Humans of Chapelboro: An illuminating trip to France

This week’s Humans of Chapelboro continues the story of George and Ruth Ann Groh of Chapel Hill. See the first post about them here. 

Ruth Ann: George’s grandfather, Emile Jung, emigrated to Boston from Eastern France in the 1890’s, leaving behind a whole family with many brothers. But after George’s mother, Rosalie, died in 1967, there was no one to ask about the French family. We had time to travel and to sort things out after our children had grown up. I found a travel diary from a trip to France that George’s mother had gone on with her father in 1925. Emile was French, but he emigrated from Alsace-Lorraine, which was in German territory at the time. So from this travel diary, we followed Rosalie’s description of going with her father to his birth place. We were able to track the train trip and find where he was born–a village in eastern France called Saint-Louis. And then we had a place on a map. That was in 1985.

George: We knew that during their trip before World War II, there had been a live family. But we didn’t know what had happened.

 

RA: There’d been no communication for years, because of the wars, and we didn’t have any of the old letters. In 1992, our friends told us how much fun it was to go boating in France. You could rent a boat and drive it yourself on the canals in France. And we thought that sounded like a lot of fun. We planned a boating trip with friends in the spring of 1992. When we turned the boat in at the end, we looked at more maps, and found out that it would be possible to reach the village of Saint-Louis in eastern France–where George’s grandfather was from–by boat.

RA: So over the summer we thought about it, and at some point we said, let’s go back in the fall and find Saint-Louis. So we did, just the two of us this time, renting a smaller boat. We eventually got to Saint-Louis, and so we got on our bicycles that we had rented and went into the village. We looked for traces of the family in the cemetery. But we didn’t find any names of anybody named Jung. Then a nice old couple in the cemetery–the Wagners–told us there was an older cemetery, and they took us there. At the older cemetery, George recognized the name of someone he had heard mentioned–Louise Kaiser. She was married to someone in the family. We thought that was the end of it. We went back to our boat and we continued on.

Stay tuned next week for a new Humans of Chapelboro. Read part 3 of Ruth Ann and George’s story here. 

Photos taken by Aleta Donald.