October 1999   Volume 3   Issue 7

Birthdays & Wedding Anniversaries
Dies und Das
Two New Kids make 59
Schwenk Wedding on San Francisco Bay
A Small World Story
A Word from Uncle Don - Immigrants

Birthdays and Wedding Anniversaries in October  9.  Gordon Schwenk of Boise, ID turns 33. 12.  Michael and Maike Schwenk near Stuttgart celebrate 3rd anniversary. 17.  Ursula Gorzelany of Kochstetten SE of Stuttgart celebrates her 17th birthday. 19.  Doris Blair near Portland, OR celebrates her 97th year. 20.  Charlene Laur Soos near Niagara Falls, NY turns 58.  27.  Peter Hayes near Albany, NY will have 48 candles. 31.  Kyle Schwenk near Astoria, OR celebrates his fourth decade of life. Want to see how these and other Kids are related to you? Click here for those who descended from John Schwenk and his immigrant siblings. Click here for all others. Want to see a gallery of pictures of most of these 57 Kids? (212 KB).

Editors' note: The  underlined names are Konrad's Kids.

Dan Blair near Portland, Oregon wrote: Thanks for the newsletter. If you're interested in seeing some great fine art work, I now have an online retail art gallery business going at: http://www.danblair.com/varts.html ...Gerd Schwenk of Laichingen has sent the editors a much improved photo of himself which you can see in the Konrad's Kids Gallery. He also informed us he will bring in the New Millenium at Miami Beach, FL...Markus Hilsenbeck of Neu Ulm, Germany recently acquired his own domain and launched into it a very attractive and interesting Website. Most of the text is in German, some in English. Check it out at: http://www.hilsenbeck.com/...Irene Rehse of Laichingen and Christine Schwenk Moore of Boise, Idaho have recently enrolled in UncleDon'sSchoolof , which he defines as e-mail with formatting, imbedded images and the use of background files - just like you see here on this Webpage! Uncle Don reports that these two students are making remarkable progress and will graduate soon. If anyone else wishes to "enroll," contact Don Schwenk at you know where...Kyle Schwenk and family of Warrenton near Astoria, Oregon spent several days in Seattle and they all took in a Mariner's baseball game there the last weekend of September. Kyle is another Colormail proponent. He also loves to takes snapshots with his digital camera and share them through e-mail. And he is sometimes a ham. Here is a little "production" he calls Stress Reduction...JoAnn Schwenk Carlson of White Bear Lake near St. Paul, MN has been galavanting again. This time with a flight to San Francisco to attend the wedding of her nephew David Schwenk on Sept 11th (see separate article), then accompanied by a girlfriend, rented a car and wandered up the coast to Portland, Oregon where they later departed by air to their homes. While in the Portland area, they visited Jerry Schwenk in Astoria, JoAnn's first cousin and offline brother of Don Schwenk. JoAnn is now using Netscape 4.06, thus can receive and send . Please keep that in mind - those of you who use NS or Outlook Express...Have you noticed that the older you get, the stupider the television commericials become? Do you try to guess what they are hoping to sell? Do you wonder where they find those nitwits who create these? Is the author of this column showing his age?...Tyrone Schwenk who works in Ketchum near Sun Valley loves to drop names. He claims he recently saw Nancy Kerrigan (of the Tanya Harding incident) at the Kneadery Restaurant. He says he heard that Demi Moore was recently seen at the Roosevelt Bar and Tavern in Ketchum and in the company of a young local fellow. He says that the actor who starred in the Green Lantern was in the Kneadery recently. And of course Arnold and Maria stop in often...Milton Schwenk of Yakima, WA has reminded the editors that years ago in Sunnyside, WA the local newspaper, The Sunnyside Sun, would be sure to mention the names of each of their subscribers at least once a year in the hope this would encourage them to renew their yearly subscription. Maybe that's what we're trying to do here? Well, not really since your subscription to this monthly SNNL is free ...Last month we reported that Dieter Rehse on August 11th had climbed a high peak in the Alps, and there witnessed a total eclipse of the sun. Click here for a photograph of this mountain climber/super cop from Laichingen...Speaking of mountain climbing, that is also what Heidi Carlson and her friend Todd Tratz, both of St. Paul MN, did after the wedding of her first cousin David Schwenk in San Francisco. David and Karen loaned them the use of their apartment and also their Ford Explorer with which to drive to Yosemite where they climbed the famous Half Dome...That's all folks.

