Bonhoeffer's meditation on the “old spirit” provides the concept with which we will examine our own families’ heritage.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, in prison for plotting to overthrow Hitler, wrote about heritage upon the occasion of the baptism of his nephew, which he could not attend.

"By the time you have grown up, the old country parsonage and the old town villa will belong to a vanished world. But the old spirit, after a time of misunderstanding and weakness, withdrawal and recovery, preservation and rehabilitation, will produce new forms. To be deeply rooted in the soil of the past makes life harder, but it also makes it richer and more vigorous. There are in human life certain fundamental truths to which men will always return sooner or later; we have to be able to wait." {1}

The infant Dietrich Bethge had been born to Eberhard Bethge, who was married to Dietrich Bonhoeffer's niece, Renate. Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Eberhard Bethge were ministers in the Confessing Church and opposed Hitler, an opposition for which Dietrich Bonhoeffer and other members of his family paid with their lives.

Eberhard Bethge served as chaplain to a German infantry unit in northern Italy. In the winter 1945, he and his unit retreated to Germany before the American advance in which my father fought and during which he wrote some of the letters about Lucknow.

Let us introduce the settings of my family which are the locations for such hope as Bonhoeffer expressed regarding his family and their ministry.

Elisabeth's family has their nineteenth century genealogy pretty well worked out. Her great grandfather, Emil, living in Hannover, Germany, typed his reminiscences of the family, “Ruckblicke und Erinnerungen!”, in 1923. Historically sensitive, he wished to protect the spiritual heritage of the family against calumny: the family acquitted itself without reproach in the “Weltkrieges”. Hitler's unsuccessful Munich Putsch in 1923 worried him. In December 1923, Emil wrote in his diary that 1100 years of Jewish high culture in Germany were in peril, “mit den Drohungen von Ausnahmegesetzen gegen die Juden, mit den tatsachlichen Verfolgungen u.s.w. Nur de Namen Adolf Hitler ...” (with the menace of prejudice against the Jews, with the acknowledged persecution and so on ... Under the name of Adolf Hitler.) Shared by other members of his family, his premonition undoubtedly led to the decision a few years later to leave Germany for New York City, joining relatives who had emigrated a generation earlier.

The Tobey line is well worked out from the immigrant ancestor of the early seventeenth century, Thomas Tobey of Sandwich. {2} The family's move to Plymouth, New Hampshire, was made by our Abenaki ancestor, Olive Cross, and her husband, Francis Tobey, in the mid-nineteenth century. Other collateral lines of my immediate family (Colby, Eastman) have also been published.{3}

Historical photographs show us public buildings as central monuments focussing community life—the Congregational Church, where my grandmother had a boxed pew; the "new" county court house; the public library, where, as the original court house, young attorney Daniel Webster argued his first trial case; the Pemigewasset House, where Nathaniel Hawthorne died; the state Normal School for training teachers, where Robert Frost would teach the year before he left for England; the elm lined village common, a symbol that could have been photographed nearly identically in a hundred other New England villages in the previous century.

Fred Tobey first met his future wife, Susan Colby, at this common in 1897 when she was ten and he was eighteen. He gave her (and other village children) a ride around the common on the back of his horse-pulled truck of logs, mischievously trying to whip them off the truck on the corners.

Photo: Nana, in 1945, at age 59, raced “Stuart Trotter”, seen in this photo, in the New Hampshire state fair at the Plymouth Fair Grounds. Both Nana and Fred loved and raced horses.

The “old” Plymouth High School, ca. 1908

The photograph of the high school has personal meaning for me. Three generations of my family attended high school in the same building: my grandmother, Susan Colby (class of 1905, second graduating class from the new building); My mother, Gloria Carpenter, president of her graduating class (1938), my father, George, his brothers and sisters; and me (1960), my sister, Sarah (1965), and my many Tobey, Carpenter, and Gonnerman cousins. Grandfather Fred Tobey did not attend Plymouth High; he left school after the fifth grade to work in the woods with his brother. My father and my Aunt Libby (1932) and I shared, across generations, the same senior English teacher (honor to Mrs. E. Roberts). The State demolished the high school shortly after my sister graduated, to make room for an expanding state teacher's college (the former Normal School).

Holderness School for Boys, ca. 1908

Holderness School for Boys School is a preparatory school across the Pemigewasset River from Plymouth. It was attended by the oldest son of Fred and Susan Tobey, Fred Tobey, Jr., and in the next generation by my cousin, Spike Hampson.

You can visit on-line Plymouth, New Hampshire, where the Tobey family lived for over a hundred and fifty years. Historic photographs, taken between 1900 and 1915, show the village as my grandparents, Fred and Susan Tobey, knew it.

The photographs were taken by the Detroit Publishing Company, which sold pre-packaged sets of photographs taken by its photographers around the United States. After the company went out of business, its photograph collections were obtained by the Library of Congress, which digitized them and put them on-line. Today, they are part of the American Memory on-line collections.

The Detroit Publishing Company photographs cannot be individually linked. However, they are easily located on the Library of Congress's search page for the collection. A search on the keywords, “Plymouth New Hampshire” will return 22 photographs, including all photographs discussed in this article.

The World Wide Web has four excellent starting points for study of German anti-semitism, Hitler, and the holocaust. In addition to its educational mission, the Nizkor Project is dedicated, in the name of the victims of the holocaust, to documentary refutation of the revisionists' claim that the holocaust never happened. It brings together a variety of international projects that seek to help the West confront its recent past.

A more academically oriented starting point is provided by the Cybrary of the Holocaust. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. is the most important museum of remembrance and tolerance in the U.S. The Simon Wiesenthal Center honors the pioneering advocate of holocaust awareness and brings together an enormous range of resources.

For Ellis Island photographs, click Go to the American Family Immigration History Center at Ellis Island, and Ellis Island on-line exhibition at the California Museum of Photography at the University of California, Riverside.