WELCOME

HELLO …..     Bonjour!        Guten Tag! 

Welcome home. These are the stories of our ancestors from France and Germany. All work on this website is copyrighted! Permission is necessary to copy ANY material. Contact me, if you would like to share for personal use.

Fritz Kieber emigrated from Oberhoffen-lès-Wissembourg, Bas Rhin, Alsace at the end of the Franco-Prussian War (1872) with his bride, Magdalena Grimm, also born in Oberhoffen-lès-Wissembourg. Together they had 10 children  on the farm in East Amherst NY. The Kiebers’ farm comprised the first several holes of the Transit Valley Golf Course in an area of East Amherst NY (now suburban Buffalo). In the nineteenth century Amherst was called ‘Transit Station.’ A large settlement of immigrant Alsatians put down roots, developing farms as well as a small town.

Fritz was great grandson of Jean-Henri Kieber, a laborer, b.1739 to Johann Daniel Kieber (Kybert) and Maria Jacoba Dobbler in Preuschdorf, Bas Rhin, Alsace, a village of 875 inhabitants in the 1999 census. Jean Henri’s first wife was Anna Maria Barbe Tuba., b. 1732 Preuschdorf. When she died in 1774 (after bearing 6 children), he married Marie Margeurethe Pfeiffer and had 4 more children.

Georg Ruhland and Ana Ruhland hail from the Waldmünchen area of Bavaria. Ana emigrated in 1854 with her parents, John and Eva (Hetzl), on the AGNES, and Georg was reported to have arrived in 1865. They married, under special dispensation from the Catholic church, in 1869 in St. Ann’s in Buffalo NY and then had 13 children.

Georg Ruhland was the great-great grandson of Lorenz Rueland and Anna Maria, from Arnstein. You can learn more about this line of peasant farmers and laborers  here.

Carolyn, Rumson NJ abt. 1964

Thank you to all cousins who hve sent me famiy lists. They are greatly appreciated.

Special thanks to Debbie Blau, who has taken many of the photos of the Waldmünchen area (including the beautiful photo of the Barn in Ast, Waldmünchen that graces the header) and agreed to share them.

And kudos go to Rebecca, who uncovered the Kieber line and connected us to the Preuschdorf folks.

Thanks to Uwe Porten, our genealogist  from Bingen, Germany for much of the Kieber – Grimm research.

Thanks to distant cousin, Georg Ederer (RIP)  and the Plains,WI genealogy group for much of the Ruhland- Heltzel research.

Thanks to the many other folks and relations who took time out of their busy days to share stories, recipes, and just laugh with me over our broad-limbed and ever-growing family tree.

We’d love to include your memories, stories, photos, family trees, etc etc. Please send them along. An easy way to digitize the record, no matter if it is a photo, a birth certificate, or an artifact, is to take a photo. We loveeeee your photos.

It’s OK to copy this info. for your own personal use, but PLEASE credit this site and my, carolyn grady for the work. Trust me, this site represents many many hours of research and writing which I share here in order to extend and deepen our knowledge of the ancestors.

Finally, if you are grateful for the stories on this site, Please Please Please consider getting yourself dna tested on familytreedna….and upload your results to gedmatch. This is a deep level of research data that helps uncover areas hitherto hidden.