We had an appointment at 8:00 on Tuesday morning to visit the Lutheran Archives for Bavaria, which are in Regensburg. We arrived outside Regensburg Monday evening, where we took a room and ate supper. After supper we drove on to Regensburg to find the Archives and to see what sort of parking problem we might have. The old city does not have much room for parking but we spotted some garages on the periphery of the old city. We located the building that the Archives are in so we were feeling more comfortable that we could be there at 8:00.
In the morning, we found a parking garage and found our way over to the Archives. Already the place was going. The staff of two was there and two other visitors were there. I believe there were four microfiche readers. We explained our objectives which was to make some copies of material in the Illenschwang church books. They brought out the index cards for Illenschwang where they (Illenschwang pastors) seemed to have followed the policy of entering everything (marriages, births, deaths, and communicants) in one book. I could readily spot the year, 1732, we wanted. Very quickly we had the microfiche cards in our hands. Since the Garr authors had implied that the material we wanted would be found in the front of the book, we tried there and found it immediately. I could see right away that there were two pages that pertained to the Garrs. There was another page just prior to this on another subject, but it was written only the year before so we decided we should have it also. The staff makes the copies after noting the pages we wanted. Very quickly we had copies of the three pages. They told us that it was five Euro per copy, plus five Euro for just coming in the door. The head of this section of the archives had been very cool to us. We obviously were upsetting his plans for the day. His assistant was much friendlier and helpful. But after we had fulfilled our objectives in thirty minutes, he opened up and displayed a knowledge of English. Then he had to fetch his photographic book of his thirty-day vacation in America and show us the pictures. Only an archivist could have prepared such a neat book.
From Regensburg we went to Walderbach (not to be confused with Waldbach which we visited also) where Catharina Kirner, the great-great-grandmother of Andreas Gaar who came to America in 1732, was born and baptized in 1562. Catharina's daughter married Thomas Gahr/Gar in Regensburg. Thomas' father was the Hans Gahr of Kolmbach. Catharina married Wolf Waidehoefel of Zenzing. Earlier researchers had given his home as Sinzing, which is a good distance from Walderbach, but I had observed that there was a Zenzing, which is only about a mile from Walderbach. The probability that this place, Zenzing, was his home was much higher. So we took that in also. Here there were four or five farms and one small chapel, which, from the outside, was one of the prettiest churches we saw in Germany. Right now, I have no idea whether there were church records for Zenzing which have been maintained.
Our next stop was to go to Klings, but that was some distance away. We started driving in that direction but we only got to Ostheim, which was a random pick for a place to stay. The fates were with us and we were rewarded well for our choice.
(12 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.