Many years ago, in that lousy and hungry days after the second war in the blockaded city of West-Berlin my father sometimes comforted me by telling that perhaps our American relatives may sent a CARE package to us, filled with chocolates, bananas and other exotic things.

Later I learned that indeed an aunt of him, the eldest daughter of his grandfather, together with her husband, who’s name was Villwock, and four or five children had left Hoelkewiese in the eighties of the nineteenth century to find their luck in the New World. When my father’s grandfather retired from farming, there was a problem, because one of the heirs was lost. So they started searching her in the US but could not find her.

When uncle Fritz told me the same story, it sounded more dramatically. Someday, while cooking potatoes for the swine, quarrel came on between the grandfather and two of his sons. They wanted money, to be precise, they wanted their share of the inheritance. The old man was angry so much that he sold his farm overnight and bought with the money three houses near Baldenburg, a little town in the neighbourhood, where he lived until his end. His children came out empty-handed, because they couldn’t find the American daughter.

When I started looking for my ancestors, I discovered quickly, that Luise Lina Wilhelmine married a Rogahn, not a Villwock as my father told me. He confused him with her brother Albert, who indeed married a Villwock. And one a day I came across