Welcome to the Rehrl Family Website!  Imagine for a moment that you lived as our ancestors once did in Bavaria near the city of  Salzburg, Austria and the two salt mining towns of Bad Reichenhall and Berchtesgaden, Germany at the beginning of the 19th  Century or about eighty years before Thomas Edison invented the electric light bulb or about the time when Napoleon waged  war all over Europe.  You're a young woman married to a farmer.

If you are in your twenties, you probably already had several pregnancies and if lucky a few children that lived including a son.   You live by candlelight and oil lamps.  The daily routine is monotonous and the work you do is backbreaking.  The only respite  in the week is attending Sunday mass at the local church.  You go to confession, take communion, maybe socialize with other  farmer’s wives and other women for a short time outside of the church, after that it’s back to the farm and to work.

The men meet up at a local ‘Wirtshaus’ (Pub) for the afternoon to drink beer, play cards, horseshoes, or in case it being winter,  try their hand at curling.  But mostly they talk.  But, what about, we really don’t know!  There we are forced to speculate, and  the reason being that none recorded their thoughts and experiences.  Oh, they may have recorded the birth of a child or the  death of a parent in the back of their family's bible, but for the most part they didn’t bother to put anything in writing.  Besides  writing was difficult by lamplight.

So what is it that we wished they had recorded?  What I would like to know is how they felt about their lives; their likes and  dislikes; their politics; their ills; their loves; their joys and pains.  In other words everything that would give me a clue as to their  humanity!  I know they were farmers, in fact all three families, the Rehrls, the Aichers, and the Grassls all owned their own  farms, but for some unknown reason, the Rehrls and the Grassls swapped their farm with someone else (not with each other).   Yet, we have no idea why, nor do we know how it was done.

As I worked through the information my brother and his partner gathered on our ancestors I realized how little we really know  about them.  Basically the information that is available to us consists of dates: births, marriages, and deaths, but nothing in  between.  Even about my own grandfather Friedrich Aicher, who lived from 1868 until 1958, I know next to nothing other than  when and where he was born and when he died!  His farm is still there, but he is gone, and I really don‘t know anything about  him.  How sad!  It almost seems he has never lived. He has lived of course, and lucky for us, because none of us would be here today  if it hadn't been for his affair with my paternal grandmother!

This website then should be more about the future than the past because we will never know much more about our ancestors  than we do now.  But we have an advantage, fore we can tell our story to our descendants by writing about our lives in the 20th  and 21st centuries, and we don’t have to do it by lamplight!

So now, lets imagine you live in the 23rd century, you are a man in your sixties, still considered relatively young.  You work for  ‘The Singularity’, a vast computer network and data complex that was created to monitor the world’s environment and make the  necessary complex decisions to ensure continuing life on the planet.  You are just on your way back from a stargazing vacation  on the moon and your craft is about to break through the cloud cover over Atlanta’s space port and you wonder as you look  down what it was like for your ancestors living before WWIII was barely avoided and when smaller wars were practically routine.

Now of course wars between nations or peoples are obsolete.  The ‘Singularity’ would not allow it.  It would simply shut the  offending countries down, and rightly so!  But, you can’t get the thought out of your mind and you remember your great- grandmother Helga Kremstein-Rutgers mentioning at her 120th birthday party that she had a book or reports or something that  gave some firsthand account of what it was like growing up during the last world war.  I must ask her about it next time she stops by  at the bubble on her vapor mobile.  It would be fascinating to get a first hand account from someone that actually lived in those  times and from someone whose genes I carry!  Yes, very interesting!

Rick Rehrl
 							Webmaster

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS: I am greatly indebted to my brother Sebastian and his wife Rosemarie Winter for doing the primary  genealogical research on the Rehrl, Aicher, and Grassl families on which this website is based.  Vielen Dank Wasti und  Rosemarie!