It was a flurry of names that greeted us at the Heimathaus. Frau Weiß, Heike Wissing, her new baby, her husband, and her parents, along with Marcia and Bill were all there when we arrived. The president of the Heimatverein (home town club), Herr Holters, was leading the gathering and providing translation services between the English speakers and the German speakers. It was pretty exciting as we exchanged family trees and information about ancestors that we had in common. Herr Holters was put to the test, interpreting as we all talked at once! By the way, Herr Holters is collecting stories about the emigrants' life in the US, so if any one has one about the Kipps or the Bengforts when they came over, send them to us. We'll pass them on to him.On the left are the Americans (Marcia and Bill Zalinski, Kathy and me). On the far right is Heike Wissing. Left of her is Gerda Weiß, then Heike's parents.
What do these assorted people have to do with each other? It goes back to Johann Heinrich Kiepe. One of his sons, George, married Gertrude Nienhaus, and her parents were Henry Nienhaus and Gertrude Bengfort. George and Gertrude were great-grandma Finnegan's parents.
We all met for lunch at the Haarmühle, a restaurant at the site of an old mill. That particular piece of land still belongs to the local noble family. After lunch Gerda Weiß was very excited about taking us around to the old farmsteads where her family and my ancestors, the Bengforts, owned or leased their farms. She spent the whole afternoon driving us to various farmsteads. We started at her brother's farm, which was the original Bengfort family farm.
Practically everyone in Alstätte at that time was a farmer, including the Bengforts. The picture shows the Bengfort farm in 1931. The house is on the left half of the photo, and it is attached to the barn, seen on the right side. The other photo is taken from the same spot. The barn was expanded into the house, and today the family lives in a separate, beautiful house a few yards away. The photo shows Frau Weiß on the left, and next to her is her brother, Heinz Nabers (the current owner). His wife is seen on the right.
Herr Nabers's son, Stefan, gave us a nice tour of the farmstead. He was proud of the ventilation system for the hog house; exhaust air is blown from the hog house to a bed of wood splinters that contain bacteria that take out the smell from the exhaust air. They have a chicken house with thousands of chicks in it currently. They have a John Deere 7600 (with a speedometer in km/hour), and a Fendt tractor (the biggest brand in Germany).
We had lemonade on their patio, and met Stefan's wife and two preschool children. His little daughter's name is Hanna, and his son was Moritz.
Herr Nabers told me the story about his uncle, who build a small radio during the second world war. He was able to get information from Britain, and learned about the possibility of bombing in Alstätte. He warned the townsfolk, and most of them took shelter outside of town. Alstätte really was bombed, but most of the people survived. I asked him why the Allies would bomb a little farming village near the end of the war. He told me that everything along the border was bombed in order to make it safe for the Allied troops to march from the Netherlands.
Frau Weiß then took us to see some of the houses of the tenant farmers on the farm. This photo shows a house from the time of the emigration to America. I asked why poor farmers would go to the risk and expense of emigrating only to be poor farmers again. The problem was that people had large families, and only one son could inherit the farm. There wasn't any more land to turn into farms, so the other sons became the tenant farmers. If they wanted land for their own farms, they went to America. Furthermore, they couldn't read or write, and so could not send back letters telling their families that they had survived the trip. For Gerda Weiß, I was the only evidence she had seen that the Bengforts who emigrated survived the passage and made a life for themselves.
Frau Weiß took us to her very nice home to meet her husband and grandchildren, and then she took us to the Kiepe farm. There we caught up with the Wissings (Kipp descendants), including Marcia and Bill, and enjoyed cake and coffee on their terrace, and a tour of the old place. The hog-house had been renovated to be Heike and her husband's home, but a fenced-in lot beside the house was still full of different kinds of chickens, along with a white peacock and a couple other normal-colored peacocks.
What struck us in visiting these northern relations, was that we didn't know what kind of people they would be, but it all turned out very well. They were immediately very friendly (which some Germans would say is true of most Germans outside Franken), and we had a lot of fun finding out what each of us did for a living. About 3 to 5 years ago, Heike, her new husband and her parents spent some weeks in the US for the newlyweds' honeymoon trip. Among other places, they visited New York City, Las Vegas, and I think made it to at least one national park and to Los Angeles, and said it was the trip of a lifetime. We went through their photo album together. Bill and Marcia both work at a graphic arts firm in Milwaukee. They had met Heike and her parents at the reunions in Decorah.
The houses that we saw were mostly bigger than houses here in Franken, probably because they were built "in the country" on farms, or former farmland. And in all three cases: the Wissings, Gerda Weiß's family, and her brother's family on the farm, at least one adult child lived in a house attached to the parents' house along with his or her own family.
We will remember that trip for a long time, and hope to see all those friendly people again.
