Donauschwaben Villages Helping Hands
The Ties That Bind – Worldwide

By Jody McKim Pharr, DVHH Founder & Webmaster, January 15, 2013.
Edited by Nick Tullius and Jane Ehardt Moore.

     I was on my way to a land unknown to me but was determined to find my roots, and this is where the story of the DVHH really begins.  In January of 1999, I booked a flight to Budapest in hopes of visiting the Hungarian National Archives to find my grandmother’s birth record.  I soon learned I had not done my homework before planning the trip. Unfortunately, most who knew the answers to my many questions had died.  My mother told me all she knew was that Grandmother was from a town called “Temeswar,” which I found in an old atlas and, after further reading, learned is located today in Romania and called Timişoara.  After a four-hour train ride from Budapest, I arrived in Timisoara the evening that the US airstrikes started in Belgrade (March 1999).

     The first night in Timisoara, I located some relatives and learned about my “Donauschwaben” roots, a word I had never heard before. The next day, I went to my ancestral village, Mercydorf, and visited the Catholic Church where my family worshiped, the homes where they lived, and the cemetery where many are buried.  As I walked down the winding lanes, a cool breeze brushed across my face and I wept tears of joy.

     It was this trip that spurred on my journey of discoveries.  My story is not unique.  I’ve found that most newbie researchers have little information to start with, mainly because immigrant parents and grandparents didn’t want to talk about the old country, saying, “We are here in America now; the past is in the past!”

     I subscribed to a genealogy group mail list and became acquainted with many helpful people. One person in particular was Beryl Henry, who offered to do lookups in reference books relevant to the Donauschwaben.  She personally guided me through a useful website, which was in German.  And a few days later, she e-mailed me a hand-transcribed list of information regarding my family, which must have taken her hours to write out.  I thanked her wholeheartedly and expressed my appreciation for the extent of her efforts and time.  I then received the following response:

Just glad to help, Jody.  It seems that searching for our ancestors makes one want to help others like they did.  Today many have lost the art or haven't wanted to keep it alive.  I know my ancestors struggled to keep alive through all sorts of challenges and yet, I'm sure, when someone needed a helping hand or a kind word, they did what they could knowing that "the shoe could be on the other foot" at any time.  I like to think that my ancestors passed on this desire to be kind in their genes to their descendants and it's up to us to find it and use it and make them proud of their progeny.  Don't you agree?  - Beryl Henry, May 2002

     Her words became a source of inspiration to me.  I began to think about what I could do to give a “‘helping hand” to English-speaking researchers, because at that time there was little online information in English about the Donauschwaben.  I then put together a project proposal that would become Donauschwaben Villages Helping Hands (DVHH). 

     In mid-December 2002, I recruited a small team of new researchers to begin setting up the initial DVHH website: Chris Kech and Kim Geiger, along with Mike O'Brien, who stepped up to generously donate web space on his server for the project and who guided me on how to create and publish a website. After many days and nights, we managed to get DVHH on line on January 15, 2003. 

     Our Mission was and is to collect and provide historical and genealogical information for the former Danube Swabian (DS) villages situated in the six regions which were part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire until 1918: Banat, Batschka, Slavonia-Syrmia, Swabian Turkey, Hungarian Highlands, and Sathmar.

     The name “Danube Swabians” was coined in 1920 by Dr. Hermann Rüdiger (a scientist from Stuttgart) and Robert Sieger (a geographer from Graz) and validated by the German Foreign Department in 1930, during the Weimar Republic.  The Germans realized that, left unassisted and divided among the Romanians, Yugoslavs and Hungarians, the Danube Swabians would not be able to resist assimilation attempts.  As an ethnic group, they would disappear, and with them a culture and values worth preserving.  This collective name would identify and better describe the Germans whose ancestors settled in Hungary during the three Great Swabian Migrations.

     In the last decade, genealogy has become a favorite pastime throughout the world, and the Internet has certainly been instrumental in helping family researchers. The Donauschwaben researchers can easily find their way to DVHH.org, which often results in their adding more branches and twigs to their family tree.  In addition, the DVHH can help find long-lost friends and relatives and foster longtime friendships. On our mail list, we have witnessed cousins connecting before our eyes, resulting in some of the most amazing stories. We've seen reuniting of friends who once lived in the same neighborhood.  These wonderful stories are preserved in the mail list archives and can be revisited at any time.

     In the early months and years of the DVHH, volunteers such as Alex Leeb, John Busch, Diana Lambing, Nick Tullius, and Rose Mary Keller Hughes helped us to set a course and remain steadfast.  As time passed, every new volunteer or contributor added to our helping hands.  In October 2003, we secured the official DVHH.org domain name and Mara Henderson initiated the DVHH mail list hosted by RootsWeb, our medium for one-on-one assistance to researchers.  

     Donauschwaben Villages Helping Hands consists of all volunteers; people who desire to help descendants of the Danube Swabian discover their ancestral roots, history, environs, culture, and lifestyles.  We’ve been especially blessed with content contributors who were born in the old country and have shared their first-hand knowledge with the rest of us.  Among our major content contributors are Alex Leeb, Diana Lambing, Nick Tullius, Adam Martini, Jacob Steigerwald, Rose Vetter, Anne Dreer, Katherine Flotz, Hans Dama, Hans Gehl, and Robert Rohr. 

     One of our best attractions is that we offer free web space to all volunteers who want to create and maintain a website for one of the many towns and villages scattered throughout the six regions that once had Danube-Swabian inhabitants. These village websites are wonderful sources of information, photos, family registries, maps, and various other data specific to those villages.  Through their websites—today representing 86 villages—the so-called DVHH Village Coordinators are bringing researchers all over the world closer to their ancestral villages.

     From 2003 to 2007, the DVHH grew rapidly, more Village Coordinators signed up, and more Donauschwaben-related articles were submitted for publication. As the volume of web pages grew into the hundreds—today into the thousands—it has certainly kept me, the main publisher, busy.  The DVHH was initially managed by a core group of dedicated volunteers.  At the recommendation of one core member, Nancy Wyman (Florida, USA), the DVHH established itself as a nonprofit organization, with a base of members, each one paying a small amount annually for their membership.  This incorporation and resulting financial support of the members has ensured the online presence of the DVHH for the next generations.

     No one is required to register as a dues-paying member in order to volunteer, contribute, gain access to information on our website, or to ask and receive assistance with their research.  (Our bylaws require only board and committee members to be registered DVHH members.)  While it is not our policy to accept payments to our “helping hands” for their assistance to others, we are happy to accept donations to the DVHH general fund.  All monies go toward the maintenance of our website hosting, domain name, guestbook, online meeting space, membership materials, postage, and yearly event expenses; no person receives a salary or monetary compensation of any kind.  Today we have a thriving and loyal membership base, managed by the DVHH Membership Registrar, Jane Moore (Utah, US).  Over 150 people have become DVHH members since 2007.  Most reside in the United States and Canada, but we’ve also had members from Germany, Austria, Croatia, Italy, and Australia.  (See www.dvhh.org/membership/registry.htm for a list of our current members.)