We started easy our first day by relaxing up the Rhine on a river cruise. I say up because we were going South, which to someone who lives near the Mississippi going south is downriver, but the Rhine runs from south to north so our trip up the Rhine to Rudesheim was about 4 hours. Very relaxing, weather was nice, not too cold and before long castles started appearing. Lots of picture taking, I posted some on Facebook and have a whole album of pictures from this Rhineland tour on Flickr. Will post the link at the end.
Our next day was very interesting and full of history. We had a tour of our home base town Boppard. We had a very charming English (from England) guide who gave us an interesting tour of this very old city, back to the Romans, with the remains of a Roman fort in town (a piece of video is on my Facebook page) After this tour and lunch we then visited the Evangelisch Church Archive which is the repository of the Evangelish Church records for all of the Rhineland, where we were met by the President of the Rhineland Pfalz genealogy society and the Director of the Archive. The Director gave us a wonderful overview of the Archive,what kind of records it contains, some of the interesting things people may not know of, such as military parish records. I think these tours of the Archives are very informative and going with a small group you get to see and learn a lot more than if you went as an individual. I doubt very much they would take you down to the bowels of Archives and show you such things. Like one of the interesting documents we saw from the 1300’s.
To round out the day, we had a lecture by a history Professor from the Univ. of Mainz, who has done much work on the emigration from the Pfalz area. He presented a slide show with information on what the Pfalz area was like in the 1700’s onward, how it was divided up into so many territories and that if you even went 1 km away you could have crossed a “border” and owed someone else taxes or if you wanted to marry the girl in the next village and it was in a different territory you had to get permission from both governments and pay both, so it was very difficult to be a poor man at this time. The story progressed and he told the reasons for emigration, how they proceeded once they decided to leave and where and how they lived in the New World. Although the video is not Hollywood caliber, I will try to have a special showing for newsletter subscribers this winter of this lecture,
Of course on the free days on our tours is when folks go out to their hometowns, we had folks go nearby in the Pfalz area and even some who went into Luxembourg. I always anxiously await their return to hear how things went and it sounds like they had a wonderful time. Some were led by local historians and one was surprised with about 15 cousins showing up. For another we had arranged for someone to meet her at the Archives, where she was able to touch the actual emigration papers for her ancestor from the 1850’s. Of course she couldn’t take the originals but got copies. She also learned of another daughter who had emigrated before (she thought she had stayed in Germany or died) but now she knows she must find her in the U.S. It is always fun to hear their stories. I am going to ask if perhaps some of them will write a short story of their adventures to share with everyone.
After we moved to our second home base town Speyer, we had a historical tour and then some of us took the train down to Ludwigshafen, where in all places at the train station is a small Archive for trade unions BUT it also houses a collection of over 3000 Ortssippenbuchs, which are family registers or genealogies so to speak, from all over Germany. If you know your town and it has been lucky enough to have someone from the town or a local historian transcribe the church books or civil registers and put all this info into a book you have struck Gold
We were shown the shelves with all the books and learned how to use them and were able to check if any of our towns were there. I am lucky enough to have bought an Ortssippenbuch for one of my towns a few years back and you can use them to trace siblings lines etc, plus of course getting your direct line back usually as far as the church or civil books go. I also learned this time that this area of the Rhineland was under Napoleon’s rule in the late 1700’s-1815, where he had introduced civil registration and abolished church books. After his demise most of Germany that had been under his control stopped civil registration (until 1875 when the country of Germany started it again) but most of the Rhineland kept it, so if you have people from around this area you should know there may be Civil Register books for your towns.
Here is a link for the photos for the 2011 Rhineland Tour