From German Girls Genealogy (Teresa Steinkamp McMillin & Debra A. Hoffman):

During a recent trip to Germany, I (Debra) was able to visit a village where my ancestor, Caspar Kiefer, emigrated from in 1748. The village is Breitenbach located in the Rhineland-Palatinate (Rheinland-Pfalz). 

 

A genealogy colleague, Gerhard Höh, arranged for a private tour of the Bergmannsbauern-Museum, which is a museum that documents miner farmers, in other words, a miner who also tends a farm. In Breitenbach, which is in Kreis Kusel, approximately 62% of the households were involved in mining. This was one of the largest percentages in that Kreis. The museum is housed in a 1906 school building that was renovated and opened in 2002. Eleonore “Ellen” Strutwolf kindly opened the museum and spent considerable time with us as we looked at the various exhibits. The museum even had some artifacts from when Rome had an outpost in the area. One item was a Roman Lion. We had spent the previous day researching at the Speyer Archives looking for Breitenbach records, so imagine our surprise when we found Breitenbach town records on the third floor of the museum. You never know where records may end up!

 

As Caspar Kiefer was a Protestant, I wanted to see the church. The Protestant Church Breitenbach consisted of a quire tower that may date from as early as the 900s and includes a stone taken from a previous Roman building and reused when it was built. The other part of the church dates from 1783 and was too late for when my ancestor lived there. It is always thrilling to see something that your ancestor would also have seen.