Day One

We drove down the autobahn from Frankfurt with all the traffic.  Western Germany is densely populated, industrialized, and busy, busy, busy.  We were anxious to get to the rural atmosphere of the Pfalz (Palatinate) and couldn’t wait to cross the Rhine River and head southwest.  It was raining intermittently, not unusual in these parts.  There were several changes to connecting autobahns but we were well-mapped and it really wasn’t very difficult to find our hotel.  After about 80 miles we found the turn-off to Birkweiler.  I had chosen this village because of the hotel and because I was fairly certain it was close to our ancestor’s home.  I had my very high definition map which showed all the little roads.  It was a God-send, except that it was in spiral book format, very heavy, and Oriette had to sit with it in her lap where ever we drove so we wouldn’t get lost.

Birkweiler is a quaint little village.  This was May so the tourist hordes, if indeed they do come, were not there yet.  I headed for the Hauptstrasse, dead-ended into it, but couldn’t turn right toward the hotel because a building was being resurrected and scaffolding filled the small street.  We went left and found an old gent stooped over a cane, smiling at us.  I mumbled “St. Laurentius Hof Hotel”? and he made a swirling motion with his arm, indicating to go around and come in from the other side.  It was just as he described and we soon found ourselves back on the Hauptstrasse at the other end.  A delivery truck stood to the left and I hollered the hotel name to the driver.  He pointed just to our right.  We looked up and saw the hotel sign and, with a sheepish grin, thanked him.

I backed up and we found a small brick courtyard at the rear of the hotel, used for parking.  It wasn’t yet noon and the big door was locked so I went around to the front.  That was locked, too, so I pressed a buzzer there and announced my name.  Frau Keuser soon unlocked the door and we found ourselves in an open inner courtyard with tables.  It looked like a miniature Oktoberfest setup but the weather was a bit cool yet for it to be used.  The room was up a flight of stairs, then down a hallway.  I was feeling good about the hotel.  The outside walls were made of huge stones, a foot thick, the doors were big and heavy, the lock fixtures strong, sure and working well.  The room was very pleasant.  There was a davenport, two stuffed chairs and a small table in a nice grouping with a TV in the corner.  The bed was the usual German arrangement, twin beds side by side, each with a sheet contoured on the bottom and a single comforter for a covering.  There was a mini-refrig, desks and closets.  The bathroom was large with a window overlooking the inner court.  The fixtures were very modern.  The stool was the familiar German design, with a small shelf in the bowl above a small pool of water to the front.  I will spare the reader by not explaining the purpose of this design in the German mind.  The shower stall was fine with the de rigueur flexible hose to the shower head.  There was a door from the main room leading to a nice balcony overlooking the parking courtyard.  Other buildings surrounded the hotel but it was possible to view the vineyard covered hills beyond.  The windows and door had the design that enabled opening from the side or the top. With the time change numbing our minds, we decided to nap right then and there.  This was our home for a week.

That evening we decided to try Herr Keuser’s cuisine.  The hotel was owned by the Keuser family and Frau Keuser was a workaholic.  She was constantly on the move, tending to the tables, scurrying to the storage buildings in back of the courtyard, making phone calls, and setting out breakfast.  We asked her advice on the menu items since they were entirely in German and there was little we understood.  She suggested the Saumagen since it is a Pfälzer spezialität and also a large meatball concoction so that we each could sample both.  I had previously exchanged emails with a young, unrelated, Heckmann lad in North Germany, and when I mentioned we would be visiting the Pfalz he said they ate some strange food down there – something like Pig Stomach!  Well, that’s exactly what Saumagen means (literally Sow Stomach) although to be fair the central part of it is potatoes and other meat while the whole is cooked in what appears to be the stomach lining (full recipe available on request).

We were hungry and dug in.  It was actually fairly good.  The meatball (Leberknödel) was fine, too, but in general I’m not a big fan of German food.  It is almost always meat based, with a huge slab of meat and just a few token veggies on the side.  Tomatoes are seen sparingly and fruit is not abundant.  They did have a dessert of vanilla ice-cream covered with warm Himbeeren (raspberries) which was delicious!  And the tall flagons of dark wheat beer (Hefeweizen Dunkel) helped considerably.

