Caroline Gries from Denver, Colorado has long wanted to visit her ancestral villages in Germany, where her Jewish forefathers lived before emigrating to the United States in the 1840s. That trip was made possible in April, 2017 by European Focus. Caroline visited more than a dozen villages connected with her extensive family tree. The first […]
January 12, 2016 One of the advantages of taking a private, custom-designed tour in Europe is that you can shape the trip to just about anything you desire. What are your unique interests? Your passions? Let us build those into the perfect trip, which has been designed just for you and your alone (or your […]
January 7, 2016 Just booked – a family of four from Louisiana will experience parts of Poland, Germany and Austria with James this June 10 to 23. It will be the first trip for this family together to Europe, and they will start it with a visit to friends who live in Bratislava, Slovakia, where […]
October 9 It’s time to break out the bratwurst as the United States celebrates German-American Day on Oct. 6. Commemorating the founding of Germantown, Pa. in 1683, the holiday celebrates America’s largest ancestry group, with 49 million people claiming part or full German heritage. As President Barack Obama proclaimed a few years ago on this […]
April 17 Paul Skelton wanted to see where his German ancestors lived before emigrating to Australia. And so, as part of an extended multiple week long trip that also included England and Ireland, Paul and his wife Rhonda and their son Andrew booked a short week-long tour with European Focus which revolved around a visit […]
(From a visit made to Hoinkhausen on September 12 and 13) When German relatives know you’re coming, the red carpet not only gets rolled out, it gets wrapped around you. Suzanne Pellegrino and her sister Beth Renney not only gave their relatives in tiny Hoinkhausen, Germany advance notice, they gave them nearly a year to […]
We’ve seen many ancient sites in Ireland; monastic beehive huts from the fourth and fifth century, ruins of monasteries from the 14th and 15th centuries and the even older burial site of Newgrange, dating back to about 2,000 to 3,000 years before Christ. But the other day’s discovery on the windswept shores of Valentia Island, […]
A charming fortified town definitely not on the usual tourist agenda was our stopover for a leg stretch today between Munich and Dinkelsbuehl. This is a town that I had photographed for a family historian nearly a decade ago. Weissenburg im Bayern features grand sections of wall built in the 1300s and 1400s and a […]