2. A child's view

Growing up in a family in which all four of my grandparents were born in Germany or Switzerland, gave my earliest days a mixed German-Swiss-Texan cultural influence.   People around me spoke German, and "sayings" from German sprinkled their everyday speech.   My German-speaking grandmother stayed with us often during the 1950's and 60's.    My Krieg uncles and one aunt spoke Swiss when they all got together once a year.   Nobody else could understand them, not even the German speakers.    Most of my Swiss uncles were born at New Bern, Texas, the town named after the capital of Switzerland.   Their Swiss-born mother was quadrilingual, meaning she spoke, read and wrote four languages.    My grandmother died long before I was born.    In the Lutheran church where I grew up, German [and Wendish] accented the English language.   The hymns were European in origin.   These linguistic influences encouraged my later studies in English, Latin and French.  
 

The movie Heidi, based on the child's book by Johanna Spyri, was released in 1952 when I was 4 years old.    The star Heidi (Elsbeth Sigmund, born October 25, 1942 in Winterthur, Switzerland) was only 6 years older than me.   For the first time I "saw" Germany and Switzerland, from the point of view of another child.   The movie is still my all-time favorite.   One of my prized possessions before I was 8 years old was a soft-cover book of the movie, with photographs, a book that I read and reread and studied its pictures.   A few years ago my daughter found the movie on Amazon and gave it to me, to my total happiness!    My son bought me the German-language movie, Heidi und Peter, the second version of the Heidi movie, with the same actors a little older.    It is pure joy to watch those movies!

Here is another book I had when I was little --    

                                                 
Lutheranism, languages, hymns and Heidi, and the people around me, in church and at home, had everything to do with my early interest in family history.