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Travel Tuesday

When we took a brief visit to Sibiu (Hermannstadt to the Germans), we marveled at the massive wall surrounding the city, its combination of thirty-nine towers and four bastions a bulwark against invading Ottoman Turks.

But while Sibiu defended the city in the past against those bent on its destruction, it is now dedicated to protect its Saxon German heritage for future generations. Although few ethnic Germans still live in Sibiu (a combination of mass deportations after World War II, brutalization under Ceausescu’s rule, the 1989 Revolution, and other factors, coupled with Germany's generous immigration policy for ethnic Germans), it is still a major cultural center and home to a wealth of Siebenbürgen German history. (Click to get an overview).

 Siebenbürgen German history. Researcher at Teutschhaus, Herr Rehner,
shows brother Bill (far left), cousin Maria, and me (standing)
my great-grandfather's name with his house number

After visiting Grandpa Josef Gärtz’s church in Neppendorf, we drive a scant two miles to Hermannstadt/Sibiu to visit the Friedrich Teutschhaus, a repository of Saxon German history. It’s aptly named for a long-time Evangelische Lutheran bishop, Friedrich Teutsch, who worked tirelessly to preserve Transylvania’s German culture. At Teutschhaus we hope to track down the home in which Grandma Lisi Ebner was raised, called the “Ebner Hof.” The Ebner family lived in the nearby town of Grosspold, about 15 miles from Hermannstadt/Sibiu.

Grosspold, Romania
Archival Records

Cousin Maria had arranged for us to meet the venerable Teutschhaus researcher, Herr Rehner, to help us with our quest to find the Ebner Hof. Over six feet tall, with a shock of white hair and gentle gaze, Herr Rehner leads us to a back room where ancient Saxon records line the shelves.

Using my great grandfather’s name, research assistants efficiently stride to a back room and within ten minutes bring out a worn ledger of former Grosspold residents. Herr Rehner turns the pages to “E” and finds my great grandfather’s house number. “Ebner, Samuel—365.” The town was small enough so that every house had its own number, rather than a number and street name as we’re accustomed to.

Siebenbürgen German history: Detail of Samuel Ebner's name
in book of house numbers.

Family History- Pastor Meitert
shows my brothers, Bill, center, &
Paul, right the Grosspold Church's
 Family Records

Next stop—Grosspold. We meet Pfarrer Meitert, present pastor of my grandmother’s church. Using the house number, he pages through a two-hundred-year old “Familien Buch” in which the birth, death, and marriage dates of each family member are recorded. I initially wrote about this discovery in more detail in an earlier post: Life and Death Abbreviated and the sad truth the Family Book revealed: three of my grandmother’s siblings had died as mere babies. The book recorded the exact death date of my grandmother’s mother, also named Elisabetha Ebner, born Eder. She had died of pneumonia at the age of thirty-four, when my grandmother, (nicknamed) Lisi, was only ten years old.

Family History Book: columns l-r: "Family Member,"
Birth, Marriage, Death (dates: day, month, year)
Maria Eder's maiden name was Feyri

But the book took us even further back into the past. Cross-referencing, we found the page recording the information for my grandmother’s mother’s siblings and parents: the Eders. Johann Eder and his wife, Maria (born and 1835 and 1841, respectively, and married in 1859) were my great-great grandparents. They had seven children, all of whom survived the most vulnerable infant and childhood years, but still, death came relatively early for two of the children: Elisabetha at thirty-four and Samuel, the second youngest, died at eighteen.

After gathering this information, what happens next is extraordinary. Pastor Meitert carefully removes the Ebner pages from the centuries-old Family Book, folds them under his arm, and declares we’re going door-to-door in Grosspold until someone can tell us just where House Number 365, the Ebner Hof, is located!

In my next Travel Tuesday Post, we’ll find out what we discovered in our quest, and the century-old connection this visit made to my grandfather’s objection to naming me “Linda.”

The Road to Sibiu- Travel Tuesday

My cousin, Maria and I flew out of Stuttgart on September 16, 2007, and landed in Bucharest as the sunset washed the countryside in an peachy glow. At a nearby hotel, we met my two brothers, Paul and Bill, and Bill’s wife. The next morning, we squished five people and their luggage into a mini-van and took off for Hermannstadt (Sibiu), the big city near the two small towns, Neppendorf and Grosspold, which were the original homes to my grandfather and grandmother, respectively.