Day Two

We went down for breakfast to see what awaited us.  The breakfast room was a charming place with windows to the courtyard and a fireplace in the corner.  The offerings were quite extensive and we put a plan into place:  We would stuff ourselves on every available item and then we could sail through the day without having to stop and look for a place to eat lunch. The breakfast consisted of a boiled egg, bread or rolls with jam, butter, coffee, orange juice, cold cuts, cheese slices, 3 kinds of dry cereal with raisins and nuts, and yogurt.  With just a banana or two from the grocery store to tide us over lunch, this worked fine.  The boiled egg was served in one of those metal egg holders standing up vertically so you could remove the top part of the shell and dig out the innards with a tiny spoon.  I became quite adept at this procedure so that by the end of the week I could remove the top quarter of the shell in one piece and eat the egg leaving the rest of the shell in one larger piece.  Not bad for a klutz from Iowa.  I began to enjoy it so much that when we returned home I missed having it.

But enough of this idle chatter.  We had some serious business to attend to – what about Conrad Heckmann, where was our ancestral village!?  I took the back road out of Birkweiler heading for Wollmesheim.  We knew there would be vineyards, but we were struck by the sheer number of them and to the exclusion of almost anything else.  It was like Iowa where almost every available plot of land is put into corn.  I later asked a local if it would have been like this in the 1740s when our ancestor prowled around these hills.  I really hadn’t thought so because I equated wine with a trivial crop, one not likely to sustain a family in the harsh reality of 18th century Germany.  But I was assured there was no doubt the vineyards were an important part of the economy back then.  After all, the area was a part of the Holy Roman Empire for several centuries and wine was no stranger to those folks.

Wollmesheim was just a few Kilometers over the hills and we were soon at the village limits, taking pictures.  Call it what you will, but I swear I had a sixth-sense that these hills contained our roots.  I would be devastated if it didn’t prove out.  But of course my intuitions were probably coaxed along by a 1781 document stating that one Jacob Heckmann of Wollmesheim, brother of Conrad and Catharina, had applied for another inheritance share since his two siblings had left for America without permission in 1748.  It wasn’t hard to find the church.  The village was small and the old steeple stood proudly among some trees in remarkably well-cultivated and attractive grounds.  We were told later that the main body of the church had been destroyed and rebuilt but the old steeple was the original and made it the oldest church in the Pfalz!  Would you believe 900 years?  But was this really Conrad’s church?  Had he stood here 250 years ago and looked up at the steeple as we were doing now?  Why couldn’t I find his baptism in the church records microfilm back in the States?  Why couldn’t I find any Heckmann name during that period?  We walked among the graves to the rear of the church.  The stones were in remarkably good condition for a simple reason.  The maximum stay allowed throughout Germany is 25 years.  The population density is such that the land is simply too valuable to be used for cemeteries.  So after 25 years, out they go and a new bunch is laid to rest.  So there would be no finding of ancestral graves there.

The sound of a choir wafted faintly from the building.  We explored the grounds a bit, waiting for the church door to open.  I wanted to approach the Pastor but I was beginning to lose my nerve.  After all, the church records hadn’t showed what I wanted, what good would it do to ask the Pastor anything?  There was a stocky, middle-aged man just outside the door and I tried to strike up a conversation with him.  It was very frustrating since we did not speak each other’s language.  From what I could gather, he indicated the Pastor was a lady.  When the choir, a small group of senior citizens, came out there was a younger woman with a briefcase who marched purposefully down the hill toward town.  Was that her?  Or the choir director?  While I puzzled over this, she disappeared down the hill.  Four older ladies went to their car and I tried to speak with them.  Not understanding at all, they looked at me as though I were slightly daft.  I was trying to find out if that had been the Pastor, but if not where would I find her in the village.  They didn’t understand.  Even my pantomimes of a person walking or of a pastor preaching produced blank stares, as though this crazy foreigner had lost his mind.  They retreated to their car and sped off.

