Travel Log: October 4th, Part 3, Arriving in Carlsbad/Karlovy Vary

". . .  Then we drove an hour to a town called Karlovy Vary, that used to be called Carlsbad. It's a spa town -- there are natural hot springs here and we have a couple photos of unknown ancestors taken at a studio that used to be here at the hot springs.

After we checked into the hotel Mom & I walked down and looked at the springs.

This is the Colonnade where the water from the hot springs is piped in through little taps.

We don't have any ancestors that we know of (yet) who lived right here in Carlsbad, but we were just looking at a letter from a Josef Strunz who lived in a town called Fischern, which is now called Rybare and apparently is part of Karlovy Vary now. There are 2 surviving envelopes and 1 letter dated 1904 from this Josef to my other 3rd great grandmother, Anna Strunz Ott, who came to America with her daughter Anna Maria Ott (who married Ludwig Spohr), so we are wondering if Josef Strunz was Anna's brother [we know Anna had a brother named Josef, so we are assuming he is the one who sent the letters]. We still need to get that letter translated.

Tomorrow morning we're going on a tour of several of our ancestral towns with a local historian from a museum here in Karlsbad. We're very excited for that and hope we'll be able to understand his accent well enough to get by. Hopefully we'll be able to find more houses that ancestors lived in in these towns tomorrow. And then maybe we'll be going to a local archive in Karlovy Vary to look for census records. I've never looked at a Bohemian census record before, because the ones for the places and dates we would need for these ancestors aren't online yet. So hopefully we'll be able to figure that out.  . . ."