Today, I got a communication from someone doing family history research who found this site via a Google search result on the surname "Hess" and the name of his ancestral village in southern Germany.
In a careful examination this evening of my family tree scroll for that branch of the family, I cannot determine we are related in any directly discernible way. Still, there are tantalizing ways in which we could almost be related, and maybe someone could figure out how that might be. I will be providing him with the contents of the scroll one way or the other.
The name of his ancestral village, Neckartailfingen, can clearly be seen on the map I included in a previous post as being just two miles from Neckartenzlingen, our Höss/Hess epicenter. (The river Neckar, which I saw on my trip to the area last year, is a tributary of the Rhine.)
We established both our Hess branches are jovial and humor-loving. However, I did not yet query him on the Schwabian/Swabian work ethic. See:
http://lawpundit.blogspot.com/2010/05/greek-crisis-angela-merkel-and-swabian.html
http://swiki.hfbk-hamburg.de:8888/Lebensreform/68
In our family, when one of us tells the other we had a "Swabian attack," it means neither a circulatory system disorder nor a violent act by a barbarian tribe, but rather an irresistible feeling of being seized to tidy, clean, and shine one's home and yard from top to bottom. I will get back to my readers on whether this trait has carried over to my new friend's family after further correspondence!
In small world news, he grew up in the same town my grandparents and aunt lived in from the '50s on in eastern Pennsylvania and attended the same high school my aunt taught at, although after her tenure there had ended. (He now resides in a different state.)
He pointed me to a genealogy sharing website I'd not yet discovered, Geni.com, so there you go, something to occupy me during my after-Christmas days off.
Anyway, it's always nice to converse with others obsessed with family history and to help each other with info and clues, whether or not biologically related.
Is that where they get the terms "swab the deck", or "cotton swabs"? Hesston, Kansas always seems like such a pristine, tidy town. Must be some non-Swabians (Hesses?) who also have a neat fetish.