Passau

Our original train reservation from Munich to Passau was cancelled (for reasons I do not know), so it took both a bus to the medium size city of Landshut, then a train to Passau (which took a total
of about 3 hours) to get here. Passau is right on the Austrian border where three rivers meet: the dark Ill from the Bavarian-Bohemian border in north, the blue Danube from the Black Forest in the west, and the green Inn from the Swiss Alps in the south.

I’ve come to learn that my great grandparents, Franz Knopf and Marie Bartok Knopf, emigrated to New York 125 or so years ago from a little town a handful of miles north of Passau, in a mountainous region now in far western Czech Republic. The video from the train gives a glimpse of the geography that my ancestors came from. Curious that I emigrated from New York to Beulah, whose landscape looks an awful lot like the Bavarian-Bohemian homeland of my great grandparents.Read more