Rothenklempenow

Rothenklempenow!!!!!                

From Kiel Germany we took the train to Hamburg. Heather has a friend that lives there named lucy. Lucy and Christian gave us their flat for a few days. After doing some research we decided that we would head towards Poland and stop in a very little town called Rothenklempenow. So we took the 4 hour train, stopping in Lubeck to change rails. The stop we wanted is Locknitz. Rothenklempenow lies about 10k north. We decided we’d hitch hike into Rothenklempenow and take some photos and look around. Thought we’d visit the cemetery and then go back to the train station and head on into Poland. Hitch hiking was going very slow and so we started walking. The people we did run into did not speak any English. Because the USSR controlled this area and left less than 25 years ago, most people were taught Russian in school. And the west was looked down upon. Finally a car pulled over and a woman named Marion Pedri gave us a ride. She spoke a little English and thought it amazing that we have travel so far to see if we could just pop into a small town and expect to find anything after 140 years. I really didn’t have any expectations; I just really want to see where my ancestors lived and get photos of the land to take home and share. As we came to the sign stating that we were entering the town I think my heart skipped a few beats. I got really excited. We took a left off the main road and on to a very old cobble stone road. The church was on the corner with scaffolding around it. It was having some major repairs done. The buildings here were just incredible. Mostly build with stones and filled in with bricks and timber. They are in very good shape for how old they are.  There is a tower left from a castle from the 1200s. Turns out one of the buildings has been turned into an art retreat that does workshops. It’s getting late and we decide to ask if there is a spare room. Nina is running the office and she speaks good English. she asked us what were are doing in Rothenklempenow and we tell her we are looking for our great, great , great grandfather Carl Friedrich Wilhelm Hoeppner’s grave or any info on the Hoeppners. She speaks quickly in German to Anja and Uwe who are also in the office. Turns out there is a descendent of the Hoeppners in town. She calls him and he agrees to meet in the morning. I have a feeling of amazement. That evening Uwe take us to the tower and inserts and old key into the lock. We go through the heavy wooden door and up the spiral staircase to the top of the tower. He points out the Hoepners home and woodshop/sawmill. It’s an incredible view. From there we go to the giant oak tree in the court yard, they say it’s at least 800 years old. It stands there like a giant, so majestic and beautiful. “If this tree could talk”, I think to myself. We go through the gate and out into the gardens. Under another huge oak tree is a white statue, Lina. She is elegant and beautiful with a sense of sadness on her face.  I am moved and can’t quit taking photos of her, trying to capture the essence of the moment.  But as you and I well know, that is impossible. I offer Uwe a bier in the pub down in the cellar of the building. He doesn’t speak English so we have been playing charades for the last hour and a half. But it’s been fun. Uwe is bright eyed and happy. I feel he is excited to have some foreigners in the village.  He makes us feel at home. He is like a big teddy bear. Heather takes a tray of pilsners to a table in the almost empty pub and gets a bunch of laughs and smiles. She is amazing in that aspect. We go to sleep tired and amazed with our heads spinning thinking about tomorrow. The next morning I awoke early and just left out the back door to our little room. I follow a cobble stone street and it turns to a dirt road and I go right.  Following an old fence line the road splits again and I am move to take a left into the path lined with oak trees on both sides. The birds are singing the mist to part so the sun can break through. I arrive at the lake where there are these little triangle houses lining the shore. I am at such peace. When I return heather is still sleeping. Soon we are in Nina and Anya’s office meeting with Uwa Wittkop. He is the grandson of a Hoeppner. He lives right next to the woodshop and saw mill that were ran by the Hoeppner family.  We talked a bit through Nina and speculated about there being a relation. His wife Carmen pointed out how my father and he had a lot of the same features. Once again Nina helped us out by lining up a meeting with the priest who has all the old records dating back to 1600. We drove thought the forest on a winding road. I was thinking, “This looks just like Hemlock Michigan”, that’s where they settle in 1873. We started looking through the birth records and it was so awesome when we found Carl Friedrich Wilhem Hoeppner. And then we found his parents and their parents and again, going back another 100 years!!!!! The records are in such good shape. I know I could piece the whole family back together if I had about 10 more hours. If I have time I will go back and do that work before I come home. My 6^th great grandfather is Johann Carl Ludewich Hopfner (they would change the spelling a little every so often as to give the different branches of the Hoeppners a bit of identity. Just like Wolfgram came from Wolffgramm and then Wolfgramm. Really neat! The next morning Nina and Anya had a breakfast waiting for us. Anya was speaking English to us and we had fun talking about starting a small brewery in Rothenklempenow. Uwa took us around the wood shop and saw mill. It’s part of the museum plan now. Hanging on the walls are the templates they used to make everything from chairs and table to the rail on sleds and sleights. I really felt at home and have spent the last week thinking about how I could move to Rothenklempenow. There is so much more I could write about this adventure but that this will have to do for now.