Two New Kids make 59
 

As of the end of September, the number of known online descendants of Konrad Schwenk, 1601-86, has grown to 59. The two new Kids are Markus Hilsenbeck of Neu Ulm and his first cousin Gudrun Hilsenbeck of Ludwigsfeld, Germany. These are communities just south of Ulm and lie across The Blue Danube in the State of Bavaria and around 20 miles SSE of Laichingen. What follows is a short story of how these long lost cousins were found. On September 19th, Marcus left a message in the Guest Book of Uncle Don's Corner after checking out the Hilsenbeck page. Three days later, he sent a short email to Don indicating an interest in his own family history. Don knew immediately that Markus was blood kin (99% certain) through a common ancestor Philipp Hilsenbeck, 1628-78, who lived most of his life in Feldstetten next to Laichingen. Incidentally, around 75 % of all Konrad's Kids share that same ancestor. After an exchange of email and a quick visit to the local LDS library, Don connected Markus' g-grandfather Johannes Hilsenbeck b. 1877 in Laichingen to a Heinrich Hilsenbeck b. 1728 who was already in Don's database. As it turns out, Heinrich's mother was Anna Schwenk b. 31 May 1708. After a quick check in his computer, Don saw that her g-grandfather was our Patriarch/Stammvater Konrad Schwenk! Thus, Markus is a distant Schwenk cousin to all of us as well as a distant Hilsenbeck cousin to most of us. On the 25th, Gudrun Hilsenbeck sent Don email indicating she is a first cousin of Markus. You can see their Schwenk family tree by clicking here.  It is with great pleasure that we welcome these two Hilsenbecks into this growing network of kin. You can check out your kinship connection to them by taking the links provided in the Birthday column above. If anyone desires a list of the email addresses of all 59 Konrad's Kids, please contact your editors.

Schwenk Wedding on San Francisco Bay

At 7:00 PM on Saturday, September 11, 1999 several online Schwenk cousins met to celebrate the marriage of David Lloyd Schwenk and Karen Hultquist at the South Beach Harbor in San Francisco. CA. David is the son of James (son of Lloyd Schwenk)  and Mary Schwenk of Wausau, WI. Karen, the daughter of Carl and Marilyn Hultquist of Orange County, CA.  The couple exchanged vows in a park like setting of the marina before a backdrop of sea wall and sailboats. The Reverand Cecil Williams of the Glide Methodist Church of San Francisco officiated. David's sister, Kathryn Axtell and her children Jameson and Roslyn also took part in the wedding party.  In attendance, were also the groom's aunt JoAnn Carlson and her daughter Heidi Carlson from Minnesota (all online, Konrad Kids).   After the service the wedding party and guests boarded a dinner boat for the wedding celebration and toured San Francisco Bay for the remainder of the evening.

During the week after the wedding, the couple honeymooned in Wisconsin's Door County vacation area and attended yet another reception for friends and relatives from the Minnesota/Wisconsin area atop Rib Mountain in Wausau, Wisconsin. This event proved to be even more of a "family reunion" for all those attending, with almost all of the folks accepting the invitation. After this successful event, David and Karen returned to San Francisco, where they will make their home.  David is an internal web-master at Snap.Com,  while Karen is an account executive for the Copeland Companies of The City Group. This is the first wedding celebration to be featured in the Webpage version of the SNNL. Here's wishing David and Karen the brightest of futures.
To see pictures of the wedding, click on this small image to view large (151 K) image.

A Small World Story

( Editors note: This reprinted email was sent on September 8, 1999 to a few Schwenk kin)

I received a fax from Heinrich Schwenk this morning. He said he plans to go to Mundingen and Kochstetten this weekend with a group of people and that he would like to understand his kinship connection to Uschi Gorzelany and that he hopes to introduce himself while there.  I just now sent the attached descent tree to him via Dieter Rehse. Now, would you like to hear a small world story?

Heinrich also said that about 10 days ago, some business people from Stuttgart were at his linen shop in Laichingen. One of them just happened to mention that they were later to drive down to Kochstetten and that Heinrich probably didn't know exactly where that was located. And further that a young woman, an Uschi Gorzelany from there, was visiting in America at that moment. Can you imagine Heinrich's astonishment! And then Heinrich replied that his son had just a few days earlier met Uschi at my place here in Idaho. Talk about small world stories! Don Schwenk.

A Word from Uncle Don - Immigrants

Back in the mid-1800s in the old Kingdom of Wuerttemberg, economic conditions were wretched. Bad crop years, industrialization and overpopulation were the principle causes of these. Desperate times make people take desperate actions. And that was to pack ones belongings, say goodbye to friends and family and board a ship bound for America to join other friends or relatives who had gone before them and had written home saying, "Come on over. It's good here."

Of the present 59 online descendants of Konrad Schwenk, 45 reside in the United States. They are the descendants of seven immigrants who left Laichingen or communities near there between 1853 and 1956. See table below.
 

Keep in mind that the 44 in America and the 15 in S. Germany are the known descendants of Konrad who are connected to the Internet. I often wonder how many more descendants of him who are online remain unidentified - or at least remain unidentified to me. There are only two ways for these to become known to me: 1. Through visitors to my Website  (the Hilsenbecks as a recent case in point), or to the SchwenkNet Website. 2. For you 59 Kids to inform me of children, siblings and other kin who are likewise descendants of Konrad Schwenk who are now online.

And why is this quest to locate more Konrad's Kids important - if it is? Well, my answer would be that it is just plain fun and interesting.