Trip to old country brings past to life

by Marie Johnson

He traveled more than 6,000 miles to deliver the invitation in person so we felt we had to RSVP we would be attending and there would be four in our party.

He was Karl Jergen Neddenriep from Frankfurt, Germany. He was asking my husband, myself and our two sons to come to a Neddenriep family reunion near Bergen, Germany, north of Hanover on June 30. This family reunion has been occurring every three years for 82 years since 1929.

We had been invited before, but the kids were too small or an event conflicted with the date. This year we said yes. Our oldest son had just graduated from Douglas High School and our other son would be graduating next year so before they went off to make their way in the world it would be good for them to know where they came from and what they could be capable of doing.

They knew their forefathers came across the Atlantic to avoid the Prussian war. Two cousins trying to avoid being conscripted into the Kaiser's army came to Carson Valley to farm. One cousin went back to Nebraska where he liked it better while one stayed in Carson Valley and beckoned his family to join him. In 1872 Claus Fredrick Neddenriep and his wife, Anna Engel Neddenriep came to America with their grown and growing children.

It was a difficult choice to leave all the comforts of their home in Germany behind. The family had been established in its own free homestead since 1552. There are records kept by the family Neddenriep, we learned on our visit, that record Neddenrieps established in the region of now northern Germany since the 1100s.

Stories were told of uncles who, at the start of the 1940s, escaping the New German Reich, had everything they were traveling with taken from them at the border. They arrived in America with only the clothes on their backs. They somehow wired for help from New York to the Neddenrieps in Carson Valley who sent money to get them to Reno. They lived at the ranch for one year, the ranch where my husband grew up and raised his sons. These relatives with only the skill of their hands and quickness of their minds purchased land, started commercial businesses and banks in Carson Valley.

It was good to hear all the stories of who went where when they got to America. It was interesting to meet Neddenrieps from other states telling the stories of their family tree they knew from their great aunts, uncles or grandparents.

The four of us only knew the words for thank you, please and good-bye in German but many Germans were well-versed and fluent in English even if they had to pause for a minute to think of the word to answer our many questions and compliments about their beautiful half-timbered homes and pristine farms. A horse barn captured my attention so much that I took multiple pictures from the stable door because the barn floor was so clean the shinning afternoon sun reflected off the cement causing a glare in my camera.

The Germans talked of their country's history and the events of the world wars, of which they say they are not proud. A visit to the infamous Bergen concentration camp was part of the afternoon events. They do not want to forget their past, but remember and learn. All this was said in broken English over many pints of beer and a buffet of food offered for a king's table.

The afternoon of the family reunion began with players of jagdhorns or hunting horns announcing the beginning of the program and a buffet set out with racks of hanging sausages and hot dishes steaming with at least four different types of potatoes, platters of hams, bratwursts, pig shanks and cured pork.

Boards loaded with cheeses from creamy soft whites to hard yellow, herbed and plain, pickled herrings, hard rolls and of course pretzels were offered. Tables of mixed fruit torts, German chocolate cakes, Black Forest cake and berry pies lined a whole wall inside a few hundred year old, half-timbered, outbuilding where the reunion was held.

Our children heard stories of where their forefathers came from and stood for a picture with the Neddenriep family who live and raise breeder pigs on the original homestead established in the 1500s as Hof Neddenriep. Back in America now they will make their own history.

-- Marie Johnson is a Carson Valley rancher.