Passade

Sunday morning and I’m preparing to head north to a small village called Passade. This is a small town the Shauna’s grandmother descended from.  Peter Kruetzfeld was born in 1612, He settled in Passade Prussia. This is about all I have to go on. It’s a warm beautiful partly cloudy day. I take a quick look at the map and fill up my water bottle. I’m wondering if this is worth the effort to hitch hike north. I don’t want to run out of day light and get lost.  I head down the stairs of the flat we have been staying. Its a very old building that has escaped the bombing of world war II. The streets are all made of cobble stone and have really neat patterns in some places. I head toward the inlet from the Baltic Sea in Kiel. I can’t make sense of all the street names but I can follow a shore line pretty good. I pass by these magnificent homes with beautiful gardens (flowers and trees). The tulips and daffodils are in full tilt. The cherry trees are just finishing their blossoms but still smell so sweet.  I make it to the water and am amazed by the size of the big ships coming and going. I found this wooden ship tied up to the dock. It’s an old single mast ship that I think they take tours on. I walked and walk and finely was at the end of the inlet. Now back up the other side I went. After about 2 or 3 hours of brisk walking I was beat. The road was too narrow for a car to pull over and pick anyone up. I saw a bus coming and noticed it to be the one headed north. I ran to the stop that happens to be just 50 yard or so away. I showed the driver my hand drawn map with Passade as my destination. 4 euro it would cost me and I gladly paid it. 30min later I was getting off the bus in Passade. Passade is set off the road just a little bit so I headed down in the direction of the lake. Passade is smaller than a village. I counted 25 or so houses. As I was walking the cobblestone approaching the center plaza, I saw a couple on bikes coming in from the other direction. “Guten tag”, I called out. They slowed down and I asked in English, “where is the church?”  They told me there was no church here and I then asked where the cemetery is. Well this had them interested. An American gets off a bus, walks into a very small town and wants to go to a church and cemetery. (sounds like the beginning of a joke, eh). I open my small koa book that Cameron made for me and show them the info I have on Peter Krutzfeldt. “OK”, they said. “We know a farmer who has lived here a long time”. In 60 seconds we are knocking on the old wooden door of a very old stone house. The farmer is stout and tall his face has sharply cut features, yet his cheeks are soft and show off his bright eyes. He does not speak English so the two that were riding bikes fill him in on my quest. They talk back and forth and I just smile and listen. Turns out that the church and cemetery in the area lies in Probsteierhagen (about 3k back the way I had come). But he tells us that there is an historian just up the road left of the giant sycamore tree. “dankah”, and off I go, led by my interpreters. The farmer called the historian and gives him a heads up. When we got there he was waiting. He led us out to the back patio and has spritzer water and apple juice. They don’t drink apple juice straight. It’s always mixed with the sparkling water. There on the table he has 3 books. One has a date on it 1380(something), with the town name. He peers into my hand made book and smiles. He opens a smaller book and shows me the history of Peter Krutzfeldt. They were blacksmiths and owned 10 hex of land. He opened another book and showed me the black and white photos of the home they lived in and the blacksmith shop. In my hands I was holding the genealogy of the Krutzfeldt clan. Right up to when they immigrated to the USA. In the book, in place of a death date is just says, “usa”.  After his wife served me a delicious dark cake with hazelnuts, we went down to the lake and they showed me how they collected the reeds to use as the roofs for the old homes. He took me to the home and shop that are still standing today. We then went to the cemetery in Probsteierhagen. He showed me where the graves of all the people from Passade would be. Mr Lamp also told me that his wife came from the Mundt line (Peter’s wife) making her a distant cousin to Shauna. It was amazing to have just walked into a sleepy little village and had such great success in my quest. I took photos of the church and inside too. I was just wishing Shauna was here to see and experience this. I don’t know why I have such a strong desire to connect with the past.  But it is something that has driven me for years now and I’m happy that I’m in motion closing some of those loops.