This whole experience left me dazed and disappointed.  I rationalized that I wasn’t going to find Conrad here anyway so why keep jumping through hoops in Wollmesheim.  We could do some sightseeing and then go home.  I took several pictures of the town, and then we sped off to Speyer.

Speyer is a larger city near the Rhine River and there is a beautiful cathedral dating back many centuries.  It was not far away and we were soon there.  We marveled at the short distances between sites.  I believe Germany is the size of Colorado, so it isn’t like you have to drive for hours to find anything.  After viewing the cathedral and its grounds, we walked over to the town shopping area.  It was a nice mall with several shops but unfortunately as so often happens when we visit Europe, they were closed at mid-day.  The closing hours here were 12:30 to 2:00.  I wanted to get some Marks so I was wondering if the bank’s automatic teller machine would work for me.  It didn’t appear to so I asked for help from a younger German fellow.  He spoke some English and wanted to help.  I had to muffle a laugh at his officious manner, all too common a trait in this wonderful country’s citizens.  The author of a book I read on the modern German psyche said that inside every German there is a lecturer wanting to get out.  This fellow was the quintessential.  He thrust out his arms and said something like “One moment please.  I must read this” as he scanned a sign.  I tried to mumble something to be helpful but he kept shushing me so he could think through the problem thoroughly.  He tried his card and it wasn’t working.  We were a few steps behind him and I started to say something to Oriette.  He wheeled around and was going to shush me again but decided against it when he saw her.  I guess it was okay to talk to your spouse during such crucial moments.  We finally gave up on the machine, thanked him, and walked off.

There were a couple of hours left in the day.  We were not too far from Heidelberg by then and I thought it might be nice to make a quick tour of the castle.  That didn’t work.  We got there alright but there was too much traffic to justify such a short visit.  We were very close but as we followed a side street that seemed to indicate that was the way to the castle, a Polizist waived us away and we ended up on the eastern outskirts.  We decided to drive further east on the main road for a ways and then go back using the rural roads.  The main road followed the Neckar River, a major tributary of the Rhine.  I was aware that to the north of the river in the forested hills of the Odenwald there are scads of Heckmann families in current day phone books.  But it was very difficult to make a connection between that area and the Pfalz.

I finally veered off the main road and we enjoyed the nice country vistas on the small roads leading back toward the Rhine.  They were all paved, but one road was so narrow I had to keep a constant lookout for other cars because two would barely fit in passing.  We were hungry and eager to see what Herr Keuser could cook up for us.  We strode into the small, cozy dining room and Frau Keuser waived us to a small table for two.  We had seen several signs in the country indicating Spargel (asparagus) for sale.  I spied Spargelsuppe on the menu and also Spargelsalat.  Being fearless, I ordered both.  I’ve come to like asparagus and the kind they grow is the white variety.  It is much milder than the green and it doesn’t, uh, well you know…  The soup arrived – very white.  So white and so mild that I wondered where the asparagus was.  There was little taste of it.  I assumed it was pureed and let it go at that.  The salat was not really a salad – it was supposed to be asparagus chunks and ham in a cream sauce.  The asparagus was delicious but – no ham!  This was a Thursday night and for some reason much busier than the night before.  Frau Keuser had two other waitresses helping out.  They were all rushing around.  I stopped mine and said there was no ham in my salat.  It took some time to get her to realize there should have been ham with it.  Even an English speaker sitting behind me piped up and offered that yes, there’s supposed to be ham in it.  She finally understood but then came the clincher as I kept at her – she said “Oh, do you want the ham?”  Of course I wanted the ham and she later brought two slabs that were delicious by themselves.  Why do I have these troubles?  Oriette had a strudel of some sort and was quite content.  It brings to mind my broken tooth over the roast pigeon in Italy.

