Today I was on a pilgrimage, and my Mecca was the part of Leingarten, Germany, formerly known as Grossgartach. As a little girl, probably as early as age four, I would stare at the photograph of John Jacob's Link's home in the front of a large, green volume titled "The Link Family," which sat in our front room. In this photo of a medieval-looking house on Heilbronner Street in a village just west of Heilbronn, a woman holding a baby in her arms stared out of an upstairs window. The photo was taken around 1914, and the house looked run down. This place seemed so very, very far away from me in Martinsburg, West Virginia. I was fascinated by the tale of my immigrant ancestor, John Jacob, who in his fifties, chose to leave his home
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