LANGER EMAIL DATED 16 DEC 2006

Christina says:

“I have arrived at point where the church records were destroyed. That is the time of the Thirty Years’ War (1618-1648). The only thing I found out was that one of our ancestors we both share came from Holzberg in the community of Adelboden, Switzerland. He was Christopher Offner whose first child that was baptized at Unteroewisheim in 1652 (7 Feb). The Offner family was obviously accompanied by Hans Ulrich Offner who was the first Offner family member that died at Unteroewisheim on 2 Dec 1655 aged nearly 86 yrs old. The couple’s elder daughter Veronika (b. 1650) was not yet born at Unteroewisheim so that the Offner family must have arrived at Unteroewisheim not before 1651 and old Hans Ulrich Offner must have accompanied the younger Offner generation at the age of 81/82 from Switzerland to the Kraichgau area (about 15 miles south of Heidelberg). As a result of the Thirty Years’ War about 80% of the inhabitants at the villages in the Kraichgau area were killed or died of the plague or of hunger caused by the destructions of the the Thirty Years’ War. Therefore after the war the villages in the Kraichgau area were resettled by people from Switzerland who were not touched by that awful war so that the number of the inhabitants of Switzerland had increased widely. Even in the Second World War the Kraichgau area was the area (and especially Unteroewisheim) is an area of soft hills where troops can easily march through on their way to Wuerttemberg with the capital of Stuttgart and on to Bavaria and Austria on their way from west to east. North and south of the Kraichgau area there are the mountain ranges of the Black Forest and the Odenwald which form a barrier along the Rhine valley. And the Kraich, a small brook on which Unteroewisheim is situated, forms a broad valley. That is why since thosee times, the Romans roads pass the Kraich valley at Unteroewisheim. Most of the Unteroewisheim folk have got more Swiss ancestors than German ones from those times after the Thirty Years’ War.”

Christina and Anita Langer have provided excellent information regarding our common heritage in Germany and from Switzerland.