Thanks to the red and white little flags in her flower boxes, we find her home right away on Southbridge Court in Louisville. At the door, we are greeted by an amiable and neat lady full of energy. Mary Rose is supposedly 95 - incredible! She has set the festive table especially for her guests from Switzerland with sandwiches, cookies, and fruit sticks as well as with red and white napkins. This afternoon, her daughter Mollie and her nephews Dan, Jim, and David and also Su Ann Schoenbaechler, the oldest child of her brother Edward, have joined in.

“I had always hoped that my mother Anna Mary and my father Joseph Martin Schoenbaechler would have been able to visit Einsiedeln, their cousins and numerous relatives in the “Birchli” and in the “Gross”. But with their ten children it was impossible. Where was the money to come from for such an expensive trip to Switzerland?”

Mary Rose is the second youngest of the family and the last still living child of the large Schoenbaechler family. “Of course, I don’t know as much about my forebears as my older siblings, who have all passed on, and some of whom had still known grandfather Jakob.”

Mary Rose’s grandfather Johann Jakob Schoenbaechler arrived via Le Havre in Louisville with his parents when he was barely three years old. “Like his father, my grandfather Jacob was a blacksmith. First he lived with his wife and little son Joseph Martin at the Schmiedenstrasse in Einsiedeln. But then emigration fever grabbed the 31 year-old and he wanted to leave for America, a land where milk and honey were flowing!”

He began working in Louisville as a blacksmith, but his knowledge of cattle breeding proved to be useful as well. “Grandfather adapted easily and associated with the many immigrants such as the Kaelins, Schoenbaechlers, Gyrs, and Birch­lers. When my grandfather was nine, his sister Mary Anna was born, but Catha­rina, the mother, became seriously ill with tuberculosis. As a last resort one hoped that the air of home might help.”

Thus in May 1895, Catharina left with her daughter for Switzerland. Einsiedeln’s air was of no help, and on the return trip to the ­United States Catharina’s ­condition worsened. On arrival in New York an ambulance took her to St. Vincent’s Hospital, but she died on the way, but 38 years of age. “An undertaker notified grand­father of his wife’s death. It must have been terrible, also for nine year-old Mary Anna who had to travel home for 28 hours by horse-drawn wagon that carried her dead mother’s coffin. Grandfather was a broken man. He lived alone with his two children, didn’t remarry, and didn’t correspond with his Swiss ­relatives at all.”

Yet, his son Joseph Martin felt at home in America, was ­optimistic, and soon got to know Mary Baumeler - she was a year younger - who had emigrated with her parents at about the same time from Kriens to Louisville. “At that time, my father worked at a dairy plant and daily brought milk to the family of his future wife.” Young Anna Mary found Joseph Martin attractive and fell in love. On October 16, 1901, they married in Louisville’s St. Martin’s Church and managed together the Centennial Grocery and Bakery on Preston Street. “We lived with the large, 12-member family in the upper levels of the house. Do you really want to know how things were at home? First, we lived in that small house with the store - it is still standing - and then in a somewhat larger one. A flushing toilet did not arrive before 1924. Incredible.

And now I am living alone in my house and have three of them! We didn’t have everything - but we had what we needed. Mom and Dad were splendid, and I felt especially close to my father. I still remember that my parents spoke ‘Schwizerdütsch’ with each other when they did not want us to understand what they were saying.

Nobody spoke Swiss German anymore with us, and unfortunately, I therefore never learned it.” After school, Mary Rose worked in the bakery and at age 21 married Harry Limb in 1940 in the midst of the war. “At that time, he had been stationed for two years in the US Navy; later we raised five children, three girls who now live in the neighborhood, and two boys, one of them living in Oregon, the other in Texas. I am an American through and through, but to this day have also always felt still being Swiss and from Einsiedeln.”

For Mary Rose it had been a dream to journey to Einsiedeln, to the home of her grandfather! And twice indeed, in 1976 and 1984, the granddaughter traveled to the monastery village. On a pilgrimage to Rome in 1976, she stopped for three days in Einsiedeln, together with her sisters Katharina and Antoinette and her ­brother, the priest father Charles. “For me it was a great moment when I entered the old farmhouse at the ‘Stollern’, the home of my grand­father Jacob Schoenbaechler. And in Gross, we were in the house of my great aunt Marie Kälin-Schönbächler in the ‘Neumatt’. On my second trip in 1984 I stayed a whole week. On our visit we met above all with the Kälins, the relatives of my paternal grandmother, and stayed with our co-cousins, the two Benedictine nuns of the monastery Au in Trachslau, Sister Waldburga and Sister Cäcilia.

To this day, Mary Rose regularly exchanges ­letters with Kälin relatives in Einsiedeln, ­especially with Sister Walburga and with Sister Cäcilia. “Sister Walburga wrote many letters to me in English, and she could translate my correspondence for the circle of relatives. I never met the Schoenbaechlers, however, and to this day I don’t have any contact with them. A pity, actually! Would it not be great if I could find descendants of the ‘Stollern’ Schoenbaechlers thanks to this project?”