Dear Regina,
I am searching for a forester with the surname of RASSIES in Kreis Insterburg. He would have been living and working there in 1937, and probably in 1926 as well. Thank you in advance for this look-up! Please feel free to reply in German, as a reply in English is not necessary.
Here is part of a letter, sent to America from Berlin in 1937, that forms the basis of my query. [The writer was my great uncle by marriage, and the grandfather in the photo was named Johann Wilhelm BALLASEUS. "Lucy," his granddaughter, was the writer's wife.]
“From the church office of Schernupchen, I was informed that in Insterburg a forester and gamekeeper [by the name of] Rassies [was] living. I wrote to him asking him for some still missing data and telling him that Lucy’s great-grandmother [was] a Rassies. He wrote back [that] it would certainly interest us very much that his sister-in-law, the wife of his brother, [was born a] Rassies. You can believe that I wrote to her immediately, and heard from her that her grandfather was the brother of your grandfather. She sent us a photograph of your and Lucy’s grandfather. He is shown on the photo with his second wife.”
With kindest regards,
Gordon Seyffert
Kansas City, Missouri, U.S.A.