Hi everyone! This update includes only one day, but a very special day it was!
After Interlaken, we took the train to a city called Pirmasens, where we were picked up by a very sweet man named Manfred Sand. He lives in a neighboring town called Clausen and owns the guest room that Thayer and I would be staying in that night.
Clausen is a tiny town in Germany near the French border, just north of the Black Forest. It has a population of about 1600, one restaurant that you need a reservation for, one bakery, one church that the whole town attends, one cemetery…etc. Everyone knows each other. No one speaks English.And, funnily enough, the dialect of German they speak (Platt Deutsch) is one that even Thayer could barely understand.
Also, Clausen happens to be the town that my forefathers came from back in the mid 1800s. When we got home from the train station, a traditional German lunch was waiting for us. We sat down with Manfred, his wife, Hilga, and their son, Peter, to a lunch of bratwurst, potatoes and peas and carrots. At every meal we ate with the family, Hilga made it clear that we were expected to empty every plate or dish before we got up.
After lunch Manfred took us for a walk around the town to see the "new church" built in 1903, the footprint of the old church which is likely where my great-great-great-great grandmother and grandfather were married. After that, he took us to a church meeting attended by about twenty women over the age of 90 who were a-buzz with excitement over our presence in their town. They all wanted to give their stories to us, but of course all at the same time and all in the same unintelligible (to us) dialect of German. Our heads were spinning but we did get to meet Frau Müller, whose son Franz Josef wrote a comprehensive book on Clausen families between 1466 and 1806. Since the Sand family also had a copy of the book, I was able to match the information I had with the information in the book and even trace the family line back two more generations. Very exciting!
Manfred also took us to the town cemetery where we expected to find graves of my ancestors. We found plenty of Germanns but we couldn't find any prior to the 1900s. Manfred didn't seem sure, but he thought perhaps the old graves just "went away." Thayer and I thought this was ridiculous so we continued the investigation on our own and found a tiny chapel up a mountain in the woods with all the stations of the cross but no graves.
On our way back home, we ran into Frau Müller and we thought if anyone would know where the graves were, it would be her. She confirmed what Manfred had said. Apparently the old graves were simply done away with when more than 30 years had passed since their deaths and new people were willing to pay for the land for new graves. We found this terribly disappointing but at least we had a definitive answer. We also came to understand that the cemetery in Clausen is less about history and more about immediate family being able to honor and remember their dead and also to show their family pride by impeccable upkeep of the gardens above their plots.
Manfred and Hilga treated us like family, and we felt like very special guests in their home. The day we left, Hilga was feverishly searching through her kitchen. She brought out a clay pitcher, what is known in Clausen as the "Clauser Hawe" (KLOW-zuh HAH-vuh). It is a unique symbol of the town. In fact, there is a fountain on the main street with three pitchers pouring into each other, and Manfred and Hilga even have these pitchers on the metal gate to their driveway. She gave us a hawe to remember the town where my family came from, a gesture so kind it brought tears to my eyes.
We had an amazing time, and hope to return again someday, as Manfred and Hilga told us we would always be welcome.
Another update will be coming soon!
All our love,
Hayley and Thayer
**Memorable Trip Quote**
Manfred: [telling a story… takes a pause so Thayer can translate to Hayley]
Thayer: Something about the devil and paradise and Adam and Eve and it's funny, so laugh when I finish talking.
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