The very beginning

On the basin, some day I found an old piece of furniture, it was the desk of my great-great-grandfather Franz Bourggraff. He was known as   “Schulfranz”, a teacher during the 19^th century. I found a letter as well written by a Bourggraff who had emigrated to the United States of America. He wrote that himself and his friend, who was also a native of our village, would have found gold of a value of 6000 dollars. Unfortunately, the gold of my relative had been stolen. The letter has been lost. Now I became very curious and one day I drove with my moped to reverend Eugène Jost at Basbellain and started to scrabble around. Reverend Jost had a record card of every family indicating the birth, the marriage and the death. The oldest book that I was able to consult, a marriage register, dated from 1616. So I could collect my first information concerning the Bourggraff family. The two sheets with the notes taken are still in my possession. I always wanted to do genealogical research and I decided to start after my retirement of work.

So, at the age of 60, I concretely started with my research. I found most of the dates at the National Archives of Luxembourg. Those dates are filed and may be seen on request.

By these searches I found out that this gold seeker who had written the letter was Joseph Bourggraff, who had emigrated in 1888 to Minesota and of whom each trace had been lost. He was a cousin of my grandfather Joseph Bourggraff. The gold digger

I have invested a lot of time in these searches and found a many interesting events of the family, which I have written down in a chronicle. A reprint, respectively a supplement to the existing chronicle is planned and will be ready for the next meeting of the genealogical tree in 2014.