Visiting Family in the Leingarten Cemetery

On this Sunday evening Martin and Elly went with us to the Leingarten Cemetery to visit family members there.  There aren’t many of our people’s headstones left here.  After 20 or 30 years, the headstones are removed, standard procedure.  None of the stones from the older generations remain.

Hilde died in 2019.  She was married to Dad’s cousin, Kurt, son of Hermann.  Hermann died in a tragic farm accident at age 42.  The tongue of the wagon hit him in the stomach and ruptured something.  It was not treated in time to save him.

Kurt’s brother, Rudolf also had a stone here.  He was cremated.  He had learning disabilities, but lived a long life.  He was living in Grandpa Rudolf’s childhood home where Hilde helped look after him.

Here’s Helmut’s headstone.  He died in 2016.  His daughter Regina’s plot has also been turned over to the next person, but there is a stone to her memory on Helmut’s plot.

The Leingarten Cemetery is small and peaceful.

Martin & Elly’s grandma is Sofie Werner Laemmlen (m. Rudolf’s brother Karl Albert “Heinrich” Laemmlen). Sofie had a sister named Frieda. Frieda married Karl Hauff, Gerhard’s father. I met the Hauff family in 1976 and they’ve visited us in America. Gerhard lived in Canada a couple of years and he spoke English well. He worked for a lumber company. His wife is Erika and she is still living, but she has dementia now. She was delightful and fun. Gerhard and Erika have 4 kids–Martin, Barbel, Andreas and Karl-Heinrich. Some of the kids have come to America to visit our branch. What a nice family.

Gerhard Hauf had one sibling, a brother named Reinhard.

Reinhard’s son, Werner died of cancer in 2020.

Those are the only family members still represented here.  We saw the place where Onkel Richard and Tante Marie’s stones once stood.  It’s vacant now.

I wonder how many hundreds and hundreds of my relatives have been buried in this cemetery.  Thank goodness their names are recorded elsewhere.