OBERKALBACH, HESSEN, GERMANY
Village of My Berthold and Ullrich Ancestors Includes Information about Surrounding Villages Ursula Kaiser Ursula Kaiser was my maiden name. My mother called me Ushi. My stepfather and stepgrandfather called me Rosalie. In public, I used the name Ursula Kaiser until I went to college at Brigham Young University. There my roommates decided to shorten Ursula to Sue. A year later, I got married and got a new last name as well. Ever since, I have been known as Sue Foster. |
When my mother, who was born in Oberkalbach, reached the age of 21, she got a job in Fechenheim, a city-part of Frankfurt am Main, at a chemical factory. Fechenheim was an independent town that grew from about 100 inhabitants in 1636 to about 16,000 in 2007. This location was about 60 kilometers (40 miles) southwest of her home in Oberkalbach. In Fechenheim, she met and married my father, Richard Kaiser, in 1931. They settled in Fechenheim around the corner from his parents' residence and had my brother. Then they moved into an apartment across the street from the factory and I was born six years after my brother's birth.
I lived the first six years of my life during WWII. My father was drafted into the army when I was two. Our lives were a nightmare of air raid sirens, rushing to the bomb shelter, destroyed buildings, etc. My father died in Albania when I was four years old. All my uncles were drafted. All, except one, survived the war. He starved in a Russian prisoner of war camp at age 25.
When I was ten, my mother, having been widowed for 6 years, married an American soldier and we left our extended family in Germany to live in the U.S. I graduated from high school in Connecticut, where I lived for nine years. When I was 16, mother and I went back to Germany for a visit. After that, we knew for certain that America would be our permanent home. Germany, although rebuilt somewhat from the war, was still a depressing place to live. My brother and I had assimilated into the American life-style and wanted to stay here. So mother stayed here too, although her marriage was not a happy one.
I joined the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, also known as the Mormon church, when I was almost 17 years old. That was the best decision of my life. After a year at Brigham Young University, I married an Ensign in the U.S. Coast Guard. We criss-crossed the 50 states during his 20-year career, living in 10 different places, and had six children and adopted a Korean baby girl. We eventually settled in Puyallup, Washington, 30 miles south of Seattle. In his second career, my husband worked for Boeing as a spares engineer in customer support and retired after 23 years.
Over the years, I have had many interests, mainly genealogy but also including reading, crocheting, macrame, ceramics and playing the folk guitar. I taught pre-school in my home for 12 years. Between 1990 and 2004, I served as the director of the Family History Center in the Puyallup Washington South Stake of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. Until 2016, we also supervised about 100 volunteers that are indexing the genealogical records on the microfilms of the Family History Library, the great project that will culminate in the free accessibility to anyone in the world of scanned images on the familysearch.org web site. Some of those records are already online and indexed but there are many records still waiting to be indexed before they can quickly be viewed online. There are about 300,000 volunteers working on this enormous project.
In 1984, I earned an associate degree in Arts and Sciences and another in Early Childhood Education. Then on 16 August 2007 I received my Bachelor's Degree of General Studies majoring in Family History from Brigham Young University, finally attaining the education goal I had begun 49 years earlier. At the age of 68, I walked across the stage as the oldest student in the graduating class. From January 2017 to June 2018, my husband and I served a mission at the Family History Library in Salt Lake City, Utah. I served on the International floor and my husband on the British floor. What a wonderful experience to be able to help numerous patrons every day for 18 months!
My web site is a way for me to share some of the information I have gathered about my mother's birth village and the surrounding villages - their people and their records - with others because the history and ancestry are similar. I have fond memories of my childhood visits to my grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins in this small community. During WW II, we left Fechenheim when the bombing became intense and we lived in Oberkalbach for a short time. There are still three cousins living there whom I occasionally visit, as well as nine other cousins within an hour's drive of Oberkalbach.
On the internet I have found several people in the U.S. who are distantly related to me through their roots in Oberkalbach and I will probably find more as people contact me for genealogical information. Interestingly, I discovered that I am an 8th cousin one generation removed to another volunteer who worked in my very own Family History Center, a small room in a church building in Puyallup, Washington. Such is not an uncommon discovery for people who have had ancestors in the United States for many generations. But to find this relationship is fairly unique. This volunteer was born in Kansas. Her ancestors immigrated there from Russia but originally went to Russia from Germany in 1763. I was born in Germany and my ancestors were 100% German [okay - I do have one that goes back to Belgium about 1600 and to Austria about 1725 :-) ]. I immigrated to Connecticut from Germany and eventually ended up in my present location in 1980. Jan had been at the brick-wall for many years until I offered to undertake a search in the marriage protocols of the Oberkalbach area. Amazingly, I found two entries for her unique surname. Further research proved that her people had gone to Russia from a village a few miles south of Oberkalbach. In researching the ancestry from that point back, we discovered that the emigrant to Russia was a direct-line descendant of our common ancestor who died in 1685!
Perhaps someday all of us "distant cousins" that I have located might have a fun reunion :-)
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