Has anybody got any experience of tracing Amish people ?
I've got quite an interesting story (well, to me). OH was teaching English to a class of 15 year olds here (Germany) & they were quite fascinated by an article about the Amish. So he did a project with them , which was a filmed story about life in an Amish community. One day they all piled into a few vans & found a quiet spot in the country where he filmed them "working in the fields etc"
There was a feature in the local newspaper about this & a man in his 90s phoned us shortly afterwards to say that he thought we might be interested to know that there had been an Amish community in our area (very unusual...this is a 90% Catholic area). He said they had been ostracised....made to live & bury their dead outside the village....& they left in the 1820s, intending to go to the US. No ine in the area seemed to be interested...he'd given up trying to interest people.
We asked him where exactly they had been & it turned out to be exactly where the filming had been done. They'd worked the same field & lived in the buildings opposite, which are still standing. We thought he must have seen the filming & somehow imagined it was real....but he was right....we've found the land rental agreements in the archives, together with the names of the Amish community. He said that someone had been from the University of Kiel in the 1960s to try & find out more, but had drawn a blank.
I believe that the Amish in the USA today have pretty complete records of their communities from that time....has anyone got an address or tried approaching them ? If I can't find out anything from the Amish, I guess I'll have to look at the shipping lists for the names. It's quite possible (if not probable) that they never got to the US & then I don't think I'd have much of a hope of finding them.
But I'd love to know what happened
I've got quite an interesting story (well, to me). OH was teaching English to a class of 15 year olds here (Germany) & they were quite fascinated by an article about the Amish. So he did a project with them , which was a filmed story about life in an Amish community. One day they all piled into a few vans & found a quiet spot in the country where he filmed them "working in the fields etc"
There was a feature in the local newspaper about this & a man in his 90s phoned us shortly afterwards to say that he thought we might be interested to know that there had been an Amish community in our area (very unusual...this is a 90% Catholic area). He said they had been ostracised....made to live & bury their dead outside the village....& they left in the 1820s, intending to go to the US. No ine in the area seemed to be interested...he'd given up trying to interest people.
We asked him where exactly they had been & it turned out to be exactly where the filming had been done. They'd worked the same field & lived in the buildings opposite, which are still standing. We thought he must have seen the filming & somehow imagined it was real....but he was right....we've found the land rental agreements in the archives, together with the names of the Amish community. He said that someone had been from the University of Kiel in the 1960s to try & find out more, but had drawn a blank.
I believe that the Amish in the USA today have pretty complete records of their communities from that time....has anyone got an address or tried approaching them ? If I can't find out anything from the Amish, I guess I'll have to look at the shipping lists for the names. It's quite possible (if not probable) that they never got to the US & then I don't think I'd have much of a hope of finding them.
But I'd love to know what happened
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