July 26- Oberhoffen-sur-Moder and Merklingen, Weil-der-Stadt

When we woke up today, we had two choices- visit Versailles or just head on in the general direction of Zurich. Even though seeing the palace at Versailles was tempting, we decided against it because we didn’t want a day of crowds and exhaustion again. So we packed up the car, bid adieu to the tiny hotel room and au revoir to the rest of France. (A teacher-friend once explained that the difference between those two terms is that with au revoir, you expect to see them sometime again, but adieu is more permanent. You are sending them “to God” and never expect to see them again in this lifetime. “Adieu!” to you little hotel room.)

The drive was uneventful and the girls slept much of the way in the backseat. By early afternoon we had reached Oberhoffen-sur-Moder, in Alsace. Alsace is the part of France (today) that is right along the German border and has been alternately part of Germany and part of France over the centuries. The German language and culture is a big influence in the region. Nearly all of the surnames in the town cemetery are German in spelling and appearance. We know that a Michael Jung was born in the town in about 1700. At least three generations of Jungs would live in the town until Jacob Jung emigrated to America in the 1800s. Edwin Jung would then later be Scott’s maternal grandfather.

Oberhoffen-sur-Moder is a little town on the Moder river, hence its name. It is so small that it is one of the little towns that doesn’t appear on either our AAA map or the map of France that we bought later. We had to find it on the Internet first, before we went to find the town itself. Oberhoffen today seems to be a growing town because we saw a number of housing developments on the edge of town under construction. We found St. Michaels, the protestant church and apparently the only church in town. However, it appeared to be a really new building and clearly the building itself would have had nothing to do with the Jungs before they emigrated, but the congregation might have. The church was on a little town square that was covered in bricks, and it sits right across the square from the “Mairie” (Town hall) which was also a very new building. There were lots of old-style houses in town, but it was impossible to guess their age. Scott had no sooner said that a particular house could be from the 1600s or could be from last year when we came across a half-timbered house that was actually being built. The whole skeleton of the house was up, but none of the filling between the beams, so it was easy to see how it was put together and what it was going to be. There’s a fairly big, new sports complex in town. We looked at the soccer field and the girls played on a playground next to it. There is a small French army “camp” called Camp d’Oberhoffen, but it doesn’t look very big or heavily guarded. We’re not sure what they do there, but it probably means money for the town.

We found the town cemetery a few blocks from the church. None of the graves were very old, most from the late twentieth century and a few from the twenty first. Scott strolled through the cemetery reading the names, while the girls ate a quiet picnic in the park-like, unused area of the cemetery. There were quite a few stones with the name “Jung” on them. Some of the oldest were born in the late 1800s. We saw the smoke from a barbecue in someone’s backyard and heard a banjo being played at the party. A rooster crowed while we were there, showing that we really were in a rural part of France. There were cows and cornfields right at the outskirts of town, and one car drove through the town in front of us towing hay on a little trailer behind it.

We know of a Jung family winery which actually makes non-alcoholic wine. We asked several people about it and were guided towards one of the traffic circles in town where there were two pretty looking restaurants and several other buildings. Using German, Julie asked an older couple here if they knew about the Jung winery. If they understood our question right and if Julie understood their answer, we think that we were right next to the place but that it was closed for several days due to an illness or a death in the family.

We left Oberhoffen and drove on to Merklingen. Readers of this blog might remember that we visited a Merklingen back on July 9, looking for the ancestral home of the Pfaeffle family on Julie’s side, but were apparently not in the right place. We knew that the church that was associated with the family still existed somewhere because we had seen it on the Internet, and had to revisit that page to solve the mystery. It turns out that there is another Merklingen which is also near Stuttgart. Our detailed German map opens like a book. If you turn to the page where Stuttgart is shown, the first Merklingen that we visited is on the right hand page, to the southeast of the city. The Merklingen that we wanted was on the left hand page, to the southwest of Stuttgart, closer to the edge of the Black Forest, and outside the smaller city of Weil-der-Stadt. The odd part is not that there are two places with the same name because that seems to happen a lot in Germany. That’s why so many place names add a second part like Rothenberg-ob-der-Tauber. The odd part is that no-one that we talked to in the other town thought to tell us about the other Merklingen, since they really are pretty close together and this mistake must happen a lot.

Anyway, a member of the German branch of the Pfaeffle family used church records and traced the Pfaeffle (or Pfäffle) line all the way to a certain Bartlin or Bastian Paeffle who lived in Merklingen and was born around 1535. He would be Julie’s 12th great grandfather. For seven or eight more generations, the Pfaeffle’s lived in Merklingen, until around the 1800s. In the 1700s, Johann Georg Pfeaffle (Julie’s 6th great grandfather) owned a tavern called the Waldhorn near the church in town. Otto Pfaeffle would later emigrate to America and his daughter Vera (or Wera, to use the German spelling) was Julie’s paternal grandmother.
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It turns out that Merklingen is a very charming town and one filled with the half- timbered architecture. The most interesting thing here is the church, which dates back to the 1400s. We know for certain that all those generations of Pfaeffles that lived in this town would have had their lives revolve around this building because the church records are how we know of them today. The church itself is rather unique because it is fortified with a moat and walls that also date back to the 1400s. The church is referred to as the Kirchenburg, that is the “church fort.” Behind the church is the Remigiushaus where Johann Georg Pfaeffle kept his tavern, though the building has been renovated recently and is now used by the church. Obviously we took pictures in and around this small complex of buildings.

We found a really nice place to stay in Merklingen, just a short way from the church. Julie is glad to be able to use German again, and was tickled when she not only got our room using her German, but was able to have a little conversation with the gasthaus owner. The gasthaus itself is really nice. It naturally seems spacious after our last four nights, but even so, we’ve got two large rooms with a total of five beds. True, the bathroom is down the hall, but we think we’re the only ones here tonight and it’s not creepy like the one in Munster with the weird bird thing. We had a satisfying dinner a few doors down with pizza for the girls and jägerschnitzel for Dad, and finished with strawberry gellato sundaes for dessert.