Discovering my roots
(World News Austria)

Discovering my roots In 1912 my infant grandmother and her family traveled by wagon and train from a remote community in Austria-Hungary to Hamburg, Germany, where they boarded a no-frills passenger ocean liner to the United States. A century later in Brooklyn, I stepped onto the luxury cruise ship Queen Mary 2 for my first trip to Europe to visit the home of my ancestors. The trip had been years in the making. I knew that my grandmother was from a German ethnic minority called Danube Swabians that had populated Southeastern Europe along the Danube in the 18th and 19th centuries. Her dad was an abusive alcoholic and, as the youngest, she was stuck at home with him after her siblings had...