Guten morgan

Guten morgan, we were greeted with wind mills and fields of yellow canola as we entered Germany.  The train we were riding left Copenhagen packed and as we made our way into the countryside the people slowly trickle out.  It was fun to have the train board the ferry. We went out on deck with the Baltic Sea breeze in our faces looking with excitement toward Germany.  As we watched the country side go by I notice how the land was used. They have left huge tracks of land as forests between there crop fields.  And in some of the fields you would see wind mills spotted about generating electricity. The land seemed to be used efficiently and consciously. While in Denmark we went to the National Museum. It was really cool. They had a section that started out as the beginning of Danish history. Starting with the Stone Age, I was amazed at how closely the stone axes and tools resembled those in all cultures. They looked just like the ones in New Zealand, Hawaii, and even like the ones in Utah that are on display at the museums. I notice some of the carvings in the stone and they reminded me off the eerie pictographs/ petroglyphs and such down in Buck Horn Wash.  It was interesting to see the progression of time in the form of handmade objects. To watch how even slight changes in the stone tools lead to art and mystery as things became refined. To watch identiy and culture being born out of rock and antler, to become the Norse people of Denmark. i really liked the ancient 7000 year old wood spoons that had been preserved in a bog. There really is something magical about a handcrafted spoon. To me it is a symbol of health and well…a sense of nourishment and abundance. I brought my own wood spoon on this trip. It is a wooden spoon hand carved from a limb of mountain mahogany.  I have been eating with it since 2006. It is so smooth and silky, I find great pleasure to have it in my hands and even more pleasure to have a big scoop of mango sorbet slide into my mouth.  I love the feel of the wood on my bottom lip as I pull the spoon free after delivering is precious cargo. I know it sounds quite silly.

I have never seen so many bicycles in one place as I did when coming out of the train station in Copenhagen. There were at least 500 if not 700 bikes lined up over the bridge, around the corner and down the street again.  The cobble stone streets don’t look fun to ride on though.  Our couch surfing host lent us their bikes, so heather and I went shopping for foods at a small market.  It was fun to cruise the streets of Copenhagen with a basket full of veggies. I was feeling very European until I notice that people would stare at us as we rode by. “How do they know we are not locals”, I thought.  They just do.

I’m in a town called Kiel in northern Germany. Today I’m going to go hitch hike out into the country side, to a village called Passade. That is where some of Shauna’s ancestors are buried from 1667.  My German is not good and when going into the small villages it makes it quite difficult to communicate.  Yesterday I was walking the streets of Kiel and an older man stopped me and asked if he could buy me a coffee. I accepted and sat with him in a sidewalk café.  Communication was difficult as his English was broken and I thumbed through my phase book that my sister Julie gave me just days before I left. He was a painter and gave me a photograph of some of his work. He told me of how he used to do exhibits and commissions. And now with his family all gone and sight failing, he raised his hands up and said, “I am forgotten”.  Tapping his worn watch “I must go now”. We exchanged goodbyes and he disappeared into the woven threads of people on the street. I write this, as to make sure he is not forgotten to me.

The bakeries are incredible!!!!! The crusted breads taste so good. I just want to eat that them every day. One day I’m going to buy one of those huge twists filled with elder berries topped with flaked almonds.  Last night we walked to a beer garden. It was in this huge park surrounded by giant oak, elm, maple, birch and cherry trees that were in full bloom. It was amazingly beautiful!!!! I was excited to say “ien bier bitter”, with my order. I had the pilsner age in oak barrels. I guess I was expecting more.  It was good but not as great as Gregg Updikes pilsner. But none the less the night was just beautiful. We dined with our couch surfing hosts, the garden was called Forstbaumschule. We walked back to their flat along the old cobble stone steets. Their flat is in an old building that survived the bombing of world war II. This city took a beating as it has a major shipping port.

Monday we are moving on to Szczecin Poland.

beginning

i'm on a quest. i'm preparing for a journey of 50 days to discover my roots.

ernst conrad wolffgramm with his wife, henrietta phal, left prussia right after the prussian franco war(1870-1871). upon arriving in america, one f and the last m was dropped from their last name. in saginaw michigan, the year 1873 he renounced his loyalties to prussia and gave them to the united states of america.

ernst was born november 1839, in a small town that was once called soldin in brandenburg, prussia. in 1918 the prussian empire was dissolved. the towns that lay east of the newly drawn boarder that now separate germany and poland, had their names changed. everything east is now slavic and west is germanic. the town soldin is now known as mysliborz.

i am leaving slc on the 4th of may. flying into copenhagen, i will work my way down into germany. i will stay close to the baltic sea, making my way over to poland. i am very excited to walk the lands my ancestors live on. to taste the salt from the baltic sea. to hear the languages stir memories that have laid hidden. to write about this experience and share emotion and depth for my children and their children. that they might have a peek of where they came from. to feel a real connection with humanity.