I know he existed. But where did he go? One of our family mysteries is Wesley, an orphan boy that lived with my Schott grandparents sometime in the early 1900s. The family lore is that my Grandpa Peter “went to the train station” to pick him up, that he was a bit wild, and that […Read more]
You may have seen the Ancestry ad where a man trades in his lederhosen for a kilt after taking a DNA test that shows he is more Irish than German. A word of warning—if you make your wardrobe choices based on a DNA test, you may want to make sure that store takes returns. And […Read more]
I admire my ancestors’ sense of adventure and determination to seek out better lives by migrating from Germany to Ukraine/Poland/Hungary to North America. But I curse that same sense of adventure, because whenever they moved, they often left their past lives behind so completely that I can’t figure out where they came from. Since most […Read more]
As children, we used to share what we did on our summer vacations. As an adult genealogist, I can’t wait to share what I learned on my summer vacation about finding ancestral towns in Germany! The Meyers Gazetteer has gone online (not new news), but at the recent IGGP conference, I learned that it has […Read more]
From the very first email, I felt my ancestral town of Osthofen reaching out to welcome me. The email was, of course, not from the town itself but from my guide for the day, Ursula Feile from the tourist office. Her cheery note: “We’re so excited you’re visiting the town of your ancestors. We’ll show […Read more]
The town of Osthofen, Germany, was the home of the Schott family from at least1717 to 1809. It is over 1,200 years old, and was first mentioned in 784 in the Lorscher Codex (a manuscript from the Lorsch Monastery). In 784 it was referred to as Ostova. Later names included Osthoven (1262), Osthouen (1268), Ostown […Read more]
My mother was always blunt, or “direct” if you want to be polite. I learned to live with comments like, “Well, that hairstyle doesn’t look good on you,” or “You just have no sense of style,” (when I preferred my own tailored look to her more flamboyant, sequin-bedecked clothing suggestions). So it didn’t really surprise […Read more]
This is the final of 6 blog posts on my grandfather’s home village of Hoffnungstal, Bessarabia (now Ukraine). Resettlement to Poland The areas of West Prussia and Posen/Warthegau in northern and western Poland had been directly annexed to Germany. By the first part of 1941, the SS had expelled close to 400,000 Poles from their […Read more]
This is part 5 of 6 blog posts on my grandfather’s home village of Hoffnungstal, Bessarabia (now Ukraine). The beginning of the end … leaving Bessarabia The year 1940 was a major turning point in the history and life of the Bessarabian villages, including Hoffnungstal. As part of the Versailles Treaty after WWI, Bessarabia had […Read more]
This is part 4 of 6 blog posts on my grandfather’s home village of Hoffnungstal, Bessarabia (now Ukraine). Celebrations Memories of life in Hoffnungstal include much hard agricultural work. But there are also many stories of dances in the fall on the empty threshing areas with the musicians playing “zippy” dance music, the young men […Read more]