Any memoir that I might write has to start with my family background, and that background is very closely connected to my family’s business fortunes. The name Heinrich is of German origin. I have found a vague reference to the Schwarzwald, the Black Forest, but we have discovered no more specific location than that.
The first Heinrich we know of was named János. He married a Hungarian woman and had two sons: Alajos I, born in Szekesfehérvár in 1776, and Ferenc, born in 1779. (The Ferenc branch changed their name to Imrédi in the course of time.) Apart from the fact that János had a wife and children, we know nothing about him.
Alajos I was the founder of the business, and so our family history starts with him. Alajos I was German. He spoke and wrote in German, and his notes to his five sons were all written in German. In 1790, at the age of fourteen, Alajos I went to Buda, where his mother had relatives. (Budapest didn’t exist as a unified city at that time.) He was an apprentice in a hardware store, or whatever we imagine an eighteenth-century hardware store might have been, for a period of five years. After his apprenticeship concluded, he left Buda and became a bookkeeper in a different hardware business.
So here we have a nineteen-year-old boy, with no formal education and nothing to his name. But he was obviously intelligent, clever, and ambitious, because from these origins, we see that he developed. He became successful in the Hungarian town of Györ(in German, called Raab), where he was further employed in the hardware business.
Alajos I returned to Buda at a time when Pest had started to grow, mostly due to economic conditions caused by the Napoleonic Wars. There he began to make enough money from the hardware business that he could afford to get married. He and his wife produced ten children, of whom only six survived.
In 1806, he entered into a partnership with József Wurm, which flourished because Buda and Pest, still two separate cities, were flourishing as well. Slowly but surely, Pest became a commercial center, in part because of increased commerce on the Danube.
When two of his sons, Alajos II and Ferenc II, got older, they became part of the family firm. Before his death, he instructed them to arrange the firm’s future and to take care of the business. The two of them bought out their other brothers, and the firm continued to do well.
During the Napoleonic Wars, Austrian steel mills and iron-producing companies were in the hands of the French, a situation that caused disruptions in construction supplies, which were important for the war effort. But Alajos II managed to keep the Austrian-Hungarian troops supplied with the materials they needed. And he undertook a mission, transmitting a letter from the Hungarian Palatine back to the military headquarters in Vöcklabruck, Austria, and he managed to return with a responding letter. In the meanwhile, Ferenc II was a grain merchant outside Budapest.
For rendering these services, the family was awarded nobility by the emperor of Austria and king of Hungary on June 1, 1827. Part of the deed bestowed them whatever belonged to the kingdom’s portfolio, grounds, or land in a place called Omorovicza (which is today in Serbia, in the region of Banát). Hence these two brothers were allowed to add the prefix Omorovicza to the family name of Heinrich. (This is also the origin of the “de” preceding the family surname.)
Years passed, and the business, then called Wurm & Heinrich, flourished. In the 1840s Ferenc II managed the business, along with others, including his son, Ferenc III, because of his intelligence. In 1843 Wurm retired and left the firm on a very friendly basis, and Ferenc II renamed the business Heinrich A. és Fiai, which means Heinrich A. and Sons. (The A stood for Alajos, the founder.)
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