So this will be a little convoluted at first. Bear with me.
When I first started exploring our family ancestry, my sister and I headed to southern Illinois and met with a first cousin once removed on the Wolf side. This cousin, Bill, in turn, told us about a cousin in Germany whom Bill had met several times. This cousin, Hans Hertling, had done extensive research in Germany on the Hertling family; Eva Hertling, who married Frank Wolf, immigrated to the US with her family in the 19th century, and Hans, in pursuit of the family, had turned from ancestry to cousin finding. That search led him to Bill (and some others). Bill figured Susan and I should know about Hans. He was right.
So Bill shared some of Hans' work with us. It was impressive, detailed, well-supported, so I, as the designated finder of this side of the family, checked off a family as found and turned my attention elsewhere. I figured I'd return to the Hertling side for verification when I'd finished with some other lost families. (Sounds sloppy doesn't it. But Hans was an archivist and historian, and his support looked first rate. I still plan to obtain his documentation, but I trust his conclusions. However, the Hertlings have not yet been included in my family tree.)
Then three years ago, Hans decided to return to the US with his wife; this would be his fourth or fifth trip but Christel's first. It was to be her birthday gift, and they needed places to stay. So, along with Bill and a cousin in Cincinnati, I volunteered my home.
The planning was elaborate. We had to coordinate getting Hans and Christel from point A to point B (and then to C and D), figure out what they might like to do, deal with the language issue. Hans was fairly fluent in English, Christel not at all. But we all sorted it out; We arranged to have a cell phone available while they were in the US, shuttle services from one place to another were arranged, we compiled lists of possible attractions and activities.
Hans and Christel were at our place for three days, and we had a lovely time. Hans and I had some time to talk genealogy, Christel and Jay bonded over food (the universal language), and we took them to some decidedly Midwestern America things: the prairie museum here, the Lincoln Museum, some gardens, a Bavarian restaurant, the Amish community south of here. Christel and I spent an afternoon together, teaching each other German and English and laughing. We all had fun.
A week after they left us, they headed to Cincinnati where we met up again and did more sightseeing sorts of things. Hans met Susan and another sister, we did another German restaurant, toured Cincinnati sights, and then I took them back to Evansville, Indiana, their point of departure for home.
Over the next few years, Hans and I emailed one another, a lot. I started learning German and so wrote in Deutsch; he lied and assured me I was totally comprehensible. We sent copies of documents back and forth, had discussions about the Wolf family (I'd switch from German to English and back, as vocabulary and syntax failed me), whose origins in Alsace I had just discovered. I sent a German birth record that he translated for me. We talked about how names might alter in Alsace depending on who "owned" the region. I searched for immigrants here for him; he translated for me.
In 2015, Jay and I went to Europe; our plan was to spend time in Provence with friends, a week in Alsace for genealogy, and then a couple of days in Stockstadt with Hans' family before we flew home.
It's that planning thing; don't trust it. In late winter, Hans got very ill, ended up hospitalized. When we arrived in France, we had no idea what his health was like. I corresponded with one of his stepdaughters, and reading between the lines filled me with dread. When we left Provence for Alsace, we learned that Hans was home, that he was dying, that he wanted to see us.
So that's what we did.
Six weeks later, he was gone.
It's been a year now (May 30), and I miss him. For a while I attributed this to my own inherent selfishness; I'd lost the man who helped me with the incomprehensibility of European research. But lately I realize that isn't fair to either one of us; it's a lot more than that. Hans adored the hunt as I do, and he loved teaching, being the expert. And I love learning. And we both loved the puzzle that is family research; turning a multicolored, oddly shaped piece in our hands and speculating about where it might fit. I have all our emails and when I reread them, I see a much deeper relationship, that of cousins, yes, but also of friends and collaborators. So, yeah, I miss him because he could help me puzzle out what a 17th century occupational name might be, but what I really miss is the discussion that would follow, the one we both would have loved. The one where we argue about which Johannes Leonhard Müller is MY Johannes, the one from Göppingen or the one from Hohenstaufen; the one that sorts out which of two implausible stories is less implausible; the one where we moan about deplorable handwriting, the lack of centralized records, the random gaps in documents; the one where we speculate about what might have driven my Alsatien ancestors to abandon settled lives for the uncertainty of 19th century Ohio/Indiana, a newly settled, wild, untamed part of America.
That's what I miss, when I miss Hans. Which is really, really often.
