Grandma's Granny's Family Album

Have you heard of the Headless Horseman of Sleepy Hollow? I was looking at church records from Philipsburgh Manor in Westchester County, NY, since that is where our ancestor John B. Acker said he was from ( see Parts 1 and 2 in Acker Series, see Acker Pedigree Chart ).  The records are partially written in Dutch, which is actually pretty easy to read, once you know that  Kind  means child and gedoopt means baptized. The records collection is called both  Record Book of the Old Dutch Church of Sleepy Hollow and  Dutch Reformed Church Records of First Tarrytown Church .  I remembered that the Headless Horseman chased Ichabod Crane thru the graveyard of the Old Dutch Church, so I looked to see how many Dutch churches there were in Westchester County, and how far Philipsburgh, Tarrytown, and Sleepy Hollow are from each other. The Headless Horseman is good for the tourist trade Come to find out, there is only one Dutch church, and it is old, having been built ...

This is the saddest thing I have ever read. I have been "reading" the history of Rockenberg, my Sulzbach great-grandparents' hometown.  The towns of Rockenberg and Oppershofen, 2 km away, have been intertwined for centuries, so it was on the website of the Culture and History Society of Oppershofen, http://www.marienschloss.de/arc-roc800.html, that I found Heimatbuch Rockenberg (hometown book of Rockenberg).  This history was written in 1950 by Johann Jakob Gesser to commemorate the 800th anniversary of the town.  You read that right, 800 years!  From 1150 to 1950.  Yes, people were writing down what they thought was important in 1150. The Heimatbuch runs 376 well-sourced pages. But before you go for it, I need to warn you, it is written in German.  That's why I say I am "reading" it.  I copy a paragraph or two, paste it in Google Translate, and then try to combine the high school German I learned 45 years ago with what Google Translate thinks it says...