When my grandfather, Heinz Herbert Meissner, died in his home at the ripe old age of 96, surprisingly, his children and grandchildren were caught off guard. Although he had started developing some health problems, including a minor stroke that he recovered from in only two days, his resolve and stoicism had always been the stuff of legend, as had been his father's before him. We had all been certain that he would live to be a hundred, and only realised at the time of his death that this had been a bit of a delusion of our own invention!
His funeral was remarkably well-attended for someone who had outlived his wife, friends and acquaintances. For the first time, our side of the family were introduced to other South African members of the Meissner family: children and grandchildren of my grandfather's siblings, for whom we promised to send copies of a family history my grandfather had been compiling ever since his golden wedding anniversary, when my aunt Elke gave him an empty notebook with the instruction to lay out the Meissner family tree. My grandfather set to work and wrote down everything he knew from memory or record. As he was the only living child (out of seven) of the first generation of Meissners who made South Africa their home, and his memory began to fail him in the years thereafter, this gift proved to be truly inspired.
My mom took it upon herself to scan the pages of my grandfather's book, along with other documents and photos she could find, to compile as a CD-Rom to hand out to her siblings as well as our "newly-acquired" family members from the funeral. As she was busy with this task, there were a few details about her great grandfather, Johann Friederich Meissner, that caught her attention as either being specifically interesting but lacking detail, or perhaps not quite accurate. This, along with the fact that there was very little information in my grandfather's book about the women in the family, led her to continue my grandfather's family research beyond his scope and into the annals of family research websites, archives and other records. It was also at this point that I became more involved, as my mom's limited internet skills proved to stifle her research a bit, and eventually I got bitten by the bug too!
Johann Friederich was a man with a bee in his bonnet, we found out. My great great grandfather moved around a lot, working as a photographer in Alexandria, Egypt - where he was awarded an Adler (eagle) needle for his "aufmerksamkeit" as a thank you from the crown prince of Prussia, Friedrich Wilhelm III - and in Paarl, South Africa - where his photos bore the Prussian royal family crest on the back - before returning with his family to the Riesengebirge (Giant Mountains) in what is today a part of Poland.
While my mother found out that Johann Friederich's wife's name was Josefine, and that they had two daughters, Emma and Amalie, as well as a son, my great grandfather, Friedrich Wilhelm, there remained a great many gaps in our research that we began to realise could only be filled in by a trip to Germany and Poland. We wanted to know more about the significance of the Adler needle, about Josefine, Emma and Amalie, and whether we had any remaining family members in Germany today. We wanted to see if we could find out the story behind a little anecdote in my grandfather's book, about how Johann Friederich chased a Roman Catholic priest out of his house, pushing him down the stairs, and about a hunch of my mother's that he might have been married to someone else before he married Josefine. And thus the idea for a trip was born that would take us to the archives in Berlin and Dresden and to a couple of little towns in Selesia, Poland.