Peles Castle in Sinaei, Romania

On the way, we stopped for a few hours in Sinaei (named after Mt. Sinai, of Ten Commandments fame) to view Peles Castle on a perfect blue-sky day, crossing a brook, having wine on a terrace overlooking the castle, laughing and telling jokes and stories about our childhood.

Continuing on to Sibiu/Hermannstadt, the going was slow as the major highway was under reconstruction (roads and streets were ripped apart everywhere in an effort to rebuild a country that had been working for almost two decades   to overcome the neglect and brutalization under Ceausescu).

Scenes along the road were of another era. Passing through one small town near sunset, we yielded to cows on the highway driven home  from the pastures. Old women in their babushkas and long skirts sat at the side of the road, perhaps waiting for loved ones to return from the fields or watching the world go by.

We arrived at 9 p.m. in Sibiu, exhausted after about ten hours of travel, but were rewarded with dinner in a cellar restaurant with ancient brick domed walls, entertained by the musical duo pictured here. Lots of meat and salads of tomatoes and onions were typical menu choices.

We overnighted right next to the Evangelische Kirche Neppendorf, (Lutheran Church in Neppendorf) where the Gärtz family had worshipped for two centuries. In the next few posts, we'll see the  secrets this church yielded to expose unknown family  history.

Travel Tuesday-Transylvania Sights & Family Secrets

Welcome to the first post for “Travel Tuesday.” I plan to use Tuesdays to highlight the roots-finding trip my brothers and I made to Transylvania, Romania, in September, 2007. I’ve suggested this topic to Genea-bloggers as another possible prompt to which others may wish to contribute about genealogy research trips they have taken, and/or to highlight the lands of their ancestors.

Transylvanian Countryside

One of the scores of horse-drawn carts in Transylvania

A Breathtaking Land


The theme of Travel Tuesday is two-fold. One is to introduce my wonderful readers to the not-yet-fully discovered, gorgeous region of Transylvania in Romania. Some of the places we visited are as beautiful, historic, and fascinating as any destination in Europe. Romania is caught in a bit of a time-warp. We saw scenes every day that one would have to go back forty to sixty years to see in Western Europe: ubiquitous horse-drawn carts hauling harvests on the secondary highways, men actually cutting grass with scythes in the fields, cone-shaped haystacks out of another time, parents and youngsters working side-by-side to harvest potatoes. Breath-taking mountains and valleys, dotted with farms and grazing animals, created an unfolding panorama, a new view around each bend.

Ubiquitous cone-shaped haystacks squat throughout
the countryside

Gleaning Genealogical Treasures on a Roots-finding Journey


The second theme is to share the genealogical discoveries such a trip afforded us, which I hope will encourage others to travel to their ancestors’ native lands, if for no other reason than to breathe the air, and be part of the geography in which previous generations lived. In some places, this is no longer possible, so much was destroyed in the wars or built up with 20th century sprawl. But some vestige of the past probably remains that your imagination can latch onto as we all love to envision the reality of our ancestors’ lives.

So I’ve used up most of my words today just introducing this idea, but will begin next week where my my journey to Romania began: in Crailsheim, Germany, where the present-day Gärtz family, my cousins, settled after leaving Romania.

Family Resemblance


In my previous post, I wrote about my 1995 trip to meet these relatives for the first time in my life. The goal of my most recent visit in 2007, twelve years after the first, was to visit again with a part of the family that had actually lived and grown up in interview the elder Gärtz, Hans, and find out what I could about my grandfather and life in Romania.

Hans Gärtz and me. Hans's grandfather
was my grandfather's half-brother

I was struck, as Hans spoke to me, how much his gestures resembled those of my grandfather, Josef. Just like Josef, Hans used his hands, often spreading the fingers wide, palms down, to emphasize a point, leaning back, then forward in his chair, as he shared stories from Neppendorf, the little town he and my grandfather’s called home.