Day Three

This was our day to go to Baden-Württemberg, a German state just east of the Pfalz over the Rhine River.  Our target was Lomersheim, the village from where our Boger ancestors came in 1754.  It was a bit far for country roads so we chose the autobahn that goes around Karlsruhe.  Karlsruhe is rather large so there was a lot of traffic.  I had phoned Pastor Zeuner, a lady, but she wasn’t in and her husband said he would be glad to show us the church.  Klaus spoke fairly good English and gave us a bit of history about the area.  The church had some World War (1 & 2) memorials with lists of local boys who had stopped some Allied bullets.  Whenever I see that it always seems so bizarre.  For a fleeting, irrational second I think hey, don’t they know those were the bad guys, and they’re honoring them!?  But then reality sets in.  They weren’t Nazis, idiot!

Klaus had his son along and suggested we look at the site of the old fort at the top of the hill overlooking the village.  It was a steep hike for about 2 blocks and when we got there it was only a stone with a plaque on it.  Oh, it looked like the remains of a corner of a building about 50 yards away.  But you had to use your imagination.  Europeans are much more aware of the past than we are.  And their buildings are made much sturdier with heavy, thick walls designed to last and last.  They must be much more expensive to build.  In America, we build them to last maybe 30 years or so and then we tear them down and build new.  Klaus let me use his email to send a message back home.  Then we thanked him and sped off. 

The next stop, a few blocks away, was the home of the brother of another American Lomersheimer who I had exchanged emails with back home.  She is descended from the same immigrants.  She suggested we try to visit him so we gave it a shot.  Her brother and wife were a nice couple who spoke no English at all but they invited us in for coffee and strawberry shortcake.  Their son’s daughter was there and she could speak a bit of English, thank God, so it wasn’t a total loss. He brought out a family chart but didn’t seem to realize we were distantly related.  Their grandson seemed anxious to meet us and beamed from ear to ear.  I asked him if he played basketball and he answered “no, soccer” in perfect English using our term for what he would otherwise have called foosball.  The pattern was becoming clear to us.  Older people, those over 45 to 50, did not speak much English at all.  The younger they were, the better they knew English.  One lady told us it was because so many of  the younger ones see and hear American TV programs.  Of course we ugly Americans, to a man, can barely mutter Guten Morgen.  They wanted to know if we were going to visit Maulbronn.  Maulbronn is an ancient Protestant seminary a few miles away.  It was established by a cleric from Lomersheim centuries ago.  We told them yes, definitely, thanked them, and headed off for Maulbronn.  It was an interesting site, awesome in size, and steeped in historical significance.  We began to tire and decided to follow our same steps back to the Pfalz.

It seemed reasonable to me to take a break from local German food and try to find something different.  I had spied what looked like an Italian Ristorante the day before in Annweiler.  It was just a few K over there and sure enough, there on a corner was the Ristorante-Pizzeria Da Angelo.  Now we were talkin’.  The place was apparently run by some Italian folks who spoke German.  My mouth was watering despite the smokey atmosphere.  Germany has a veritable epidemic of smoking.  To me it is a national disaster!  Restaurants are clouded in smoke and the Frankfurt airport is one giant bonfire.  It is very hard to believe that a nation of otherwise intelligent, up and coming people, are oblivious to the harm they are doing to themselves.  But it isn’t just Germany, it is Europe in general.  We ordered salad and spaghetti with some Chianti and the memories of the sow’s stomach faded quickly.  They served up the spaghetti with a small Pizza-like side dish which I devoured.  Things were looking up.

Day Four

The mission for this day was to visit Alsace, France.  It is hard to believe that, engulfed as we were by the German culture in the heart of the Pfalz, we were only about 11 miles from the French border.  The history of the area tells us about the constant battling back and forth over the centuries between the Germans and the French.  Looking at a current day Alsatian phone book we find such incongruous name combinations as Jacques Heckmann, André Heckmann, Angelique Heckmann, François Heckmann, etc.  The small French village of Rott lies just across the border.  I had noticed in my prior research that there seemed to be an inordinate number of Heckmanns in and around that area in the 18th century.  The current phone book reveals just one left in the area – one Marguerite Heckmann.  It was a long shot but perhaps I could find her and she would have a genealogy chart going way back and …..

