Saturday, December 7, 2019

A Geography Lesson

1. If you missed the beginning of the "Small Town America" series, just scroll down.

2. Just to let you know they found our stolen trailer in Sacramento. People were living in it and it was in pretty good shape, but that was all the Sacramento County Sheriff would tell me.

3. Every day or so I get a new picture on my computer when I open it. The pictures are usually some awesome place I'll never visit so it's nice to see the rest of the world like we do via other's blogs. The reason I started the "Small Town America" series. This morning the one below was the new one.

Now starts the Geography lesson..............

This lovely Winter scene is of Baden-Württemberg, Germany. If you've followed this blog for any length of time you know I've been researching my ancestors (actually for about 29 years).

Baden-Württemberg, Germany


Pretty Christmas scene huh.

When I saw the name on this photo, my eyes lit up. I have MANY relatives from this place. Since I only knew it by name, my first reaction was to go to Google Maps and find it.

Turns out that Baden-Württemberg is a state like California. Then I started to see the towns on a lot of my ancestor's places of birth. Places like Heilbronn, Pforzheim, and Karlsruhe.

Then I started to look at places like Ispringen, again where a lot of ancestors are from. Ispringen is like a county within the "state" of Baden-Württemberg, in the country of Germany.

Everything suddenly became very clear.

A lot of times when you're entering a distant relative, all you have to go on is what Ancestry says the place should be. One Johann Philipp Kautz born in 1608 is from Ispringen, Pforzheim, Karlsruhe, Baden, Germany.

Here is where the confusion comes in. Ispringen is between Pforzheim and Karlsruhe in the "state " of Baden-Württemberg. He should be from Ispringen, Pforzheim, Baden-Württemberg, Germany.
 Ispringen being a "suburb" of Pforzheim.

Now my only problem is correcting all those places that are wrong. I've got 4347 people on the family tree. Guess I'd better get going. 

That's the end of today's geography lesson. 

Stay tuned. 

3 comments:

  1. Mark I would agree "you better get started"
    I get pictures like that on my computer to. Most of them are quite nice.
    You don't really want your old RV back?

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    1. Hi Alan. First I don't own it any more the insurance company does. God knows who's been doing what in it. And we have a new (and better built) one. So no, don't want it back although we did love it while we had it. I just wish I could have had 5 minutes with who ever stole it. Maybe it's best I couldn't.

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  2. Mark
    Playing catch up here----There are some places I'd like to visit and many more Cathey and I wouldn't set foot on.
    No I wouldn't want the camper back, just wondering what was the punishment for these guys?

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