Today was mainly Jim's day. We visited Cholosno where his family lived until they came to Canada in 1928. But on the way we also stopped in Tschernigov where Cathy's grandfather was born, and spent a bit of time in the market there. In Cholosno things got really interesting. Through a few inquiries of several locals, we once again were led to an older German man, although he no longer spoke German. His name was Ivan. He said he was nine years old when his family fled west along with all the other Germans in 1945, but they were forced to go back by the Russians. When we mentioned Jim's family name of "Stober" he said there was a Tamara Stober in the village, a name Jim had also discovered in the archives. Ivan agreed to take us to her house, which we did, and Jim got to meet and have a short visit with a cousin once removed that he didn't know he had! Tamara was quite old and not very mobile, but she described the exact location of the Stober family farm to Ivan and he took us there. He then also took us to the German cemetery there, which was completely overgrown and where we again found only one headstone. Unfortunately the inscription was completely illegible. We then had our picnic lunch nearby, after which Ivan took us to the site of the former German Baptist church in Cholosno. We managed to uncover on small piece of the foundation, which was all that was left of the building where Jim's family worshipped. (I forgot to mention in yesterday's blog that we also visited the site of the first Baptist Church in Volhynia in Sarotchin. This was a wooden structure still standing mostly intact, albeit in an advanced state of decay. We could still barely make out some of German inscriptions painted on the front wall inside.)
After Cholosna, we drove to Koresten where the railroad station was where the Stober family would have left from in 1928. There's a good chance the Bartz/Gohl family would have left from there also. In Korosten we also visited a park with a statue of "Olga" (see statue behind me in pic) who we were told was responsible for first bringing Christianity to Russia in the 9th century. There was also a Russian army bunker nearby which was turned into museum a few years ago. We toured it with an English speaking guide and were shown all kinds of interesting WW2 related artifacts. Ironically, they didn't get any help from the Russian government in setting up the museum, but they got all kinds of documentation from Germany, from the time when the German army had occupied Koresten. It was an exciting day, especially for Jim.