Jeffrey Loritz

It isn’t easy growing up in a big family, but I wouldn’t have traded it for anything. It really teaches you to be a team player, especially with this family!

 

Thoughts relating one’s lifetime to the entire scope of time since humanity has walked this earth are the threads by which our own experiences are woven into those in history. They can also produce some interesting paradoxes. For example, in the present age a human being can expect to probably live a little over six decades – maybe seven if you’re lucky. Let’s assume that the passing of two such decades represents the birth and upbringing of a generation. Given this, one can expect to personally interact with, at most, three or four generations within one’s lifetime. We might wonder then how many generations we could reasonably expect to go back in our own lineage before we forget even the names of the people from that time. Since at least the 18th century much of Europe has been living with mass industrialization, which included increasingly widespread literacy and access to information-storing media such as parchment or books. Since we could reasonably expect that our ancestors from the 1600s or 1700s had the ability to record or be recorded in their family trees, we could expect to trace our ancestry back 300 or 400 years, or 15-20 generations.

But often this is not the case. For many people, it is difficult to go further in one’s lineage beyond one’s great-grandparents, a mere four or five generations. The question naturally arises: Why the discrepancy between the ability of ancestors to record this information and the inability of descendants to have this information? An acceptable answer would probably be given by siting a whole host of causes for the lack of genealogical information for many people. The ruins of war often destroy records, and if just one generation of a family fails to pass of the information to its descendants, there comes to be a break in the lineage.

For the Loritz surname, the break occurred back five generations, with an eastern German man named George Loritz. We do not know the name of his wife, or for that matter many of the substantive details of his life. Amidst a still divided German confederation, George had a child named Antoine sometime in the 1860s, who by the 1890s had immigrated to America, briefly living in the city of Baltimore. Antoine and his wife eventually moved from Baltimore to Michigan, where they had many children. One of these children was named Edward Julius Loritz, who raised three children before his early death. His oldest son he named Edward Francis Loritz, who as an adult in the 1970s made the decision to leave the Chicago area and head west for California. Edward had six kids, one of whom was Jeff Loritz.

But can we try to go further back by scrounging for what limited clues may be available to give us some sense of how long our lineage has lasted?

There are some clues to be found. One comes directly from the name ‘Loritz’ itself. It seems that Loritz is a Germanization of the Czech surname ‘Lorenz’. The surname Lorenz is a cognate with its English variant ‘Lawrence’, and the Italian ‘Lorenzo’, which all derive from a single Latin name ‘Laurentius’, which means “from Laurentum” – an Italian coastal city just south of Rome.

Laurentum itself got its name because of the laurel trees which grew in the area, trees from which the famous wreaths of antiquity were made. This tradition can be traced back to the Pythian games that were held in Delphi to honor the god Apollo. The winner of the games would be given a wreath made of the leaves of a laurel tree (which are today also commonly known as ‘bay leaves’) taken from the Vale of Tempe in the northern Greek region of Thessaly. The vocabulary of this tradition has carried forward until the present day in honorific words such as being a “Nobel Laureate”, or in phrases like “to rest on one’s laurels”.

“Do you not know that in a race all the runners run, but only one receives the prize? So, run that you may obtain it.  Every athlete exercises self-control in all things. They do it to receive a perishable wreath, but we an imperishable.   So I do not run aimlessly; I do not box as one beating the air.   But I discipline my body and keep it under control, lest after preaching to others I myself should be disqualified.” – 1 Corinthians 9:24-27

Its therefore something of an honor to live by the name “Loritz”. On our family’s heraldry there is the Latin phrase Fructus Pro Patrium, which roughly means “Fruits of the Fatherland” – used as a way to convey that, like a fruit to a tree and as a son to a father, the Loritz name is part of the produce of a rich European tradition, but has now, in the New World, taken up its own significance apart from its heritage. Whether the Loritz name is known as being good or bad fruit is a question for the future bearings of its name to decide.

Likewise, the name of Jeffrey Loritz will be one day evaluated and judged as to what kind of life it was and how did it influence the people and society/culture it came in contact with.

This Jeff Loritz waits for the following words by the only judge that matters.