We set off on the lovely drive down to the border.  The countryside was gorgeous, revealing vineyards all the way to France.  But here and there among the vineyards would be something else: bright, golden fields of some sort of plant we were not familiar with.  Beautiful.  We were told later that it was Raps, from which rapeseed oil (and Canola) is produced.  They have been growing it since the late Middle Ages.  There were also in the fields periodically some plantings around which were arranged some very long poles, reaching to the sky about 20 feet high, presumably for the plants to climb on.  We later learned the plants were Hops, used in making beer.

We crossed the border without fanfare.  I didn’t even know it ‘til afterward when Oriette said there was a sign and that there appeared to be a station that wasn’t being used anymore or perhaps only for spot-checking.  Rott was easy to find, just outside the larger town of Wissembourg.  We drove down the small main street, looking for the address I had for Marguerite.  We spied it and I pulled over.  There was a young man of African descent sitting near the home and I asked him for help.  He was pleasant, spoke some English, and wanted to help.  I told him the name and address and he looked puzzled and finally said there was a family by another name in that home.  At about this time a small French woman off to the right came over and began to add her two cents worth.  I have some familiarity with French but she kept rattling it off a mile a minute.  I told her I didn’t understand and tried to continue talking to the man but she kept on.  She had a bad case of over-bite plus her upper teeth were widely spaced so that as she rattled on her little tongue had to work overtime to hit the right places.

So here I was, an American in France asking a black man in English about a German lady whose home was now occupied by a stranger and a woman kept asking me questions in French.  Finally, the new occupant of the house strode toward us.  He was a very pleasant man who told me he just moved in a few weeks ago.  He empathized with my situation as he also dabbled in family history and knew the trials and tribulations.  He took me up the street where he asked some ladies for help.  After some confusion, they pointed up the street and indicated it would be the second house from the next corner.  The gent offered to go with me but it wasn’t far so I said it wasn’t necessary.  He said to come back and tell him if she wasn’t there and he would help me further.  Well, as it turned out, the location they mentioned didn’t pan out.  I decided it would be wise to abort the attempt and move on.  Much ado about nothing.

We continued on further south in Alsace enjoying the scenery.  But soon we were approaching the environs of Strasbourg which is a rather large city.  We again opted for the country and turned right on a small road.  We headed west, deliberately following small country roads that led to cozy villages.  We were soon back across the border and into the Pfälzer hills.  A lot of old forts can be found perched atop those hills, most of them in ruins.  Their purpose was obvious – look out for marauding invaders and signal the people in the town or towns below so they could rush to the safety of the fort.  We came upon one of these – Berwartstein, one of the few that are completely restored.  It was first mentioned in the year 1152 in the time of the Emperor Frederick Barbarossa.  We joined a tour of the fort and the guide frequently stopped and spoke about it – in German.  Of course we don’t know a lick but we got the general idea.

After leaving the fort, we headed back to the hotel.  We nibbled on some grocery store victuals, had a couple of beers, some soup and salad, and hit the sack.

Day Five

We wanted to visit the western part of the Pfalz and I did have some towns’ names there where lots of Heckmanns lived so off we went.  We again shunned the autobahn as soon as possible.  We were soon in the Pfälzerwald (Palatinate forest) and this was perhaps the prettiest part of the region.  It was hilly and forested with lots of pines.  The roads quite often followed valley streams.  It reminded us of Colorado but without the ruggedness.  This was the longest drive of our week, but the prettiest.  Our target was the area of Saint Wendel and a smaller town called Tholey.

It was pretty driving over there but when we got there we weren’t impressed.  The villages were not quite as quaint as the ones back to the east and south.  I looked up a couple of Heckmanns in the phone book but struck out on the visits.  In the first case a lady came to the door and was mildly impressed that I was an American named Heckmann researching my family history.  But she had nothing about her own family genealogy (or, more importantly, her husband) so I moved on.  The next one was in a more impressive apartment building.  He looked like Pat Paulson, former TV comic and presidential candidate.  This was Sunday and he was watching a soccer game on the TV.   He wasn’t terribly interested in any family history so no luck again.  There were a few other aborted attempts over there and we decided to head back.

