The Beginnings of a Family of Triebswetter

       
 
The land and the houses, with everything they contained, do not belong to us anymore. All that I took with me, upon leaving, was a suitcase; in it, among others, the photographs and a copy book, like the ones used at school some sixty years ago. It contains the diary of my grandmother, written during the years of the second world war. On the last page, she has written down her family tree. For a long time, I didn't pay attention to this, I just cherished this document because it contained the handwriting of my beloved Oma. It was with me everywhere:on the high plateaus of Southern Arabia, where I lived for ten years, and now in Germany. One day, as my life became calmer, out of the blue, I became curious: Where is Rakour?
       
The following is the story of one segment of a genealogical research, the fruit of years of :

- reading relevant and irrelevant books, patiently provided by a good soul from our interlibrary loan dept.
- spending time and money abroad, in Lorraine, to walk on the footsteps of these ancestors
- spending endless hours in the corner of a library, scrolling through hundreds of badly written churchbook pages on a microfilm reader, till my first pair of glasses was due
- being on several mailing lists and getting help from good angels out there.

Was it worth it? What I have found out seems very little but isn't no news also good news?!

Damas is not the only name I have researched, I picked out Maurice Damas because this is the line I could find out the most about. Which, in fact, is not very much. It doesn't tell me anything about his personality, only that he existed in a line bearing the name of Damas. Which is normal, what can one expect to find out about an ordinary man who lived in the 18th century? Only the fact that he left his home and made the big journey to the Banat enables me to build a story around him, in which the circumstances of his life have to be presumed, based upon what we know about those times.