John & Leesa Dupree--Alpine German-speaking Mission

      Leesa and I are hitting our stride here in Freiburg. We've found our way around, gotten acquainted with the Church members fairly well, and put on a lot of meals for folks, and Leesa has been getting a lot of knitting done. One of her key projects is the knitting of small washcloths in the shape of hearts, and giving them as small gifts. (Heart in progress)     In addition, she's come up with the idea of making gifts of them, along with chocolate bars, to our friends here on their birthdays. Which brings us to the next subject, going out to the birthday folks where they live. The Freiburg ward takes in a lot of territory (rough estimate: 400-500 square kilometers), and a lot of the members live in pretty rural areas.      Our first foray into presenting the birthday gifts took us out of town a fair piece, and along the way, we were rewarded with some absolutely gorgeous views of the Black Forest. (East of Freiburg in St. Märgen)   ...

      The last post focused on the finding of a rich trove of family names, and now it's time to follow up. A few days after meeting with my second cousin Frank Küchlin from Wolfenweiler, a mere five miles from us here in Freiburg, I went to the Rathaus (city hall) of the combined townships of Schallstadt and Wolfenweiler, and found a copy of the book Frank had shown us. I couldn't hand over the €39 ($41) fast enough, and now I had my own copy.     I went through my Grampa Kuechlin's line all the way back to about 1600. The Küchlins had lived in Wolfenweiler for 400 years, and because of Frank and others, still do. The family names in the book are pretty much represented on the genealogical website familysearch.org, but I noticed some important omissions. My Grampa's grandfather, Matthias (ma-TEE-us), had ten children listed on FamilySearch, but my new book showed eleven. Matthias and his wife, Elisabeth Beissmann, had had a son, Matthias Martin Küchlin, who was...