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Many years ago, in that lousy and hungry days after
the second war in the blockaded city of Berlin my father sometimes comforted me
by telling that perhaps our American relations may sent a CARE package to us,
filled with chocolates, bananas and other exotic things.
Later I learned that indeed an aunt of him, the
eldest daughter of his grandfather, together with her husband, who’s name was
Villwock, and four or five children had left Hoelkewiese in the eighties of the
nineteen’s century to find their luck in the New World. When my father’s
grandfather retired from farming, there was a problem, because one of the heirs
was lost. So they started searching her in the US but could not find her.
When uncle Fritz told me the same story, it sounded
more dramatically. Once a day, while cooking potatoes for the swine, quarrel
came up between the grandfather and two of his sons. They wanted money, to be
precise, they wanted their share of the inheritance. The old man became so angry
that he sold his farm overnight and bought with the money three houses near
Baldenburg, a little town in the neighbourhood, where he lived to his end. His
children came out empty-handed, because they couldn’t the American daughter.
When
I began looking for my ancestors, I discovered quickly, that Luise
Lina Wilhelmine had married a Rogahn, not a Villwock as my father told me.
He confused it with her brother Albert, who indeed married a Villwock. And once
a day I came across
and found the Lost Daughter 100 years
later.