# Bempflingen, Reutlingen, Baden-Württemberg, Germany Bempflingen is a village in the countryside south of Stuttgart, in the region that would later become part of Baden-Württemberg. For the Rudolph family and their forebears, it was home across several generations before the youngest of them crossed the ocean and left it behind. The oldest connection to the village reaches back to **Maria Katharina Gaißer**, born here on 9 June 1797. A generation later came **Christiana Mary Hahn**, born on 12 December 1825. These early births place the family in Bempflingen through the closing years of the eighteenth century and well into the nineteenth — an ordinary village existence in a farming community of the Württemberg hinterland. The family's story in Bempflingen comes into sharpest focus with **Marie "Mary" Anna Rudolph**, born here on 9 August 1878, and her younger brother **Christian Rudolph**, born about 1879. They were the children of Jacob Rudolph and Anna Raisch. Their years in the village were brief and shadowed by loss. Their mother died while Marie was still very young — by family memory, around the age of three — and their father, feeling unable to raise them alone, left the children in the care of their maternal grandparents. When Jacob emigrated to the United States in 1881, the two children remained behind in Bempflingen, growing up in the household of their grandparents. For Marie and Christian, Bempflingen was the whole of their childhood world. It was where their mother was buried, where they were raised by an older generation, and where they lived until 1893, when — Marie fifteen and Christian fourteen — they were judged old enough to make their own way. In that year they left Bempflingen for good, sent by ship to relatives in Philadelphia. The village they departed was the last German ground the family stood on. Neither child returned. Christian's life ended in Philadelphia in 1896, and Marie eventually made her way west, married, and raised a large family in America. Bempflingen remained the place of beginnings — the quiet Württemberg village that held the family's roots for a century before scattering its last children across the Atlantic.