Friday, June 6 – Pforzheim to Ulm

Weather was beautiful today. The forecast was for a high near 30 degrees C (about 85 F) for the next few days. Unfortunately, we did not take much advantage of it. We went north to our first stop at Bretten, but we weren’t very successful. It is quite a large town/small city with several churches and, we assumed, because we never went there, a very large cemetery. We retraced our path to Pforzheim where we turned east to Sindelfingen.

Sindelfingen is the only real research stop on our trip. It is home to the Haus der Donauschwaben, with its museum and library of DS history and culture. A tenant in the building is the AKdFF, which houses a huge collection of family books from the Donauschwaben areas. We were there from about 10:30 until 4.

The new people had a lot of success finding their ancestors in the family books. I was helping George and we took almost every line back two or three generations and in one case about five generations. In most cases he is now back to his origins in Western Europe. Those of us who have been here before did not really expect to find much that was new, but we took pleasure in helping and enjoying the success of the others. 

Ray and Carol met up for lunch with their Hasenfratz cousins that Ray first met on our 2010 tour. Mary Ann met up with her friend Anni Lorenz (who will join us later in the trip) and departed early for our next stop at Altingen. She was able to meet with someone there who helped her sort out one of her lines, thus accomplishing her goals without tying up the group. We picked her up there later and continued on to Tübingen. The Schusters’ daughter had gone to school there twenty years ago and Bonnie had visited her, but Erv had never been. This was just a “looking around” stop with no genealogical goals.

We arrived at our hotel in Ulm a little before 8 and gathered as quickly as possible for our walk to a nearby restaurant that we had enjoyed on previous trips, finishing up about 9:30. We did a quick tour to point out the venue for the beginning of tomorrow’s activities and were back at the hotel by about 10.

The countryside here is a little like Lorraine – gently rolling hills, a patchwork of green fields, but probably a little bit hillier and a few more groves of trees.