Pip: Rootsandrevolations is a site where family history, old photographs, and generational memories comes all together with a collection of history of her family to the family she is connected by blood and marriage. What stays with me is the Berlin Wall detail — genealogy as something that happened to a her family and many more, not just something recorded about one.

Mara: Tanja Boehme has been posting across a range of territory this week — German genealogy searches, preserved family media, and personal reflection. Let’s start with the family names she’s been chasing across Berlin and beyond.

Tracing German Roots

Pip: The core tension in this segment is a familiar one in genealogy: you have a name, maybe an address, maybe a photograph — and almost nothing else to go on. A Berlin street address and a blurry postcard. That is both everything and nothing — the whole problem of German genealogy in one sentence.

Mara: The Arndt family post captures that exactly. Setting up a photo postcard as the only evidence, it reads: “Mrs. Elisabeth Arndt, lives in niederschoneweide Berlin, Brueckenstr. 11. but that’s all i can make out!” The Seidel, Arndt, Schmidt post adds a photograph that connects these surnames directly: Gerda, born Arndt, is pictured with her husband Erich Seidel, described as an architect in Berlin. The Arndt name stops being abstract once it’s a face.

Pip: And the Hartung post extends the Seidel line further, noting a family connection there and flagging that AI is being used to help with translation — which brings in the German handwriting post, a practical cheat sheet for reading old manuscripts where script styles shifted dramatically across generations.

Mara: The Family Strub post widens the geography — that family came from Austria, possibly Luzern, and later lived in Italy. The Germany post anchors the broader regional context for all of it.

Mara: Then there is the Watching TV post, which is quieter but lands hard. Working on the family tree one morning, the television comes on and starts covering East Berlin — and the post reflects that when the Berlin Wall went up, the family was divided along with the city.

Pip: That is the detail that stops being genealogy and becomes history you lived inside.

Mara: From old documents to preserved images — the next segment stays with what memory looks like when it’s been saved on film.

Saved on Film, Kept in Memory

Pip: This segment is about the physical and digital artifacts that hold family memory — photographs, footage, reunions.

Mara: The Lackland post is spare but specific: barracks at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio, 1960s. A single caption carrying a whole era. The Old Movies post goes further — old family films transferred to digital, the kind of preservation project that keeps footage from disappearing entirely.

Pip: And then there is the SS United States Reunion post, which is a different kind of memory-keeping — a 2026 reunion announcement with merchandise, a member roll call, and the line “this reunion is not just an event — it’s a celebration of togetherness, respect, and lifelong friendship.”

Mara: That sense of shared history connects naturally to the more inward posts coming up next.

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