Dear Listers, To all those folks who are not familiar with Louisville, KY, let me say it is a Southern town with very German roots. At one time 40% of the population was German Catholic, which means Southern Germany. I have been told that the area, on the Ohio River, looked like the Rhineland and that is what attracted so many Germans. I do not know if that is true. Louisville is my home. Although I have lived in California for many years and have been away from Louisville since 1957, I have never found a more polite, concerned populace. I was at the University of Louisville in 1950 when a petition was circulated asking if Blacks should be allowed to attend the University, and I think the response was 99% saying, "Sounds like a great idea." The other one per cent thought they were already on campus. Germans were something else. They did not have a great socio-economic status. In local publications such as the very good newspaper, the Louisville Courier-Journal, Germans did not seem to exist. But there were no less than five German newspapers by 1874. In my own family, which had some pretensions of grandeur, there were three German ancestors. But they were seldom mentioned. Some German was spoken in my home, as a flavoring to our everyday Southern English. It added variety and some understanding. Still, two World Wars made Germans and Germany unpopular. Now my studies have shown that our German ancestors were brave and industrious, entrepreneurs of a good sort. They are to be emulated, not to be the source of embarrassment for being recent immigrants. Even today, though, I find it difficult to dig out any useful information on my German ancestors from cousins who shared my ancestry. On top of that, the 1937 flood wiped out public records. So it is going to be an uphill battle to find anything useful about these strong, self-reliant folks. Tom the Bewildered.