Schwerin, Germany – May 2004

Our trip to northeastern Germany to visit ancestral sites was discussed with my Mom’s cousin, Lillie Mae Kainer of Katy, Texas, for some time.  Lillie Mae was to take a tour from Vienna, Austria throughout the Czech Republic and we decided that if she came early to Brussels we would do the trip then.  Lillie Mae arrived in Brussels on May 19 and we departed the morning of May 20 by car. 



We were away by 8:30 am in sunny, but cool, weather.  We took the E 314 motorway from Leuven to Maasmechelen where we tanked up on gasoline before leaving Belgium.  In Holland we took the A2 motorway north and the back road N 273 through pretty countryside lined with farms and fields with horses.  Near Venlo, Holland we entered Germany and negotiated our way through the heavy traffic of what the Germans call, the Ruhrgebiet, that industrial work area around Duisburg, Essen and Dortmund, Germany.  We eventually made our way (with Rita’s fine navigation) to the A1 autobahn near Munster for a clear drive up to Hamburg.



In Lengerich we stopped for gasoline again and lunch.  I had my first schnitzel of this trip with mushrooms and fried egg topping.  It was asparagus, or spargle, season in Europe and every restaurant had their spargle kart with various ways to order them.  Rita and I like green asparagus but don’t care much for these white, pasty ones.  Lillie Mae did her best over the next few days to have her asparagus daily.



In Hamburg we changed to the A24 autobahn, which continues on to Berlin.  We stopped for a side trip to Wittenburg and Dodow just before our exit to Schwerin.  We stopped in Dodow because church records I obtained in 1979 said my great-great-great-great grandfather Johann Fick was born in Dodow in Mecklenburg-Schwerinschen, which would make it this small village.  It isn’t much of a village and the entire industry of the area seems to be based on apple orchards.  Later we were to find another village named Dadow near Cumlosen where my great-grandfather, Joachim Frederick Wilhelm Fick, was born.  So it is still a mystery to me.  Did a church researcher misread the old German script in the church records?  We’re talking late 1700s here.



We continued on to Holthusen, a small village south of Schwerin, where distant relatives live.  We could not find the address and had to call them on our cell phone.  We found out they really lived in Buchholz, which is very near to Holthusen, but they came and we followed them to their house. 



Where to start with my distant relatives?  Lillie Mae met them about 29 years ago on her first trip to what was then called East Germany.  The parent’s names are Sybille and Detlef Bogdanski and they have a daughter, Yvonne (who was our translator throughout the trip) and a son, Mario.  Yvonne is about 22 while Mario is 15.  Detlef is soon to be 50 and Sybille is in her late 40s, we presume.  Detlef is Sybille’s second husband, the first marriage ending in divorce.  Sybille’s great-grandmother was Anna Fick Henning.  Anna Fick was a half-sister to my great-grandfather, Joachim Frederick Wilhelm Fick.  My great-great-grandfather, Joachim Wilhelm Fick, had married twice.  His first wife, Anna Jahn (my relative) died early and he remarried to Katharine Herr and had a second child, Anna Fick, who later married a man named Henning.  Sybille Bogdanski is in this line descended from the Fick family.  Confused?  I am.  As best as I can figure it out, Sybille and I are some distant half-cousin in relation.



Detlef and Sybille have a nice, modest house and even though their daughter, Yvonne, and her boyfriend, Matthius, live in the apartment upstairs, Detlef and Sybille gave Rita and me their bedroom to sleep in.  We tried to explain that we would be happy to move to a hotel in Schwerin but they wouldn’t have it.  Lillie Mae slept on a couch hide-a-bed in their small office.  While Sybille can understand much English she doesn’t feel comfortable speaking it and all of us spoke very little German so their daughter, Yvonne, gave it her best try to translate for everyone.  It was confusing at times.



Soon after we arrived, Detlef put sausages and pork chops on the grill for a barbeque.  I should mention that the Bogdanski family did visit with Lillie Mae in Texas about seven or eight years ago.  We had a nice welcoming dinner of barbeque and potato salad.  Shortly after introductory discussions about family trees, relatives, ancestors, etc. we retired to bed for a good nights sleep.



