Posted on Facebook on 15 February 2019.

At times I too have difficulty keeping present and past apart. One such instance was when I walked through my ancestral village Veckerhagen, and found that there were no Weisenborns living there. The last one of my relatives who had lived there turned out to be Peter Wittenborn the shoemaker, who died in 1800. His house was still there, though.

When I visited Marbach in the summer of 2014, I knew that many Weisenborns in the USA descended from a family Weisenborn which had lived in Marbach until at least 1852, when Johann Georg Weisenborn left for New York. But I found no Weisenborn there, and even the oldest inhabitant of the village, a lady well into her nineties, could give me no more than a vague recollection from her youth when a widow Weisenborn had lived in Marbach ..... . I had no way to verify her story; no one could help me on that Sunday afternoon.

But now I have come across the address book of Erfurt, including Marbach, of 1939-1940. In it I found Hermine Weisenborn, widow of Karl Emil Weisenborn, see first scan. She ran the farm (she was "Landwirtin") at Käferberg 7, close to the "church hill", see second scan. I do not find her in later editions of the address book (but I had missed her in the address book for Erfurt for 1941-1942 - I have added this line after Carol Weisenborn had alerted me to my oversight. Carol further alerted me to the possibility that Hermine might be Karl Emil's youngest sister who lived with him on the farm and survived him by a few years -).

The third scan is a screenshot showing how Karl Emil was related to Irving Ferdinand Weisenborn and his siblings: their most recent common ancestor is Johann Friedrich, a son of Johann Lorentz, the oldest known Weisenborn in Marbach so far.

So, the old lady's recollection was entirely correct. She may well have met the widow Weisenborn in her youth.

During our Weißenborn meeting in September this year we shall not only pay a visit to the Gotthardt Church and see the original church registers; we shall also took a look at the farm at Käferberg 7.