Yesterday, I had an incredibly busy, chatty, chaotic, nice and warm afternoon with a fifth cousin from #NewYork and some of our common cousins in the house of their ancestors in #Simonswald (mine apparently had branched out before). The three groups had never met before and I had the responsibility of translating, while everyone was talking curiously in parallel 🤯

While I was waiting for the US cousin and her husband in #Hinterzarten before taking them to Simonswald, I also managed to photograph all the new cemetery burials since my last round in August 2023, so I can add them to @grabsteine / https://grabsteine.genealogy.net/namelist.php?cem=5279 soon.

As another side-quest while being in Simonswald already, I met an explicit offline-researcher and quickly photographed the 150+ pages of one of the church books he had transcribed decades ago.

#genealogy #3GoodThings #ThreeGoodThings

The early mornings and evenings of the last two days I spent pondering and writing on the profile of my 8th great-grandfather Gallus Bank. I mainly worked with the notes of #Hinterzarten parish priest Vincenz Zahn, who left over 200 pages of notes about the houses and their owners, which he compiled from the church books, an enquiry of the whole parish and a lot of archive visits in the early 1800s. It was touching to read the notes about Gallus that were written in the course of two years and to see, how Zahn learned more, crossed out passages and asked himself the same questions, which I did now.

Currently, it really seems that the author of the 1990s farm chronicles did not dive into this particular family as deep as I did (which makes sense, because he had to write a book about the whole village), so he just went for the easiest road and missed Zahn's final conclusion. Luckily, I had a source, they both very likely didn't have access to, which kind of confirms that the newer chronicles were wrong.

And now I am constantly obsessing about details from the case, asking myself if I really just landed a breakthrough in the still pretty scary field of "before church book #genealogy"?

https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Bank-300

#WikiTree #Ahnenforschung

Thursday's #grandma recording, the only one from October 2021, mainly revolved around former inhabitants of the house Vogtsmühle https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Space:Vogtsm%C3%BChle%2C_Hinterzarten and another house in the neighborhood, in which the drama around forced laborer Stefan Kozłowski https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Kozłowski-397 began, which later lead to his murder by the authorities. Grandma was convinced, that Georg Thoma, Olympic medal winning ski athlete from #Hinterzarten, only lived in Vogtsmühle and not in the other house as a kid, while her brother in law and the newspapers say that he did. I guess, she was wrong there.

The recording also mentioned a previously unknown occupation of grandma as a waitress, from which she had a great view towards those two houses.

(this toot was written in a text file right after transcribing it on Thursday)
#genealogy

Initiative Hinterzarten - Youngstyle - Kick Off am 9.3.2026, 19 Uhr  https://www.gemeinde-hinterzarten.de/news/1/1204419/nachrichten/initiative-hinterzarten-youngstyle-kick-off-am-9.3.2026-19-uhr.html?q=3146b2a7288971cb5eb224bfe5318e6a

#Hinterzarten