Just about midday we had found Kolmbach and eaten lunch. At the restaurant, no had heard of the name Gahr (an alternative form of Gaar/Garr), even though a few hundred of them live not too far away. After lunch, we drove into Austria. Crossing the border is a non-entity. A sign says "Entering Austria", but that is the only thing that told us we in Austria. On the trip two years ago, we stopped and got some schillings to spend, but that was unnecessary this time as our Euro were good there.
Our destination was around Gresten, a town of about fifteen hundred people. On the last trip we had met Florian Berger who had generously offered us help. We have in stayed in contact, principally through email. I had alerted him that we probably would be coming to Gresten this particular weekend (it was now Thursday). As we pulled into the Guest House where we had stayed before, I spotted Florian driving by and he spotted us. We waved to each other and then he came back to say hello. We agreed to eat dinner together the next night.
Friday we went to visit some of the farms that are significant in Germanna history. The first was Plankenbichl, where Kilian Planckenbühler was living in 1600. (Kilian was the common ancestor of Richard Plankenbühler in Nürnberg and myself.) On the farm, we had difficulty finding anyone, and we saw that the old house was not being kept up. Eventually, people appeared and we found that the Dallhammers had moved to the adjacent farm. Two years ago they were living on the Plankenbichl farm. We got some of the story from them and some of it from Florian at a later time. Mrs. Dallhammer’s family owns the farm and there have been some problems among the family members. Eleanor suggests that the farm might be purchased cheaply. Then we could set up a bed and breakfast and cater to the visiting Blankenbakers.
At the Pletzenberg farm, we were welcomed by Leopold Scharner, who, as far as I know, has lived there forever. He is cutting back on the farming a bit. Previously he had some dairy cows, but the government wanted him to put in cooling tanks for the milk and he decided the return on his investment would not be justified. So now he is just raising cows. In the two years since we saw him, he completed the renovations on his old house, including the conversion of it into two apartments.
The third farm was the Scheiblau place, which I had identified from photographs after we came home from the previous trip. On making an actual comparison to the physical farms, I saw that the Scheiblau farm was actually next door to the one I had identified as it earlier. The Scheiblau farm has now been converted to a lumber processing and manufacturing facility. This was very characteristic. The old farms will no longer return a living to the owners and they are being converted to other purposes, in some cases, guest houses. (I believe that Scheiblau is probably the home of the Scheibles in the Germanna community and, hence, of the Holts.)
We did some sightseeing and visiting neighboring villages and towns in the afternoon, and then we had dinner with Florian and his wife Elizabeth. During the day I had been showing the signs of a cold.
(10 Jun 02)
We gratefully acknowledge the work of John Blankenbaker who published over 2,500 Germanna History Notes via the Germanna-L@rootsweb.com email list from 1997 to 2008. We are equally thankful to George Durman (Sgt. George) for hosting the list and republishing the notes via rootsweb.com.