As I have written few pieces on the subject and had a few conversations discussing this trip already so I will try to keep this short. We made it from Oldenburg, by way of non-Autobahn road systems, to three towns my ancestors (as reported by Ben Sieve, of the nine Sieve siblings including my grandfather Paul Sieve, in a letter to my Grandmother Sally) came from.

The first we visited was Lohne marked most distinctly by the central Church named St. Gertrud Kirche, it also has the only museum of the three devoted to the industrial history of it and the surrounding towns.

In this museum I spoke the most German I have this entire trip! The conversation was a series of small questions about the museum, an explanation of why I can understand but not speak the language, and the in training Polish woman getting help from her coworkers to give us directions to the park nearby. The park was filled with the sent of rhododendrons, lorrels, dark violet tulips, and the faint wisp of aging lilac flowers caught on the breeze.

The second and smallest of the three is called Brockdorf and is associated with my maternal Great- Grandmother Caroline Kohorst who was born and raised by her family until the age of twelve in a small farm on the southern end of town. We didn’t even stop to breathe the air of this little place as it only took us a matter of a couple minutes to drive through the now suburban developments that comprise it.

Dinklage was the third and final town we stopped in only to have a brief talk with a man in the Rathaus t ask about a place to eat, if there were any museums, and to hear his odd anecdote of a family with the Sieve name that moved out of what was a sizable farm, and is now a housing development, to the state of Minnesota. It seemed as though we had just made it out of Lohne before a rain cloud hit and made it to Dinklage just after. By the time we finished our meal at the Burg Hotel, backed against a beautiful forest, the rain was coming back as a light drizzle that refreshed our journey for the two hour windy trip to Münster. We have only been in the hotel in this town, but I am already excited to see the extent to which the history is still present here.