Travels Begin

Mom by our Church
This is the first week in which we have traveled outside of the immediate Frankfurt Area. Bad Vilbel is just a suburb of Frankfurt, and so is Bad Homburg and Steinmuehl where our office is, even though they are completely separated by farms and forests. We've traveled to a few towns just north of the city line, including Friedricksdorf where the temple is and where we go to Church, but these have all been less than an hour's drive.


A few yards closer and you can see the temple.
But this week we took a longer trip to a little town in the hills South of Frankfurt. We were driving on the road for over three hours, and some of that was on the Autobahn going about 120 - 130 (I won't drive faster than that even if others are passing me. I'll just stay in the right hand lane.)


The destination was a Family History Center in Michelstadt, and we climbed up some hills to get there. The city was nestled in a valley with hills all around. Modern people of means like to live on the hills and enjoy the view or the feeling of looking down on others. In ages past, however, the location of choice would have been down closer to where water was available. Most old towns will be centered fairly close to the water. Frankfurt am Main gets the last two words of its name from the fact that it was built "on the" ("am") Main River. That is not the English word main, it is the name of the river and is pronounced like "mine."


View of a well with the people lowering bottles into it to fill them up with the "healing natural waters." The water tastes like AlkaSeltzer.

So we got to visit Michelstadt where the newer chapel is built a ways up on the hill above the old town. Our host spent the whole day trying to help us learn to read the old German handwriting and printed scripts. When we had finished an 8-hour day, our instructor asked us to come again when we could stay for three days at a time. I got the impression he thought it would take a couple of such trips to get us to read the stuff with any kind of speed. He was a good teacher, but it is a huge task.


There are two basic sources for the German styles of writing: The ancient Germanic styles, and the Latin (Roman). Remember that Germany was under the rule of Rome around the time of Christ and for a while thereafter. We have gone for walks from our house and walked past several historical spots that date back to the Roman period (ruins from 100 a.d.). German historians describe three distinct periods of time when Germany was not just a part of but ruling over what was called the Roman Empire. Hitler's "Dritte Reich" translates into "Third Empire" - the third time the Germans had been been exercising authority over what had been the Roman Empire. The Roman styles of writing were introduced by the early contact with the Romans.


The native German writing styles are vastly different. They are far more ornate. Roman styles tended to to be designed to maximize the distinction between the individual characters. The native German styles allowed so much embelishment as to almost hide the distinguishing features.


During my first mission I learned to read the old printed style - called "Fraktur" -which is based on the native German. That was the printing style used for all Bibles then. It was, and is, difficult to learn. Now they use a Roman style even for the Bible.


What we were studying was government records made back in the time when the government first started keeping the vital records. Up to that time, all of the records were church records. The records we were looking at were handwritten on forms that had been printed - sounds like something that could have been done a few years ago by a census taker. The challenge with these records, however, lies in the fact that the printing was done in Fraktur, most of the handwriting in the old Germanic hand, but some of the writing was done in Roman. We spent all day on two pages of text, and when we had worked it all out once, we still couldn't read it from the original much faster than we had done the first time we worked through it.


Well, that was the way the week started, but it will end with a trip in quite a different direction. Saturday we will drive into East Germany to a little town right on the border of the Czech Republic. When I was here 45 years ago there were lots of refugees from 'Tschekoslowakei' (Czechoslovakia). They had fled their homeland to get away from the communist block of nations. Even East Germany was communist then, and while I was here the communists built a wall to keep their people from fleeing to the West. The whole zone was off limits then. But this week end we will be driving over there to attend a conference of German genealogists. We hope to be able to get a few people interested in helping with the Indexing of German records so those records can be searched by text-based search engines. Obviously, we'd like to have the best readers do that Indexing, and unfortunately there are few left. One of Hitler's commands was that all students were to be taught to read and write using the Roman writing. Now, a generation later, there is almost no one left to read the old records.

So we'll choose our roads carefully so we won't have to take our vehicle across the borders. That would be the direct route, but a couple of border crossings could take a few hours. Instead we'll take the long road around that little thumb of the Czech Republic that protrudes up into Germany twenty or thirty miles. You might be able to see that on the North-West corner of the Czech Republic if you have a good map of Europe. Bad Elster is on the East side of that thumb.

A side note that might be interesting to some of you, particularly Jacob.


In Bad Vilbel they have some really nice firefighting equipment, and it has cost quite a bit of money. They have recently opened a new firestation (the third in town) that has 10 bays for equipment. They had an open house on the holiday last week (Unity day celebrating the reunification of East and West Germany). We could see their tower and the top of their ladder truck from our window, so we were interested enough to walk around to it.


One of the interesting things we learned was that after building the buildings and buying the equipment, they didn't have any budget left for firefighters. As a result they run the fire department with volunteers. The open house they held last week was aimed at getting young people interested in volunteering.

This is one of the firetrucks (looked very modern to me including water and foam facilities, night lights, etc.) with some of the teenagers that are being trained to operate it. They also had a group of volunteers that were training rescue dogs, and they were demonstrating how the dogs could perform in an emergency (even walking on ladders!) How about that! A volunteer fire department!