On Sunday mornings we like to take the dog on longer walks than usual. We take the day to let her romp around in the fields and to discover more of our new home. Today we took a dirt path which runs parallel to town and ends by an enormous farm.

As we were following another farm road back to town, an older gentleman on a bicycle approached us with a big toothless grin. He stopped us and the first thing he said was that he knows we are new in town, knows our dog and where we live. Of course that immediately strikes us as a bit freaky that everyone knows our dog but not us…but it’s hard to keep a low profile when you move into the most prominent house on main street as young city slickers, with a huge dog and an even bigger off-road vehicle parked outside.

After the dog got a good petting and rubbing session the man turned his attention to us. He proceeded to tell us that he knew the farm well and that we should sell some of the old stuff to Americans since Germans don’t really value the old treasures on the farm anymore. He told us that the PO had three old tractors, but that they were sold off right after he died. Hubby almost cried when he heard that, we love old tractors – as can be seen in this post about the local tractor festival.

The guy was probably in his 70’s and told us that not only was he born and raised in this town, but that his family has been in town for 7 or 8 generations and that he was related to about a quarter of the families in town to some degree. Wow!!! We got a great history lesson about how the town developed. Aside from old town, all around town there are new developments which are expanding more and more into the countryside. Although the houses there are quite nice, we could never imagine living like that again. The houses are right next to each other with no privacy and there is always a certain sterile feel to those types of neighborhoods. I digress…it turns out there used to be a canal running along the path we were standing on, but a few years back someone had the great idea to fill it in and build one of these new residential areas. Great idea. Now, every time it rains hard and the fields flood, so do their houses.

It was great to once again meet someone who could tell us more about Büdesheim and the people who used to live on our farm. We are a bit curious, though, because it seems that although everyone knows about the Wissenbach’s, nobody seems to really know the whole story about what happened to this family. We put together a bit more of the family tree today though. There were two daughters (which we’ve seen in some of the old photos) but he told us one of them died very early in life, and the other was very old when she died. Unfortunately he couldn’t remember which of the two. He does remember that it was so long ago that their graves aren’t even in the graveyard anymore.

I guess the next time we run into him we need to get a bit more information out of him. It doesn’t help that we only understand half of what he says due his thick accent. Hubby’s family is Bavarian, so his dialect is from there but this guy speaks with a Hessian dialect which is completely different. We are getting better at understanding the old timer, though, so soon we should have no more problems. 🙂