Thanks to Frau Eva-Marie Jülich in Chemnitz I now have current photographs of the Biltz house I wrote about in an earlier post, in another post about inheriting this house, and in an article about the Biltz owners! It’s been a long hunt, but I’ve finally tracked it down and now know a bit about it’s current condition.
Frau Jülich writes that she was very disappointed by the house. She says that apparently nobody lives in it, that owners have disfigured it with new additions, and that it’s quite run-down.
The photographs she sent document her description. It’s sad, but that’s the way things go sometimes. The house did survive a difficult part of history, the division of Germany into east and west, and I’ve seen buildings in former East Germany that look a lot worse than this. On the other hand, 30 years after German reunification a lot of the east has been beautifully reconstructed.
Still, I am thrilled to finally have a successful conclusion to this part of my long hunt! I now have photographs of the house that my great great great grandfather Biltz almost owned and might even have lived in.
This is a great contrast to a couple of visits I’ve paid in the last decade to the locations of houses I used to live in as a child and in my early twenties. I choose the word “locations” on purpose because there is no longer any sign of the former buildings in those spots. That was always a huge disappointment.
Not so here.
Wyneken Family History 