagos), but failed because of Bismarck's colonial-political restraint (Ernst Hieke: Gaiser, Gottlieb Leonhard, in: Neue Deutsche Biographie, 6 (1964), p. 39f.). Robert Karl Edmund Schinzinger (1898-1988), university professor and lecturer in Japan, and Ernst Ostermayer (1868-1918), professor and painter are to be emphasized as representatives of science and art. Albert Joseph Fridolin Schinzinger (1856-1926), the Japanese Consul General in Berlin, worked in the field of politics and diplomacy. 2. processing of the stock: The family archive Aldinger-Ostermayer was created step by step. In ancient times, outstanding documents were preserved and entrusted to the next generation. Initially, only a few documents were handed down, mostly letters or documents with a special memoir value. This happened with both the Aldinger and Ostermayer ancestors. Only later generations left behind complete estates, i.e. closed traditions. This was the case with Eduard Ostermayer and his son Helmut as well as Karl and Hertha Aldinger. For Oskar Görger and his wife Marie, original documents have been preserved to a considerable extent, but in smaller quantities. Family research on a larger scale had already been carried out in the 1930s in connection with the Aryan evidence by the Aldingers and the Ostermayers. Lore Braitsch, née Aldinger, collected older documents for the Aldinger family, which she also evaluated (e.g. speech in honour of Dr. Paul Aldinger, cf. Bü 360). After their death in 1998 these documents came to Hertha and Karl Aldinger, so that a family archive for the Aldinger and Ostermayer families grew together. Hertha Aldinger edited this. She supplemented the originals with copies and transcriptions. With admirable patience she transcribed the documents in old, no longer generally legible script, first by hand and later by typewriter. Already in 1996 she worked with computers. Even more important are their evaluations of the family records. She put together different material to certain persons as well as whole family branches, so for her husband Karl (Bü 179) and for herself (Bü 118). She also wrote the couple's memoirs under the title "Our 20 Initial Years" (Bü 246). She also wrote down her personal memories of her parents (Bü 181). For the Ostermayer (Bü 284, 304 and 334), Heldbek (Bü 453, 473) and Schinzinger (Bü 226, 237, 296) families she compiled material and wrote elaborations on the history of these families. Probably also the order of the family archive goes back to them. This only considered a separation of the individual family branches and was otherwise little structured. When the materials were handed over to the Main State Archives in January 2013, they were stored in guide files and the subunits were formed in transparent envelopes. There were also other types of packaging. A handwritten fixation of this order was made on the occasion of the transfer of the family archive to the main state archive in a transfer register (Bü 550). Hertha Aldinger's intensive family research and work have left traces in the state of order. The units were inflated by copies, often multiple copies. Original tradition and copy or transcription were not separated. The original letter series were torn, there was the group of already transcribed pieces and the group of still unprocessed letters. The archival order of the documents restored the series of the original letters. The copies have been reduced. There is little point in keeping an original and a copy of it in the same tuft. Multiple copies of the transcriptions could also be collected. However, different processing stages (e.g. concepts, final version) were left unchanged. There was a larger collection of postcards, which had been arranged after picture motives. This collection also contained described and run postcards, i.e. family correspondence. This had to be reassigned to the letters and cards. The collection of postcards was thus reduced to the undescribed pieces (Bü 506, 509), and the archival indexing attached great importance to a detailed characterization of the Büschel contents in the Contained Notes. This was especially necessary when the title recording for the tuft had to remain very general. The collection was structured in such a way that the central importance of Karl and Hertha Aldinger for the documents is emphasized. Karl and Hertha Aldinger are expressly referred to as related family branches. The spelling of the first names was standardized according to today's spelling: Helmut instead of Hellmut, Karl instead of Carl, Jakob instead of Jacob etc.. The index lists the women among the aforementioned families from the related circle of Aldinger-Ostermayer, but also mentions the marriage name. Women who have married into the circle of relatives are classified under their names of marriage, their names of birth are given in an explanatory manner. The stock P 45 "Familienarchiv Aldinger-Ostermayer" was sorted and listed by the undersigned in Spring/Summer 2013. The duration of the documents ranges from approx. 1770 to 2013, the volume of the stock amounts to 553 units in 6.1 m.Stuttgart, in October 2013Dr. Peter Schiffer
