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German Roots Trip 2003 - Contents

SEEKING OUR GERMAN ROOTS

Chapter II    
May 14, 2003

Schoenberg

Wednesday Evening, May 14

We got to "Ruser’s Hotel" in Schoenberg about 5 p.m. Again, our hotel room reservation made through the Deutsche Bahn service was ready, exactly as we had requested: "no smoking, quiet, twin beds." We had a second floor room, at the back of the building with a nice deck overlooking the hotel’s garden, filled with rhododendrons, azaleas and other plants.

Originally, this trip in search of our roots was to focus only on my side of the family tree with visits to the places where my mother's and father's ancestors lived before emigrating to the US. Then, I remembered that Glenn’s aunt, Audrey Halliday Altrogge, had given us a whole packet of letters dealing with an inheritance that Audrey’s mother, Mary Halliday, and her two sisters were to receive from the estate of an Anna Goettsch who lived in Schoenberg, Germany. Anna was a cousin of Magdalena Goettsch Hinst--the mother of Mary, Dora and Annie Hinst.

There has been a Halliday family legend that Mary Halliday and her sisters were heirs to an estate that included a castle on the Rhine. The first thing I gleaned from those old letters is that Anna Goettsch lived not in the Schonberg on the Rhine River (which does indeed have a famous castle) but in a little village way north on the Baltic Sea near Kiel (and the Danish border). I think at some point in the past some of the family mixed up the Rhine Schonberg with the Baltic Schoenberg. Anna was born in 1851 and died in 1935. A single lady, in 1893 she came to America and visited her family--who were mostly in Iowa, but she also came out west and visited Mary and Andrew Halliday in Idaho, and was in Pendleton, Oregon and San Francisco as well. Anna got around! She apparently stayed in the U.S. for about one year.

From the letters, I also learned that Mary Halliday and her sisters were required to jump through all sorts of bureaucratic hoops by the German officials to prove that they were heirs of Anna G. As far as I could tell from the correspondence, they never did get a dime from the estate, but after World War II the banker/lawyer who had been corresponding with them about the inheritance begged them to send him CARE packages--which they did, bless their hearts. The last letter was written by the banker in late 1946, thanking them for the CARE packages (and saying that he was still taking good care of their inheritance). These letters are a fascinating glimpse into life in Schoenberg before World War I, the Nazi era of the 1930’s and the harsh living conditions in Germany after the end of World War II.

Since Karen and I were planning to visit other areas south of the Baltic Sea, we included little Schoenberg in our family history tour--on the off chance that we might find some distant relatives or perhaps a descendant of the banker who once handled Anna Goettsch’s estate. We jokingly noted in our itinerary--"Collect Fortune from Bank in Schoenberg."

We dined at our hotel, and started our inquiries about any current relatives of Glenn who might still live here. When we asked the hotel manager if there were any "Goettsches" living in Schoenberg, she replied, "Half the town is named Goettsch!" Hmmm, how to winnow this down to the particular branch that emigrated to San Francisco, and later to Idaho?

With plenty of daylight remaining, we strolled through the village after dinner, reaching the handsome brick church that has a long, long history--once it was Catholic, and since the Reformation, it has been "Evangelical Lutheran." The Lutheran Church in Germany does not seem to have split off into separate "synods" as in the USA. If you see a Lutheran church, it is Evangelical Lutheran.

There was another little mystery about Schoenberg. Back in Luebeck, we had mentioned to the hotel clerk that our next stop would be Schoenberg. He literally turned up his nose and said, "Ach! Such a dirty, smelly place! There is a huge refuse dump in Schoenberg. Why don’t you just make a quick day visit there and come back here for the night?" As we drove closer to Schoenberg this afternoon, we began looking for a big dump area--but all we saw were placid black and white Holstein cows in green pastures, forest-covered low hills and the brilliant gold of the Rapeseed fields. Our stroll through the village this evening revealed only a clean, charming little town filled with picturesque buildings--some still covered with the thick thatched roofs that I recall from my childhood fairy tale books. The air just smelled clean and fresh, coming off the Baltic Sea only a couple miles away. So, where was this nasty dump??

Of course, we never found a dump near "our" Schoenberg, but a couple days later, driving east from Luebeck we saw highway signs for a big dump near ANOTHER village named Schoenberg. And yes, the air was none too fresh around the dump site. Too many places are named "Schoenberg" in Germany!

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