07 | A Live Visit to Grub
Excited to see the real homes of our ancestors, we took a required detour through the fields in a beautifully wooded and hilly countryside and soon came upon the very small village of Grub. I felt at home here, as I “held up the sign post” outside the city of my ancestors.
When Stephen grew up, he lived on a small village farm in Grub and was a local cobbler. He was married on May 14, 1667 in Grub to Barbara Wagner, and had five children listed below. I will mark the names or our ancestors with an *.
- Johann(2/6/1668)
- Hanns*(6/15/69),
- Stephen(10/11/1670),
- Margareta(6/19/1674)
- and Daughter(9/27/1683)
We had an old map of Grub that showed the sites of Odorfer homes. We also saw the site where Hanns Odorfer and later his son Marcus lived. When we first entered Grub, we met an old farmer on his tractor. He was a curious sort, asking questions about what we were up to. Georg Odoerfer rose to the occasion and told him that we were Americans that wanted to buy all of Grub. If Georg hadn’t told him this was a joke, I’m sure this bit of rumor would have been all over Grub in under 10 minutes. We walked around awhile and the old farmer appeared again, still on the tractor. He and Georg talked excitedly in German for a time and we followed him, old map in hand, to his place. He showed us out back of his farmyard the old location of Hanns(Marcus) Odorfer’s house.
He and Georg traded ideas for a while, and Georg finally agreed, with reference to the old map, that this was the place! We took some pictures, picked the old farmers brain, and finally drove away from this “exciting encounter with my roots.” As we drove a mile of so out of town, back across the fields, we met the same old farmer, grinning from ear to ear, and trucking on past us on his trusty tractor.
I couldn’t believe he had been able to get clear out there, and concluded that everyone in Grub looked the same- all of them that grinning old geezer on the tractor- and we had really met three different Grub residents. Grub was a beautiful small village, nestled among wooded hills. I felt I was back in time three hundred years or so, and could visualize old Stephan, smiling, and driving his horses in place of that old tractor.