Your Ancestors' Home Town on YouTube - Mösbach, Ortenaukreis, Baden, Germany Videos

 I did a search for the town my great-grandfather Aloys Panther was born in and emigrated from when he came to America. I was surprised how many videos there are available, given how small the town is. The first I'll list is the official YouTube channel for the town of Achern.

Reasons for Aloys Panther's Move to America

 My great-grandfather, Aloys Panther, and his wife Monica Hanle Panther, along with their oldest son, came to America from Baden in 1872. Why? I had speculated that the end of the Austro-Prussian War, the death of his brother and the death of two of his sons may have convinced him to try a for a new start in a new land. I believe his brother may have paid a return visit to his home town to convince him to follow him back to America.

Grimmelshausen and Christman Brandstetter

 Not long before finishing my ancestry research in the area around Ortenaukreis, Baden, Germany, I exchanged emails with a person who lived in the area. I provided a family tree to him and he commented that without doubt, my 8x-great-grandfather knew Hans Jakob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen. At that time, I know I recognized the name Grimmelshausen and I know I saw the death record for Grimmelshausen in my research, but since I didn't have a family connection to him, I hadn't looked too hard at it. Once I received this email, however, I started looking deeper into who Grimmelshausen was.

The Passing of Oskar Oberle - Mösbach Historian

I checked out the Mösbach, Ortenaukreis, Baden, Germany web page for the first time in a long time and discovered that the village historian, Oskar Oberle passed away January 26, 2018 at the age of 85. This makes me very sad. I very much wanted to meet him whenever I finally got to the home village of my great-grandfather, Alois Panther. Sadly, this will no longer be possible. Here is a translation of the write-up on Baden Online.

Distant DNA Matches

I explained in a previous post that it's actually pretty unlikely that your DNA results will show a match with a given relative as close as fourth cousins. On the other end of the spectrum is that even though it's unlikely, you could match a small number of very distant relations. Here's an example I've come across recently.

I was looking for my recent DNA matches and I found someone that Family Tree DNA suggested was a fourth to distant cousin. This means we match a very small amount of DNA. Looking at his list of surnames, I saw a few that looked very familiar to me. They were surnames found among my great-grandfather, Aloys Panther's ancestors in and around Moesbach, Ortenaukreis, Baden, Germany.