We have long anticipated visiting the Romanian village that Jack’s family called home after their journey down the Danube in the 1770s, and from which his grandfather emigrated in the early 1900s. I had a list of ancestors who are buried there and we hope to find their graves.
We found the Catholic cemetery and parked at the gate on a brutally hot day. It was the beginning of an intense heat wave that would last for weeks and affect most of Europe.
This region, known as the Banat, was previously under Austro-Hungarian, then Hungarian rule before being awarded to Romania after World War I. Notice, however, that the inscription at the top of the gate is in German. The area was inhabited by ethnic Germans, including Jack’s family, for centuries.
The cemetery is in poor condition and difficult to walk around in places. As soon as we entered the gate we found stones with the family names we were seeking but not yet the specific ones.
We could only stay out in the heat for a half hour or so before taking shelter in the shade or back at the van.
While we were having lunch in our campervan a Roma woman walked toward the gate carrying a bucket. She stopped at our open door and put her hand out for money. We honestly didn’t have a farthing because we’d just left Hungary and hadn’t yet found an ATM for Romanian currency. We shook our heads and indicated “No.” She didn’t react and just moved on. Jack said her begging gestures seemed automatic and well-rehearsed. A few minutes later she came out of the cemetery and her bucket was now filled with water from the tap in the graveyard. She walked past us without a glance and crossed the street. Presumably she lives in a house with no running water.
We found a row of stones bearing the name Schütz, the original family surname. In the dialect spoken here it sounds like “Shits” which obviously doesn’t go over well in America. Jack’s grandfather was encouraged to change it to Schulz when he became a citizen in 1915. (I tried calling Jack “Schitzi” but it didn’t stick.)
We spent the better part of two days trying to read every stone in the cemetery. The stones are very deteriorated and the inscriptions are nearly impossible to make out. In places they were completely encased in ivy that we both tried to tear off so we could make out a name and date.
We aren’t sure if we found the specific people we were looking for because while we could usually make out a surname, we couldn’t be sure of the first name or the dates.
We are sure, however, that this plot of ground holds the remains of generations of Jack’s ancestors and their neighbors. I’ve read the parish records of this village. I feel like I know these people. Seeing their final resting place brought the history of the village to life.
We left Bogarosch and drove to Timisoara, the county seat, to visit the Banat Village Museum.
We parked in what little shade we could find with our campervan door open and a young man out for a run stopped to say hello. Noting our UK license plate he asked it we were British.
“American,” we told him, “in a UK van.”
Turns out he’s German and his parents are Donauschwaben and left Romania in the 1990s for Germany. The history of Germans here runs deep.
We were excited to visit the museum but with our usual luck it was closed, not just for the day but for an entire long weekend for a special event.
The guard at the gate took pity on us when we told him we’d come all the way from the US to visit and he let us in to see the historic houses.
These are original, although certainly repaired and restored, and they helped us visualize the life Jack’s ancestors lived.
The house below is from the 18th century, so would have been like the original homes in the Banat after the migration. I’m not sure that chimney is up to code.
This one from the 19th century is a step up from the crude timber house. As the village prospered their dwellings grew larger and more comfortable.
We enjoyed exploring the buildings and we appreciated the information plaques in English. It was a disappointment that we couldn’t enter the rest of the museum but we were grateful to the guard who let us in at least to this part.
We had one more stop to make before we left the Banat.
After Jack’s grandfather and his sisters emigrated to America, their parents, Jack’s great-grandparents, moved to a neighboring village, and presumably that’s where they died. I spent years trying to find where they were buried but never found a burial record. As a last resort we drove to the village and walked the graveyard. Since all the parish records are so complete and residents so well documented from birth, through marriage, to death and burial, I didn’t hold out much hope of finding them. But we had to try.
This graveyard is smaller and in worse shape than the first one but we did our best to read the graves before surrendering to the blistering heat.
This marks the end of the trail of Jack’s paternal ancestors. Well, not really, but we’ll take up the journey of another branch a little later. Now we just want to get somewhere cooler and see something of Romania that isn’t a graveyard.