Like Josef, Hans laughed easily and had a quick sense of humor, Hans didn’t know Josef, who had emigrated before he was born, but Hans’s father, knew him. “Josef was always full of silliness,” his father had recalled. Same guy I knew -- always sticking his false teeth out at us grandkids to get a laugh.

Critical Family History Details Revealed in Interview


Hans’s interview, two years before I found Josef’s diary, was the first time I had heard that Josef had left Romania on Christmas Eve, and that he didn’t have the proper papers to leave. “He just wanted to go,” Hans said, “and didn’t want to wait.” When I found the diary, corroborating the Christmas Eve departure, combined with Hans’s story about missing papers (not mentioned in the diary) it was like the click of a lock. I knew I had important details, which explained why Josef had to escape detection at the borders. Without the Hans interview, I would have been left wondering what that was all about.

Lesson: interview your relatives!

So, dear readers, in order to keep these posts brief and readable in everyone's limited time, I’ll continue the Romania story on Travel Tuesdays over the next several months.

Can Love last 100 years? November 18, 1910-November 18, 2010

Funny thing about love. We know it when we feel it. We know it when we see it.  

I can see it in this postcard, mailed one hundred years ago today, November 18, 1910, by Josef Gärtz to his sweetheart, Elisabeth Ebner (ABEner) to celebrate her Name Day. Josef was twenty-one. Elisabeth was twenty-three. Within a year they would marry and eventually become my grandparents.

But I didn't always know about the love expressed in language as flowery as the blue-bedecked bicycle pictured on the front. In fact, before last year, I didn't know this postcard existed.


It was one of scores of missives my grandmother had saved for almost seventy years. "Trash or treasure?" My brothers and I debated, in a frenzy of sorting after my mother's death. We squinted at the illegible writing, written in an ancient German script that most present-day Germans can't read much less a German major like me. We decided to keep them, but I figured they'd languish for years in "Box 14, Gartz Correspondence"  and end up summarily tossed.


Enter fate.


My brothers and I traveled to Transylvania in 2007 on a family roots-finding mission. In Sibiu (called Hermannstadt by the Germans), we met Professor Uli Wien who was researching the history and immigration of Siebenbürgen Germans -- people like our grandparents. Uli asked for our email addresses. 

Serendipity had begun its subtle work.


I forgot all about Uli until the summer of 2009, when he emailed me. “Do you by any chance have any letters to or from your grandparents?” 


Did I have letters!  My heart leapt at what this meant. Perhaps Uli could help me decipher the inscrutable writing!  That put me on a mission to look at the letters closely for the first time in the fifteen years since Mom's death -- and I began to tease out some authors' names. 

The address on this postcard was clear:


F[räulein]Elise Ebner 
Reisper Gasse [Street]
c/o Mr. Ji[c]keli [the family my grandmother worked for]
Hermannstadt
Nagyszeben

(yet another name for Hermannstadt / Sibiu: Nagyszeben is the Hungarian name)


I recognized my grandfather's signature: “Josef Gärtz," and I knew I had a treasure. 


Printed under the bicycle on the front: 


Herzlichen Glückwunsch zum Namenstag. “Heartfelt Good Wishes for your Name Day." 


I sent a xerox of the writing to Uli, and he deciphered into modern German those words written one hundred years ago today. I translated Josef's sincere, flowery note into English, its tinges of 19th century formality not diminishing its sweetness:

"I wish you much happiness and best of health on your cherished Name Day, so you can keep this happy day blooming for many years into the future. A joyful “Hail! and Cheers!” rings out on this day of the flower. [He may be comparing Lisi to a flower]. Long live the pretty girl and faithful Lischen [an endearment for  Lisi -- like  sweet Lisi]. 

With greetings and kisses
Yours faithfully,
J[osef] G[ärtz]
Neppendorf, November 18. 1910"

[Neppendorf was my grandfather's home town]

Celebrating one's Name Day has been a European tradition for centuries -- and was a bigger event than a birthday. Parties, gifts, candy, and cards like this one, all were part of the day. Josef and Lisi were Lutherans, and on the Lutheran calendar, Elisabeth's Name Day is November 19th. Josef mailed this postcard a day ahead, his loving words now reaching us across the span of 100 years. 


I know love when I see it.