Our family made three separate trips to Poland to get a sense, a feel,for the area our ancestors came from.  We always wondered, why or what made them come to Wisconsin, namely to the shores of Lake Michigan. Once we drove through the countryside north and slightly east from  Stettin (Szczecin), Poland  and set foot on the shores of the Baltic near Hoff,  we had our answer.  We felt as though we were home on the farm in Wisconsin, on the shores of Lake Michigan.  There was very little difference!

On the Poland Map above, right, in the upper left hand corner is the general location of our focus, as this is the area of Pommern where our ancestors originated.

On the maps above, our driving trail is denoted by the black, yellow or red lines with arrows.  The black line represents the first trip taken September of 1996, yellow line, March of 1997 and red line for May of 1998. 

An Observation Worth Noting

As one would progress East from Germany into the newly annexed area that was "East Germany", one could see a world of difference in the maintenance of the buildings and the general infrastructure. The further East one proceeded the worse the infrastructure was.  It was very enlightening.  

In what was "East Germany" we found  cemeteries surrounding the churches, however once we crossed the border into Poland, there were no traces of any of the cemeteries as at the end of WWII, once the Germans were forced out of the area, the Polish people destroyed the cemeteries.  They wanted no traces of the Germans whom had occupied these lands for several hundred years.  The destruction was complete, headstones were ground up and used for road paving or they were used to build fences.  At one church we found many headstones embedded into a wall that had been constructed around the church.  Typically, the new cemeteries used by the Polish were several blocks from the church.  I do not know the reason for this, I can only assume they did not want to go to the extreme of exhuming the bodies that surrounded the churches in now "the unmarked graves".

There was one exception where, in a Polish Church cemetery, which was on the church grounds, we found a Polish cemetery.  What was unique in this cemetery is that although there were no recognizable grave markers that carried German names there were field stones placed alongside of trees that had the names of German deceased along with their birth and death dates. It seemed as though this congregation of Polish people somehow was able to reconcile in their minds that it was alright to co-exist in the same cemetery with the Germans and recognized this with the representative stones.