I'm sure you've thought of the cemetery. My husband and I visited Damme 27
yrs ago this May. Started out at the Rathaus and got a list of available
hotels. Then walked to the Catholic church and were not too well received by
the priest who, I imagine, doesn't appreciate people just showing up at the
door, looking for ancestors. "Come back tomorrow", he grumpily told us.
We walked to the cemetery and began looking for family graves. We asked a
local young man and his mother if they knew what part of the cemetery that
family's graves might be and he took us to a fairly modern tomb stone. In
Germany, you will find that in spring, families plant flowers on the graves,
like a flower bed. The young man and his mother kindly offered to bring us
to the home of a relative with the name we looking for. We were delighted
to find it was 2 blocks from our hotel.
This family invited us into their home and kindly offered to call the
priest to ask if we could come by the parish offices the following day. They had
a classroom building, I suppose used for Sunday school, where we were
allowed to sit and pour over church record books the entire day. We were then
able to photo copy the pages we chose to copy. That week was Ascension
Thursday and the relative drove us to Holdorf where the other branch of my
ancestors were from. Again, he called ahead and requested that we be allowed to
spend time in the parish house after mass, looking at old church registers.
After meeting these relatives, we were so busy that we never made it back
to the cemetery. Too bad. Damme is small enough that we could quite easily
walk anywhere we wanted to go. The downtown has nice shops and we were able
to purchase some souvenirs from the area. We were taken to the Dummer See,
the large area lake surrounded by marshy bogs. We didn't get to see
Cloppenburg but would have enjoyed that.
To get there with public transportation, we took a train to Osnabruck, then
a bus to Damme and Holdorf. That was 27 years ago so I don't know if those
modes of transport are still available.
Geri
In a message dated 4/10/2012 6:02:35 P.M. Central Daylight Time,
mwethington@thebluecoupe.com writes:
For a flavor of what life was life over the years back....
I would highly recommend the Museumsdorf Cloppenburg!
It was AMAZING!
Also, the restaurant there had local food! Yummy!
Click on the British flag to read about it in English.......
You'll want to go too!
Marilyn Ruhe Wethington
References
1. http://www.museumsdorf.de/
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