Greetings, Everyone! First off, a quick introduction: My name Alan Kleipass. I am new to the list (obviously) and new to the genealogy tracking hobby. This whole semester, my English class has been focusing on families and family history -- and the fictional dangers of researching it (The Swine's Wedding by Daniel Evan Weiss was our first reading assignment). The last writing assignment for the course was to write about a dead relative whom we knew. I chose my maternal grandmother. My mother and I each thought that we had a pretty good idea of her and her family history, but the very limited research I did for that assignment turned up several major surprises, and unanswered some questions we thought that we knew the answers to. Though the paper is finished and turned into my professor, the desire to answer these new questions is very strong. Now, on to the first question: Family lore had it that my maternal grandmother's father (Stefan Kraier) was a French Jew, who moved to Germany in the late 1800s, settled in Bendorf, married Katherine Decker -- a Roman Catholic -- and they raised 7 children (in the R.C. faith) there until moving to the US in the early 1920s. The first crack in that lore was the ship manifest for Stefan's voyage to the US. It listed his place of birth as Bendorf. Assuming this isn't a typo, it does raise questions about how long his family had actually been in Germany. So, was there a specific time period in the 1800s where French Jews -- or the French in general -- were moving to Germany? Or was the area around Bendorf ever occupied or controlled by the French? ~Alan J. Kleipass~