This is my story on how I tried to resume contact with a relative in Germany after 20 years of no contact.

Resuming communications with Gerhard Ruff in Germany I thought was going to be a very difficult task. The only thing I knew about Gerhard was that he was in Germany 20 years ago at a placed named Markdorf. Please see the Bonsee Region map for where Markdorf is.

My first thought on finding Gerhard would be to put my family tree on the internet at the Internet largest genealogical website rootsweb.com. My thought was that Gerhard would someday look at the website then contact me. I figured this could take up to twenty years.

My wife tried to find Gerhard by looking in an online German telephone book . There were of course many matches for a big place like Germany. Phoning everyone in Germany to contact Gerhard Ruff would take a long time.

Another thought was to try and write back to the mailing address for which I had from 20 years previous. This was going to be a step I would try but the success of this I thought was very slim as people move from where they lived 20 years previous!

Therefore, I set out to google "Gerhard Ruff" Markdorf. Using the quotations in google around the name helps to ensure that you find only people that of that name and not pages that just contained Gerhard Other Surname and Other Firstname Ruff.

Well google showed a web page of Gerhard Ruff at a school in Markdorf where Gerhard Ruff was graduating from in 1985! This was a very positive result as Markdorf only has 12000 inhabitants and Gerhard was there in 1985 the year that he had written.

Now that google had found the result I could not really understand how to work the website. The website stayfriends was written in German with German icons. As I do not understand any German, this was going to be very difficult to work. I managed to work out that google could translate a webpage from German into English (sometimes). I managed to translate the page that had Gerhard Ruff on it. At the bottom of the page, it had a register at this school. So, I proceeded to register at the school. When I submitted the form, it brought up another form this time none of the information was in English. Google does not translate the pages when you submit a form. At this point I was stuck because the next page I could not understand and when I guessed at what the various bits must be I failed. Then I stoped for the day at this part, as I did not see a way around this.

Latter on in the week I thought I would try and find a translation webpage one that could translate German text into English. I did find one such page and it was called Babel fish. I decided I would try and register at the StayFriends site again to try and contact Gerhard. This time when I get to the second form I copied and pasted all the German bits of text into Babelfish. I was then able to work out what to put into the form so that I could register. Success I managed to register and I received an email from StayFriends written in German on how to confirm my email address and activate my account on StayFriends.

Using the Babel fish service and logging back into the page I was able to work out then how to post a message to Gerhard. At this point I could not be positive this was the correct Gerhard. I could not even be 100% sure that this was the correct Gerhard. There was even a chance that this might be caught in some spam filter and would not even get to Gerhard.

I am so lucky that only after one week of searching I was able to get into contact with Gerhard. This has special significance to me as I first knew about Gerhard from 20 years ago. At the time, I was only nine years old and My Father was writing back to Gerhard. It was awesome to think there was someone that far away that I was related to :-) This gave me a great sense of belonging for many years. I look forward to one-day seeing Germany, meeting Gerhard and learning about my ancestry.

I hope this webpage can show everyone looking for someone that is possible to find him or her. With the internet, it is now even more possible.