It had been quite a ways so the autobahn seemed in order.  We headed a bit south and near the Saarland found one which put us back near Kaiserslautern in no time.  From there we wound our way over to Neustadt which is the beginning of the French-German Wine Road (Weinstrasse).  It was a pleasant drive from there to our hotel area.  We decided on the Italian Ristorante again.  We ordered a pizza with pepperoni and it arrived with 10 of the largest green peppers I’ve ever seen.  They were the strong, sour kind and definitely not what we had in mind.  I told the waiter we were expecting meat and he went quickly to change it.  He said what we wanted was called pepperoni sausage over there.  I can’t imagine anyone wanting all those sour peppers on their pizza.

Day Six

Only two days left and I had gotten nowhere.  I decided it would be better to stay in the original area near Wollmesheim and Landau.  I used the phone book again to get some Heckmann names in surrounding villages.  The first was a Th. Heckmann in Ilbesheim which was close by.  It was noon when we drove through the village and the church bells were clanging.  There were few people on the streets and the church door was open so I pulled over.  I didn’t see anyone inside but as I stepped out again I startled a lady coming up the steps.  I asked her about the Heckmann in town but she couldn’t hear with the bells ringing so she ducked inside. I was expecting some kindly old wretch in monk’s garb pulling on a rope in the tower.  But she threw some switches on a control panel with blinking red lights worthy of Cape Canaveral.  The bells soon died.  It reminded me of the Wizard of Oz who was found out when Dorothy peeked behind the curtain.

The bell ringer had a bike and told me she would take me to the Heckmanns in town.  We walked for a while, a strange apparition with a lady walking her bike and a crazed American trudging along beside.  When it seemed like it might be far, I decided to do my best pantomime routine indicating she should ride and I would trot along.  This worked for a while but my wind began to fade.  Luckily, we soon pulled into a Weingut (winery) courtyard.

A man appeared and she explained to him in German what was going on.  She left so he and I tried to continue, each with his own language.  His name was Hechtmann whereas I was looking for Heckmann but the difference didn’t bother him.  I liked him instantly, a man with a very pleasant, helpful manner but unfortunately unable to speak a word of English.  I showed him the phone number opposite the name Th. Heckmann and he said he would summon his daughter.  The word daughter in German is Tochter.  I told them later I thought he was going to call a Doctor and we all had a good laugh.  His daughter appeared, dark-haired, bright, pretty.  We were somewhat surprised to find so many dark-haired Germans in the Pfalz.  We mentioned this later to a local.  She shrugged her shoulders and said over the centuries there were all kinds of people here from various lands.

The daughter proved to be a good English speaker.  They offered to call the Heckmann number but there was no answer.  Her mother appeared and I had a nice chat with the three of them, the daughter doing the translating.  They had researched their own family history and had the information back quite a ways.  They thought the spelling difference wasn’t that significant and felt we might be related.  Turns out the father had visited the States three years ago.  He had a distant cousin in the Sacramento area.  These nice people were so wanting to help.  I thought, wouldn’t it be nice to be related to them?  They gave me the name and address of a lady from the village who had married a Heckmann and moved to another not far away.  I wanted to stay longer but then remembered Oriette was still sitting in the car back at the church.  So I bid them a fond good-bye and headed back to the car.

We drove to three other villages that day, asking Heckmanns about family history.  Unfortunately, no dice.  The one in Offenbach was an old man with a sour expression who looked like a refugee.  His son, dark hair and red moustache, was more receptive, puffing on his cigarette as we talked.  Nothing there.  The lady from the Hechtmann’s village answered the door but looked a bit spooked when I said I was an American Heckmann doing family research.  Her eyes widened when I said I knew she was from Ilbesheim but she shook her head no when I asked about family history.  Somehow I didn’t think this cold calling method was working.

We found an open grocery store (no mean feat) and bought a bunch of stuff to take back to the hotel.  We dined quite heartily in our room and pondered our last day coming up.  I told Oriette there was only one alternative left: go back to Wollmesheim.