Friday morning we had a breakfast that wouldn’t change in three days – fresh bread rolls, boiled eggs, cold cuts, cheese, butter, jam and coffee – typical German breakfast.  Today our group would consist of me, Rita, Lillie Mae, Detlef and Sybille.  We took our Ford Explorer, the largest car able to accommodate us, and headed to Cumlosen on the Elbe River.  We explored Cumlosen, a pretty village with one deserted looking church and many half-timbered houses and barns.  We had visited Cumlosen on a trip to East Germany in the early 1980s but didn’t know the information that Lillie Mae had.  Since reunification with West Germany, private ownership and the extension of capital and credit have led to house renovations throughout the region.  What we remember as run-down now looks quaint.  The region, known as the Elbetal, has many quaint villages and tree-lined country roads.  I really enjoyed the area and want to return.



In Cumlosen we were able to find and identify the house where my great-grandfather Fick was born and raised before leaving for the USA in about 1883 or 1884.  It has been renovated and doesn’t look ancient at all.  Some of the sheds around it do look old, however.  On a memorial monument for war victims we found an Otto Fick who died in World War I in 1915.  We also saw a stork flying in and feeding a baby stork in a huge stork’s nest at the top of a pole.  We drove three kilometers to the small, but pretty, village of Muggendorf, again on the Elbe River.  My great-great-grandfather, Joachim Wilhelm Fick, lived in Muggendorf when he married Anna Elisabeth Jahn in 1819.  We drove back to Cumlosen and had lunch in the only small restaurant in town.  There were only two items on the menu – sausage or pigs hock.  Most of us ate sausage and it was good.



We drove into the fairly good-sized town of Wittenberge on the Elbe River and had a tour provided by Detlef who grew up in Wittenberge.  We walked along the riverfront area that is getting a nice renovation.  Next we drove to the little village of Laaslich where Sybille’s stepmother, Kathi Rex, lives.  We visited with her and had cake and coffee before visiting the gravesite of Sybille’s father, Karl Hans Rex, and her mother, Gundula.  Then we took Sybille and Detlef back to Buchholz as they had work to do. 



Rita, Lillie Mae and I set out once more.  We took pretty back roads to the village of Dadow.  In all the villages we would stop to look at the war memorials for family names.  Each village, no matter how tiny, seemed to have a war memorial.  This land has seen much conflict over the years.  We drove to Eldena, Gorlosen, Krinitz and Eldenburg before ending up in Lenzen, a good-sized town with many half-timbered buildings and remains of a castle.  It was getting late and we found a nice restaurant called the Old Water Mill, which it was.  We had a good meal and arrived back in Buchholz rather late in the evening.



Saturday we set out once more after breakfast.  This time the party consisted of Rita, Lillie Mae, Sybille, her daughter Yvonne, and me.  We drove through Perleberg and on to the small village of Viesecke where my Freier ancestors originated.  My grandmother Franke was born Mary Freier and through the death records of her father, Joachim Freier, I discovered years ago that he was born in Viesecke.  We had visited Viesecke in the early 1980s but never stopped to speak to anyone because we don’t speak German – at least not very well - mostly menu items.  Yvonne was not afraid to stop anyone in sight and ask if there were still any Freiers living in Viesecke.  Much to my surprise we did find an elderly woman, Mrs. Annedore Brust, who said she was an 8^th generation Freier as far back as she had records.  She and her husband were very kind and invited Yvonne and me into their home to show us her records.  I’m not sure if we are related but it’s very possible considering the small size of Viesecke.  She had one ancestor, Hans Georg Freier, born in 1800, who shares the same name as my great-great-grandfather, Hans George Freier.  But my ancestor had my great-grandfather in 1850 so it doesn’t seem they are the same.  However, I have found that many sons had the names of their fathers so it could be an added generation that I don’t have in my records.  Hans Georg Freier could be the father of my great-great-grandfather, Hans George Freier.  That would fit.



While in the small village of Viesecke I spotted a strange building in back of the only street of houses that looked like a huge barn.  Exploring on foot we found out it was really a church – mostly stone on the bottom with almost no windows and the top steeple resembling a small barn.  Someone in the field came and got someone else to let us into the locked church.  He thought it was built about 1700 but it’s rarely used today since Viesecke doesn’t have a preacher.  We thanked him and set out for lunch.  First we asked about the church records and were told to see a woman in the next village of Kletze who had them.  We found her and she informed us we were about two months late.  They had been sent to Berlin to be photocopied by the archives and won’t be returned to her for another two years.  So we consoled ourselves with a nice lunch in Dupow. 



