ROOTS & BRANCHES

My first in-person memory of Rudolf “Rudi” Daub was when he arrived at Dulles International Airport in 1991.
I had seen a photograph of him so we knew he looked like a quintessential German with a salt-and-pepper beard typical of a man who was then 54 years old.
Of course, it seemed that every man getting off the plane had a beard. People in my group who were meeting Rudi would spot a new possibility every few minutes: “No, too old.” “No, too young.” “No, too thin.”
And then Rudi appeared, filled with the good cheer—he later indicated he’d had a few beers on the plane—that he’d exhibit for all the 30-plus years of our friendship.
Sadly, Rudi Daub died of COVID-19 on Christmas weekend; I received the word from his widow Helga.
Leavening that sadness is the knowledge of the kismet that we became friends at all.
Thirty years ago I was historian of the Daub Family Reunion in Lebanon County. One day I got a letter forwarded to me from someone on the reunion’s mailing list. The letter was from Rudi Daub in Germany (unbeknownst to me at the time, the letter was written by Helga since Rudi knew almost no English).
They had sent blind letters asking about Daubs in America to just five addresses … thank goodness one was on my mailing list!
What they didn’t know is that I had already traced Johan Daub, the 1763 immigrant who founded the Lebanon County family, to the town of Eiserfeld—which turned out to be just a few kilometers away from where Rudi and Helga lived in Wilnsdorf; both towns were near the city of Siegen in the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia.
I replied to their letter outlining the four generations into Germany (back to 1623) I had verified Johan Daub’s lineage in the church records of Siegen. They replied with a letter showing additional generations that included records only accessible in Germany such as guild registers—all the way back into the 1400s!
My fondest memory of Rudi’s visit in 1991 was when we stood to address the reunion—the two people in the world with the most genealogy knowledge of the Daub family—and received a thunderous ovation.
Rudi’s visit in 1991 was just the first of many reciprocal visits made to Germany and America. The final one was just this past August.
With Rudi now 85 and mostly unable to walk, I had a sense that it might be the last time I’d see him alive. Sadly, that proved to the be the case.
But thankfully the memories of those many visits and sense of both friendship and family will not die with him.