Day Seven

We took the back road to Wollmesheim again but found a different road into town.  There was a town sign there and I got out to take a picture.  If I couldn’t find Conrad, I could at least come back with a bunch of pictures.  I thought I’d better bite the bullet and see if I could locate the Pastor.  There was a lady on a veranda above her garage, sweeping up.  She had been watching me and came over.  I tried to ask her where I would find the Pastor.  She was more than willing to help me but could not understand a word I was saying.  I knew the word for church was Kirche but my spin on it did nothing for her.  I had heard Klaus in Lomersheim say the word Evangelische (Protestant) and I threw that out using what I thought was the same pronunciation.  Nothing.  Finally a small car with two young people tooled by and stopped.  She called to them and the young guy who stepped out shrugged his shoulders.  Oh no, this wasn’t going to be my day either?  But the driver, a young girl, said she understood and came over. She told me the Pastor’s name was Örter but the residence wasn’t here, it was in Mörzheim just 2 K down the road.  Her eyes brightened when she saw how enthusiastic I was to get even this small snippet of information.

Two Kilometers is only about a mile and we were there in minutes.  I punched the buzzer opposite Örter and waited.  A young, dark-haired man with rather thick glasses opened the door.  I told him I was looking for Pastor Örter (pronounced Urta) and had some questions about my family history.  He hesitated a bit, then invited me in.  He spoke very little English and had a strange way of studying me, expressionless.  I felt uncomfortable and attempted to explain a bit more what I was about.  The blank stare didn’t leave his face as he showed me into a room to the right.  There was a desk covered with paper and books, a copy machine on its corner.  There were bookshelves and a telephone to the right.  He bid me to sit down and it began to dawn on me that he was the Pastor.  I had misunderstood the man that first day at the church.  We were not exactly getting along famously and to make matters worse, I blurted out “Oh, I thought the Pastor was a woman!”  He stared at me, an incredulous look on his face.  I tried to explain but quickly gave up and sat down.

I was searching for some record of my ancestor born about 1726 who had emigrated to America in 1748 and would he have any records that would help?  Without a word, he got up and went to the phone, dialing a number, asking a few questions then hanging up.  He told me there was a local woman who had the church records on her computer.  I thought, wow, things are definitely looking up here.  Mr. Personality went back to his desk, said she would call him back, and commenced xeroxing some papers.  I said “you must be very busy.  Do you get a lot of requests like this?”  He sighed, “Yes ….. Americans.”  Oh.

Luckily, the phone soon rang.  It was the woman and she had found a Conrad Heckmann.  Hmm.  I tried to hold down my enthusiasm, having been burned many, many times before.  He told me she said to get my address and she would write to me.  I asked to speak to her.  She was in Wollmesheim and pleasant enough but told me she would write to me.  I told her I was in Mörzheim now and could I stop by instead?  She seemed a little surprised at that but quickly agreed.

I hung up and in my exuberance pulled out a 20 DM note and thrust it at him.  “I want to make a contribution to the church.”  He quietly refused, saying it wasn’t necessary.  I insisted, saying it was for the church.  He relented and his personality changed for the better.  He went over to the bookshelf and grabbed a few post cards of the church and a small pamphlet giving the history.  I shook his hand but he insisted on accompanying us to the woman’s home.

