THE REULEAUX FAMILY TREES

In 1920, Major Oskar Reuleaux, the son of Professor Franz Reuleaux, completed two family trees of the Reuleaux family. The larger one, approximately 6' 6" by 3' (about 200 by 90 cm), is comprehensive and from 1711 to 1920 may well be complete.  The smaller one, about 48" by 18" (about 120 by 45 cm) concentrates on the "Mainz Branch" of the Reuleaux family, although since it includes us, it is not quite clear where he draws the line. One of the reasons why my copies of these two documents have survived is that they seem always to have been kept (and still are) in a large and stout cylindrical cardboard container, together with many of the other family papers that have been used in preparing these archive documents. The Reuleaux trees have, of course, been invaluable.

The extracts that follow, two from each tree, show Oskar's fine calligraphy. The documents are remarkable both for the detail they contain and for the presentation - there are no fewer than 258 data boxes in the larger tree. The two trees are monumental achievements.

A minor curiosity is in the elaborately written title to the larger tree. In the first line, "Ahnen" means "ancestors" or "forbears", but "Manen" caused me some trouble. The word is in my Cassell dictionary, with the translation "manes", which is in fact the Latin word meaning "the gods of the dead" (there were three sorts of household gods, "lares", the gods of the hearth, "penates" the gods of the larder, and "manes"). "Manes" is also in the English-German half of my Cassell, translated as "die Manen, die Geister der Abgeschiedenen", i.e. "the spirits of the departed", which presumably is what Oskar Reuleaux had in mind.

Incidentally, the fact that the second "n" of "Manen" is bigger than the first suggests that this line was the last to be written and that he had left himself rather too much space.

DISPLAYED TITLE OF THE LARGER TREE (about one-third full size)

EXTRACT FROM THE LARGER TREE (approximately full size)

DISPLAYED TITLE OF SMALLER TREE WITH FRANZ REULEAUX'S BIRTHPLACE

SECTION FROM SMALLER TREE