Heini Wolfensberger, 79,

Life Member
of WFA Board

Dies in Bauma, Switzerland

Heini
Wolfensberger, a lifetime member of the WFA Board of Directors and student of
the family’s Swiss origins in and around Bauma, died March 7, 2007, in
the Swiss mountains of his beloved Zurcher Oberland. He was 79 and had been a board member since the
origins of the Wolfensberger Family Association, less than a decade ago.

His wife, Irene,
and four children survive him.

Few students of
the family’s history knew of his long and devoted stewardship to the
family’s origins. Former WFA President Bob Wolfenbarger met Heini and his
family in 1962.  They had had
searched unsuccessfully for the foundations of the original family castle
somewhere on the OberWolfsberg, the three-peak hill
depicted on the family’s flag.

“I traveled
to Bauma from the German city where I was based in the U.S. Army, in the weeks
before I was to redeploy to the states  I went to see if there was any
connection between our American family and the Swiss family.”

“At that
time, my American family strongly believed we were German – not Swiss
– and had conducted several searches for the Wolfenbarger family along
the Rhine,” said Wolfenbarger.

In Germany,
he met a genealogist on the staff of the Rhineland-Pfaltz
state government – a Dr. Fritz Braun – and visited Heini in the
weeks before he was scheduled to return to the U.S. Earlier, Braun had written
a German-language history of passengers aboard The Thistle of Glasgow, the 1730
vessel that brought our original ancestors to this country.

Braun told me that
he didn’t believe the family was German, and showed me a brief pamphlet
history listing a family of Wolfensbergers from the Alsace-Lorraine who
migrated from what was then Germany
(actually the Palatinate, an
historic former part of the old nation.

“I explored
church books at several sites and found an entry for an Anna Wolfensberger of Kohlbrunn, Switzerland, who had married a
local farmer in the late 1600s.”

“I
immediately called Dr. Braun and told him of the find, a churchbook
entry for Anna, who hailed from a village in Switzerland.”

Braun told me our
finding was strong evidence that at least part of the family may have come from
Switzerland.
He told me he would call some Swiss genealogists in coming days to see if there
were Wolfensberger descendents somewhere in the vicinity of Zurich.
It was a million-to-one chance at this late date.

Of course, there
were many Wolfensbergers in Switzerland.
But the Swiss genealogist had already contacted Heini’s
father and Heini to ask if they wanted to meet an American relative.

The answer, of
course, was yes.

So I climbed
aboard a German Bundesbahn train out of Kaiserslautern
a late night in March 1962, with a German language translator working for the
U.S. Army. That night we were due in Zurich.
But what did Heini look like? And what would I look like to him?

Believe it or not,
it was less of a problem than I could imagine.

Luckily, the
station was almost deserted. And a couple was waiting in the station for that
train to arrive. I walked over and introduced myself. The couple responded,
saying “Hi Bob, welcome to Switzerland.” It was Heini
and his wife, Irene.

Heini’s wife Irene later told me she spotted me when
she saw my ears, which she said, surprisingly resembled Heini’s
ears.

We went off into
the snowy night for a little belated dinner, while we both chatted about our
trip and the plans Heini and his father had set for us back in Bauma. I still
remember a small hotel where they put me up. The snow was pouring down and I
was able to go to sleep early.

I still remember
the next morning when I open pushed the shutters to discover that some boy
shepherds across the valley were walking their cattle up the mountain. As their
bells clanged, the cattle slowly climbing the hill looked and sounded for all the world like a scene from the classic movie, “Heidi”.

So that was my
introduction to Heini. The next morning, I met his father and began a two-day
discussion of our common – and uncommon – family ancestry.

I told Heini and
his father what I knew already about our family – that the original
immigrant was named John (or Johann) and that he and his family emigrated from Ludwigshafen to
Philadelphia in 1730, then gradually moved west with the opening of the
frontier.

And they told me
about the Swiss family history, which began in the 14th Century, a
time of turmoil in the Alps as the country separated from the Austrian Empire.
They told me of 14th Century knights who held sway in the region for
the Austrians, and of other distinguished Wolfensbergers – Swiss leaders
– who lived in later centuries.

Long before there
was a Wolfensberger Family Association, I helped to share some of my recollections
with history-minded members of the family, such as the late Mrs. Myrtle Braun,
of Guthrie, Oklahoma,
who had originally asked me to research the family’s history in Europe.

When Larry Jones
toured the country, meeting with people who had a knowledge
of family history, he came to see me as well as my father in Florida. So when he asked about Swiss
personalities who might join in establishing a WFA Board of Directors, I
couldn’t forget advising him to invite Heini to serve with us.

Heini agreed,
becoming the first lifetime member of WFA Board of Directors

As his death
notice puts it, “Early this morning, Heini was recalled from our earthly
living circle into the eternal light.

“We are
mourning our beloved, eternally constant husband, our strong, far-seeing father
and father-in-law and our amicable, adored grandfather. His bounty, his direct
thinking and his entrepreneurial spirit guided his actions and our common
life.”