You have arrived at the family history website for the Hachenburg Family of Prague. Our family legend says that Seligmann Baruch Löw (later Hachenburg) was born in Hachenburg Germany in 1769. But he was exiled to Prague as a child, grew up there, and was quite successful. All of his thirteen children, and many grandchildren, were born in Prague. If your family legend starts that way, you may be part of our family, and we would love to know you.

The main purpose of this web site is to give all of our family access to Volume 1 of the book The Hachenburg Family of Prague Bohemia, The Lucky and the Unlucky. Because of limitations (explained at the beginning of the book) I have written about only two people for this first venture into history writing. 

Seligmann Baruch Löw Hachenburg was the first person in our family to have the last name Hachenburg. His story has not one shred of primary source evidence to prove it, but it’s what we all grew up believing. Among Seligmann’s assets, I believe, were intelligence, ambition, and surely a lot of good luck.

Hanuš Hachenburg was born in 1929 in Prague. We all can see the disaster looming when we see that date. Despite his asset of sheer brilliance, he did not have his great great grandfather’s luck. His is the unexpected, terribly sad, story we found.

My goal is to write a complete family history, including much enlightening research that Susan Hachenburg Reyniers and I have done over the last 5 years.  More pictures and documents will be available to all. A big family tree will be updated and online. I am scouring Ancestry and other sites and have already found great hints about branches going back to almost the first line on the tree.

I hope very much to add contributions from other family branches about what has been their story – YOUR STORY - since the beginning of the 20th century. We did not know about each other for a long time – let’s fix that.

My style of writing is fairly casual. I am writing to and for my family and I am assuming you know the names, but please let me know what is not clear so I can fix it in the next edition. Remember, this is just my first stab at getting all this together. If you think I have made an error somewhere, please do let me know.

Hints about reading the book –

The family tree page contains only a few people to establish a context for the two stories. The entire tree will go online as soon as possible.

Bill Adelman helped me endlessly to get this computer-ready. The Table of Contents, List of Illustrations and all endnotes are clickable links. You don’t have to page back! Put the cursor over the TOC or Illustration listing or endnote number, click the mouse, and you are taken to the target of the link. To go back to the origin of the link, press ALT + Left Arrow.

I hope you enjoy the read. I hope even more that you will be in touch so that you can help this project to be accurate, and to grow. I hope that our next family reunion will include Hachenburgs I have yet to meet!

This book and all the information I have is for all my family, near and far. I only request that if you print any of it or use it for something, that you credit my authorship of the book.

Ruth Hachenburg Adelman

​November 2015