After lunch we drove to Cumlosen and had cake and coffee with Mrs. Gundula Sandmann who was born into the Jesse family.  The Jesse family is in my lineage as my great-grandfather, Joachim Federick Wilhelm Fick, married Sophie Jesse of Cumlosen.  It’s not clear to me how she is related to me.  She was nice and after a while we left her house and returned to Muggendorf to take photos of that pretty village.  We drove to Jagel and Mittelhorst, which borders Jagel, and found old houses that belonged in the Jesse family.  We met and talked with Mr. Guenther Hann and his wife.  The Hanns now live on the former property of the Jesses in Mittelhorst.



We finally drove back to Buchholz where we met Detlef, Matthius and Mario for dinner.  We went to a nice restaurant at the top of an old antenna building.  Since it was hundreds of feet up we had great views of Schwerin and the surrounding lakes.  After a nice dinner we followed Detlef for an auto tour of Schwerin – old castle, theatre, main square, etc.  Schwerin is a nice looking town and we wished we had more time to explore it further.



Sunday we loaded up the car and said our goodbyes after breakfast.  We drove to Perleberg and into the center of town, which we had not explored before.  Then we headed south on highway 189 and crossed the Elbe River.  At Stendal we drove to the city center and saw the statue of Roland and the cathedral.  We drove a short distance to the Hanseatic town of Tangermunde where the Tanger River meets the Elbe River.  This was our first time to Tangermunde, which is sometime referred to as the “Rothenburg of the North”.  It is a beautiful walled city with old city gates and a castle converted into a nice hotel.  We had lunch here and walked around the city after a hearty meal.  We walked into the church of St. Stephan and I was surprised to find a wall plaque dedicated to warriors of 1813-1815 with the name of Johann Franke on it. 



The memorial plaque is interesting since I have an ancestor, Johann Franke, who died about 1813.  My great-great-grandfather, Ernst August Franke, was born in Altenburg, Germany, which is not all that far away – about 150 miles by road from Tangermunde.  Ernst Franke kept a diary and said his father passed away when he was seven years old, which would have been 1813.  A researcher found Johann August Franke in the church records of Altenburg as having been born in 1762 and married in 1795 (late at age 33) but nothing about his death.  Using these dates, Johann August Franke was a father at age 44 (not impossible) and died when he was about 51 years old.  That’s too old to have been a soldier, I think, but many others died from starvation and as “collateral damage” during those wars.  In 1813, the Battle of All Nations was fought in Leipzig, close to Altenburg.  This was Napoleon against the Austrians, Danish, Prussian and others.  It was a major battle and one of the first Napoleon lost.  Historians say there were between 80,000 and 110,000 casualties in the Battle of All Nations.



We left Tangermunde and ran into first heavy rain and then sleet.  It was a brief spring storm and soon we were on our way towards Magdeburg.  We turned onto the A2 autobahn heading west in heavy traffic.  The heavy traffic plus road construction made driving slow and tiring.  We passed Braunschweig and Hannover and soon the driving was wearing on me and the end of the day was getting close.  We pulled over to a roadside restaurant for a quick meal and consulted our guidebooks for a place to stay.  We called a hotel in Wiedenbruck that sounded good and confirmed rooms for the night.  The town is actually hyphenated into Rheda-Wiedenbruck but we were in the Wiedenbruck part of town.  It was very attractive with half-timbered buildings dated to 1605.  Our hotel was the Romantik Hotel Ratskeller and it dated to about 1650.  We checked into a very nice room before taking a walk around the small, quiet town.  We had a drink in our hotel bar, the 15^th century Ratskeller, before going to bed.



The next morning we had a nice breakfast in the hotel and once more walked the town.  Rita and Lillie Mae did some minor shopping and we stopped into the village church for a peek.  Outside the church we found another war memorial with Wilhelm Fick and Johann Fick who had perished in World War I.  We got away a bit late, about 10:30 am, and headed back onto the A2 autobahn towards Dortmund and the dreaded Ruhrgebiet industrial work area once more.  But Rita navigated me around it just fine and soon we were back into Holland and retracing our steps home. 



We stopped in Maastricht for one last sightseeing stop.  We walked to the old 15^th century courthouse (Het Dinghuis), which is a tourist information center today, and picked up a map.  We followed a recommended city walk and came to a shaded square with many cafes where we had a nice lunch under the trees.  We toured the Our Lady basilica, which looks like a fortress more than a church.  We walked along the city walls to the Jeker Tower and the old city gate called Helpoort.  Then we walked back to the car and started our journey home.  We drove through Tongeren, Belgium, the oldest town in Belgium and a former Roman fort.  Tongeren still has city walls from medieval times that the ring road circles.  From here it was a short drive to Brussels and home.



It was another nice trip with some added family tree information and new sights included.