Ulla Pfaffman and her husband Martin had made wine for many years.  Now that they were in their 60s, it was time to turn over their Weingut to their son and his wife.  They had prospered over the years, enough so to be able to send their son to a horse farm in Massachusetts for a year.  But he was back now, the spezialität of the Weingut was wine jelly, and Ulla and Martin had time for their hobbies.  Ulla’s, obviously, was genealogy.  A Mr. Petermann had painstakingly gone through the old church book, deciphering the old German script, and writing the information down on paper.  Ulla had taken these papers and typed them into her PC.  She was also taking classes in Landau and loved to discuss 17th and 18th century history.  The Pfaffman Weingut is in the heart of Wollmesheim, and the Pastor walked with me into their court yard where we were met by the son and his wife.  They greeted us heartily and we walked back to the living quarters.  We ascended two flights of spiral stairs and Ulla greeted us at the top.  The rooms were modern and attractive.  A large window overlooked a pretty back yard and garden with the vineyards beyond.  Ulla was a sharp, intelligent woman with reddish hair.  She had her books and papers all laid out on a table and we began to discuss my mission.  We went over some of the papers I had brought along and then she showed me some records from her PC for the Wollmesheim church.  Under Heckmann, family of Peter, I saw the name Johann Conrad, born in 1712.  Nope.  Too early. Struck out again.  She must have misunderstood.  But wait.  The child died a year later.  Not mine.  My eyes sped down the list and stopped: Hans Conrad Heckmann, born Dec. 23rd, 1724.  Hmm.  Maybe.  But two Conrads ?  Yes, this was done quite often.  Be careful though.  Look for the siblings that should be there.  And there they were :  brother Hans Jacob, sister Anna Catharina.  This must be him !  I looked at Ulla.  She nodded slowly, knowingly – yes !  The long search was over.

We sat with Ulla for a while, discussing families and history.  She told us about the incessant wars, Louis Quatorze, Napoleon, their troops decimating this area a century apart.  The Pfalz was everybody’s whipping boy.  We talked about the climate, crops, taxes, the church, etc.  I wanted to stay longer but of course we couldn’t.  Ulla had other work to do, more research.  She told us she would write to summarize what we’d found after she had a while to go over everything.  It seemed almost anti-climactic.  After all the wondering and searching and here a lady sits in the middle of the Pfalz with a typed sheet outlining my ancestors.  Incredible.  Before returning to the hotel that day, I took several pictures of Wollmesheim.

We decided it would be blasphemous to eat Italian that final night.  We duly reported to Frau Keuser’s dining room, ready to order her best.  Oriette went for Rumpsteak Knoblauchsauce (Garlic sauce with tomatoes) and my choice was Rumpsteak Pfälzer Art (with onions).  They were both pretty good, made better by a fine local Riesling and raspberry sundaes (Vaneis Himbeeren).  To be factual, my steak came with potatoes and five, repeat five, peas !  But I wasn’t complaining.  The mission was accomplished.  Tomorrow:  Home.     

EPILOGUE

In the excitement of finding Conrad, I failed to make an important observation.  If his family was shown in the Wollmesheim Church records, why couldn’t I recognize any of those names in the microfilm back home?  The 18th Century script was scribbly and bad, but not that bad.  What gives?

The answer came in a few days.  A letter from Germany arrived.  It was from Ulla and she had reviewed the records carefully.  She outlined step by step why she felt strongly that this family was indeed mine.  The name of the brother, the name of the sister, the birth date for Conrad, the father named Peter and Conrad named his son Peter, etc.  Then she said “… and now you know your ancestors came from Mörzheim.”  Mörzheim?  I had completely forgot.  Wollmesheim and Mörzheim were a joint parish.  Their villages were so close to each other.  But they kept separate records of their own congregations.  The records I had been looking at were typed from the Mörzheim congregation.  Conrad’s family lived in the village of Mörzheim.  She went on to say that brother Jacob had married a girl from Wollmesheim and moved there for the rest of his life.  That’s why the document I had showed Jacob of Wollmesheim was applying for Conrad’s inheritance in 1781.  Here I had taken a bunch of Wollmesheim pictures and none at all of Mörzheim.  Oh, well, maybe next time.

On our last night in the dining room I had noticed a small painting of another village in the area.  Frau Keuser had been willing to see if she could find someone who had painted or would paint a picture of Wollmesheim, charge my credit card, and send it to me in the States.  Now I fired off an email to her, explaining that it was a mistake and to please try to find one for Mörzheim.  With my German and her English, God knows what I’ll get, but it was worth a try.

Donald Roger Hickman

May 1999 – Clive, Iowa

drhickmann@hotmail.com

ADDENDUM

A very kind gentleman, a former Iowan now residing near Heidelberg, saw this tome and offered to drive over to Moerzheim to take some pictures of that fair village and send them to me. So herewith are those pictures with many thanks to Jerry Kafer!

d.r.h., August 2003