Planning a Trip to "On the Street Where They Lived!"

Here's a small map of the immediate area of all the Burgenland villages from where the Gangl/Grieman families lived and farmed. This side of the family immigrated to the USA primarily in the 1880s.

I've been caught up in planning our upcoming trip abroad. We're hoping to see the various homes where my Austrian ancestors once lived, visit their neighborhoods, churches, and countryside. All of these two branches of the family lived in rural areas - one branch lived in Burgenland, Austria, south of Vienna. The other branch lived at the edge of the Black Forest in Germany.

It's required a great deal of research to document the various addresses involved - and the addresses all have changed as of the 1920's or so, making it a bit of a challenge. But others in our family have already visited and were assisted by many English speaking residents They even got to visit one of the GGGGrandparent's homes! They also visited two different wineries owned by GANGL families - with whom we may be very distantly related!

Toward that end, I have been refining the Ancestry.com family tree, adding details and sources - all rather time-consuming, but useful work! I've also arranged our lodging and travel plans, which was more stressful than I thought it would be! When visiting Ireland, we stayed at B+B's everywhere we went - not so for Germany, since we don't speak the language... But hotels are hard to find in the small towns where we wish to visit!

This is the actual street in the small village of Wallern, Burgenland, Austria where my Grieman ancestors lived. An on-line acquaintance grew up living in the family home! He sent me this photo from the 1950's, saying it's dramatically improved from the dirt streets of that time. The house is across the street from the Roman Catholic church - on the right side of the photo - the house with two windows. I'm totally excited to visit both town and the church, where our ancestors were baptized, married, & buried and to see the family home for well over 100 years.

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The other branch of the German/Austrian side of our family are the family names of Schmidt & Mueller, from the town of Bilfingen (A. Pforzheim), Baden, Germany, in the Kampfelback Baden region on the northern outskirts of the Black Forest. Below, a map of the region.

And one grave site I would like to visit, the ancestors of our 1852 immigrants, ...

The gravestone pictured here is my 5xGreat Grandparents: John Albert Beihofer (1754-1820) and his wife, Maria Catherine Roth (1756-1820) buried in the graveyard of the Cemetery of Kampfelbach-Bilfinger (Enzkreis) Germany. It is amazing that this stone still exists since the common way cemeteries are operated in Germany is to rent/purchase the plot for X number of years, then pay to do it again when the time is up on the space. The coffins are then moved to a "common grave" in the cemetery, without markers. So the two families involved here must still reside in the area and be able to pay the rental/purchase fee for all these years. We will visit this graveyard, and the church from which the family celebrated the Catholic services.

Above is a photo from the web of St. John's Church in Biflingen taken in 2017. We will definitely visit this small church and offer prayers of thanksgiving for all of our ancestors!