06 | A Trip to Germany!
In August, 1994, my wife Harriet and I took a trip to Germany to search for our Odoerfer ancestors. We had been corresponding with our German relative, Georg Odoerfer, who had begun to search local records for information on the ancestors of Wolfgang Odoerfer.
Georg and his wife Renate took us to the Odoerfer family church in Rasch which contained records of our Odoerfer ancestors. There was a cemetery near the church, and we were surprised to find several gravestones, like the one shown here, marking the burial places of Odoerfers. Note that Odorfer, with an umlat over the second “o” is the most common German way of spelling our family name. Sometimes the “oe” is used instead of the “umlat o” and the spelling is then Odoerfer.
Much of the information about our ancestors, the German Odoerfers, came from the records in this church, along with records from other churches in the area. The writing in the record books was in Old German, and we had to have help reading it. I have copies of the original records in my files, and have learned to decipher them a little. With the help of the church records, and much help from Georg Odoerfer, we documented the following genealogy of our Odaffer ancestors from Germany. Now we wanted to go from records to reality!