Chrisandra's Best of Both Worlds Roadtrip: How we met our long lost American cousin

Aloha all,

this is a special edition for a very serendipitous event last week. It's one more reason for me to be happy that I married Sandra, since I would not be Chris Weininger otherwise...

If I ever had to get a “real” job again and if I could pick where that would be, I might pick a presidential library. Of course they might prefer somebody with a real history background, not some German who only knows a little bit about the presidents he has visited. But in fantasy world, Director of a Presidential Library might be a fun job for me. For a couple of seconds, I thought that fantasy had come true:

Imagine my surprise: In Fremont, Ohio, we arrived at “Spiegel Grove”, the home of Rutherford B. Hayes and the first real Presidential Library in the country. We walk into the museum and literally the very first video welcome message starts off: "Welcome to the Rutherford B. Hayes Presidential Library. My name is Christie Weininger and I am the Executive Director…” Wait, who?? what???

First, we went to the bathroom to wash out our ears to make sure that we heard this right. Well, not really, but we did listen to the video a few more times and made sure she spelled her name ‘the right way’. Hearing your own name might be kind of fun if your last name is somewhat common, but it’s unheard of for us. Weininger is not a common name in Germany or in America. Neither one of us had ever met a Weininger who wasn’t one of Sandra’s relatives!

So of course we had to ask whether our long lost cousin was around. It took a few hours to connect, but if you know us and presidential libraries, you know that we tend to hang around for many hours anyway. And there was plenty to do: We took the regular tour through the home of President Hayes, visited the museum, and took a 'backstairs tour' from the servant’s perspective. In the evening they had a big band concert on the veranda. The concert might not have been in our honor, but that’s when we finally got to meet the mysterious Christie Weininger. And we felt right away like we found a new cousin, she’s just as nice as all the other Weiningers we know.

We quickly found out that her greatgreatgreatgreatgreatgrandfather was Adam Weininger from Stuttgart. Sandra’s dad was from Stuttgart…as if we needed any more proof that we are related. Obviously, we were very excited. I can also see that Christie was very excited, she had never met a Weininger from the old world. But what surprised us was how excited everybody else at the museum was, too. Wherever we went people asked us whether we were Christie’s German cousins from Hawaii. I guess Christie must be a really nice boss that they were all so happy with her. We even had a photo shoot with the PR person of the Library to record this historic event.

Of course we accepted gladly when Christie offered to take us to her hometown to meet more Weininger the next day. We had no plans anyway plus we still had not seen everything in the museum. And even with all the excitement about Weiningers, we still wanted to learn about President Hayes, too. Interesting fellow, by the way: He was elected in 1876, the centennial of the declaration of independence. At the Republican convention, he finished a distant 5th on the first ballot. The leading candidate James Blaine had almost 5 times as many votes as Hayes. But all the other delegates had one thing in common: They hated Blaine and after seven round of voting, they agreed on Hayes as their nominee. If you think that was close, wait for the general election! You might remember the 2000 election Bush vs. Gore that was so close that it took several weeks to determine who would be president. For Hayes, it took four months! Two days before the inauguration (which was in march back then), it was finally decided that Hayes would become president. I will not bore you with all the details of his presidency (of course not because I forgot most of what I read last week). But one thing that made us relate to him was that apparently he loved to travel as much as we do. He took a 71 day trip throughout the country, making him the first sitting president to travel west of the Rocky Mountains.

The next day we increased the number of Weiningers we have met in the US about tenfold. Christie took us to her home town, about 45 minutes south of Fremont and even with just a few hours notice, she got a whole bunch Weiningers together, who apparently all wanted to meet their long lost cousins Sandra and Chris. We went to cementeries, homes, farms and dentist offices all proudly displaying the Weininger name. We are particularly thankful to the the one ancestor who corrected the spelling back to the correct way, apparently Adam had dropped an ‘e’. I don’t think I would have asked at the museum if the greeting would have been from Christie Wininger.

After an afternoon of touring the various Weininger sites we got some delicious fresh Weininger peaches, had some beer and pizza with three generations of our new extended family before taking off again. Hopefully we will get to see them again, whether it’s in Ohio, Hawaii or Germany. And if we ever have a tooth ache during our road trip, I hope it’s going to be close to the Weininger Family Dentistry in Ohio.

Aloha,

Chris, Sandra & Christie