EuroTour: March 2009

24 March 2009

New EuroTour

This spring we are again off to Germany on another roots adventure. This trip is for Elfrieda. We will spend a few days with her maternal relatives in Alfeld and Bielefeld. Then we visit the Eifel region, where we will meet Elfrieda's paternal relatives for the first time. Elfrieda is looking forward to meeting and visiting with her newly discovered family. It's quite exciting! To see blog postings about this experience in April 2009, click on the heading, New Euro Tour above.

Ancestral Journey to Volhynia Ukraine - connecting with relatives in Germany

In the spring of 2008 we set off to explore the ancestral villages of Volhynia, Ukraine, where our Neumann ancestors lived for several decades starting in the mid-1860s. Our tour started on May 13th. We spent two weeks in Ukraine and two weeks in Germany, arriving home on Tuesday June 10th.

We started our Germany adventure in Saxony where we had earlier traced Dave's maternal ancestry back to almost 1500. We also visited descendants of our parents' siblings most of whom were born east of the Ural Mountains in the former USSR. Over the past 3 decades many had left those regions to live in Germany, the land of their ancestors.

This blog was started to have a place where we can post our impressions, and describe our experiences. We invite others to comment or to register and upload your own thoughts and share your experiences. Those of you who were part of our Volhynian Villages group tour in Ukraine, we encourage you to add your stories and pictures.

Note: To see a picture more clearly, just double click on it.

Books of Interest

After The Reich: The Brutal History of the Allied Occupation, Giles MacDonogh, 2007, Basic Books - Covers the period between the end of the war (1945) and the beginning of the Marshall Plan (1948).
Alle Spuren sind verweht: Russlanddeutsche Frauen in der Verbannung, Nelly Däs, 1997,KDR Stuttgart. - a women's perspective on the terrible experiences of the Russian Germans.
Byzantium: The Surprising Life of a Medieval Empire, Judith Herrin, 2008, Princeton University Press. - beautifully presented - a thousand years of the Byzantium Empire centered in Constantinople.
Catastrophe: An Investigation Into the Origins of the Modern World, David Keys, 2000, Arrow Books. Did events in the 6th century shape our world today? Is there a global interconnection between climate and history?
Europe at War: 1939-1945 No Simple Victory, Norman Davies, 2006, MacMillan. Davies shakes our western view of WWII - central and eastern Europe was where the action was.
The Great Terror: A reassessment, Robert Conquest, 1990, University of Albert Press - The classic work on Stalinism - now available in a major revision using post Glasnost evidence and information
Under Arrest: Repression of the Russian Germans in the Zhitomir Region, Ukraine in the 1930s, Donald M. Miller, 2004, Volyn. - using long suppressed files to uncover dramatic stories.

EuroTour

24 March 2009

New EuroTour

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