The Village We Didn't Know: How a Community of Strangers Broke My German Brick Wall
In April of 1967, my 1st cousin twice removed sat down to write a letter to her 1st cousin once removed with everything she could remember about the family. She got a lot right. She remembered that her grandmother's maiden name was Katerina Grebe and that she came from a town called Frischborn . She remembered that her grandparents had not known each other in Germany at all, but met in Dunkirk, New York , and married there. She remembered the children in order, including the two little girls who died of scarlet fever within days of each other. And then she wrote one sentence that would sit in my research file for years: "We do not know where grandfather Budd came from in Germany." That was 1967. Her grandfather had died in 1916. Fifty-one years, and the village was already gone from the family memory. It stayed gone for another fifty-seven. What finally brought it back was not a database, a search algorithm, or a record collection. It was people. That is th...
