GENEALOGY IN EUROPE: PART I

My husband and I just returned from 3 weeks in Europe and, having now had three weeks to recover, I am ready to share some of the amazing experiences we had, especially as they relate to family.

The family part of the trip occurred in the third week, but I must take a few lines to talk about the first two weeks. 

The first week was spent in Paris.  I had never been there before and wasn't prepared for all that I saw and encountered.  Paris has a well deserved reputation for being one of the most glamorous and sophisticated cities in the world, and in fact, Paris truly is magnificent.  My only wish was that I had been able to appreciate it when I was a little younger and more mobile.  Paris is not made for older people.  Still, there was so much to see that in one week, you could barely begin.  We visited two gardens: the Tuilleries and Luxembourg.  We saw three museums:  the Orsay, the Pompidou, and L'Orangerie - home to Monet's famous water lilies.  We visited two departments stores, two cathedrals, and, of course, the Eiffel Tower.  We ate at an amazing assortment of restaurants and took a Seine River Cruise.  All were wonderful.

On one of the days, we took the train to Bayeux, in Normandy, where we saw the 1000 year old Bayeux Tapestry which records the victory of William the Conqueror in the longest  piece of embroidery in the world. 

We traveled to Lyon to take a river cruise for 7 days.  We saw Roman ruins, sampled the foods of Provence, went to local wineries, saw the Papal Palace in Avignon and an intact medieval village dating back to the 1200s.  It was a remarkable week.

Then we rented a car and drove up to the Lorraine region of France.  Here is where the genealogy part of our travels began.  We had made arrangements to meet a very colorful Frenchman by the  name of Jerome.  Jerome has dedicated much of his life to helping people remember WW II and the sacrifice made by so many.  He has built a museum that houses countless artifacts from the war, and has created many replicas and miniature displays.

 Jerome spent the day with us and took us first to the bridge at the town of Flavigny where a cousin of mine, Ralph Brennan, died in September of 1944.  There is a plaque on the bridge with Ralph's name on it. 

Because I was the first of my family to visit the memorial, the mayor of the town and a few other dignitaries came out to greet us and have pictures taken for the local paper. 

 

Jerome then drove us around the area and introduced us to a 93 year old man whose father had been mayor of Flavigny when Ralph's brother, Dominican priest Father Robert Brennan, asked if he could have a cross carved into the newly rebuilt bridge where Ralph died.  Decades after the cross was carved into the bridge, a plaque was finally placed on the bridge in Ralph's honor and a new bronze cross inserted into the space where the old cross was once  the only reminder of what had happened on that bridge. 

Basically, the story of Ralph's sacrifice is this:  On the night of September 10-11, 1944, Lt. Ralph Brennan was leading a group of men to try to retake the only remaining bridge over the Moselle River. (Having been wounded a few months earlier, he had only been back at the front for 3 days.) The Germans had destroyed all the other bridges in order to prevent the Allies, who had landed in Normandy a few months before, from marching further into France and ultimately to Germany.  Lt. Brennan and his men crossed the bridge at night and were supposed to be followed by tanks and reinforcements. They hoped these support units would help them in fighting the Germans who were waiting on the other side.  As so often happens in the fog of war, the reinforcements never came and the young lieutenant and most of his men were ambushed and either killed or seriously wounded.  Lt. Brennan was mortally wounded, though he didn't die immediately.  Having lost an arm and a leg, he lay dying near the bridge when a fellow soldier offered him a last cigarette.  He died that night and was buried in St. Avold, at the Lorraine American Cemetery very close to the German border.

 

When my husband and I planned this trip, we had hoped we would have time to visit that cemetery, but our schedule was so packed that we simply couldn't arrange it.  However, the next day, when we were driving to a small town in Germany to see some distant relatives on my mother's side of the family, we got lost.  When our GPS finally got us headed in the right direction, we found ourselves in front of the cemetery.  Though we didn't have time to visit Ralph's grave, we felt that fate had somehow taken us by that cemetery.  And in finding myself there, looking at the final resting place of a man I never knew but have heard so much about, I felt a closeness not just to Ralph, but to the entire Brennan family who is proud to count this hero as one of them.