QUEENSLAND'S GERMAN CONNECTIONS - PAST, PRESENT AND FUTURE

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For anyone investigating family lineage in the 1970s, it was a world vastly different to the one we know today: there were telephones of course, but no internet, and enquiries were made in person, or written and posted by surface or air mail. Responses happened not in megabytes per second, but could take hours, days, often many weeks – if, indeed, sources could be found and contacted. Records lay in fragile letters, dusty ledgers or on unwieldy microfilm or microfiche, not in the digital instant download of a search engine. It was always thus for family historians and social investigators, but painstaking, dogged research could bear surprising fruit given sufficient time and patience. But the difficulties confronting those seeking their forebears amongst the Germans who left the undulating lowlands, lakes and broad agricultural expanses of Brandenburg and the Uckermark to voyage to the other side of the planet, were for a long time insurmountable. Their ancestral Prussian homelands, contested and traversed by armies of various kingdoms for many hundred years, lay for the second half of the 20th century in the forbidding and forbidden landscape behind the Iron Curtain. The legacy of that time remains, and some stories may never be able to be fully told.

The scenic Uckermark region is now a pleasant day’s outing for anyone in Berlin with access to a car, but town and church records may have suffered from the ravages of recent history and even headstones in cemeteries – such as Günterberg’s, shown here – may yield nothing, if entire generations of families had uprooted and left for newer worlds. Images by the editor

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