Staff photo by Fritz Busch Eagan tour director Wade Olsen shows slides and describes a recent European tour with a local group at the German-Bohemian Heritage Society open house at The Grand Center for Arts & Culture Saturday. The tour group is pictured in front of St. Stephens Cathedral in Vienna, Austria.

NEW ULM — German-Bohemian Heritage Society (GBHS) President Wade Olsen presented a slideshow of a recent European tour with a local group at an open house at the Grand Center for Arts & Culture Saturday.

Olsen said many Minnesotans have German ancestors from the Austrian empire, many with a family branch from Bohemia, a kingdom that included what is now Czechia today.

He talked about what it was like for German Bohemians in Bohemia, Austria, Moravia, the Austria-Hungarian empire, later Czechoslovakia, and the Czech Republic.

“All those places link to where ethnic Germans lived, right in the center of Europe, in what later became Germany,” said Olsen.

The slideslow included video from the tour that included bus rides to a number of small villages on narrow country roads, sometimes in grasslands and over small bridges.

Some of the villages included maps of property including stone houses owned by people with the same last names as people that live in and around New Ulm now.

A number of churches, large and small, were part of the tour.

“It was special to hear pipe organs play in some of the big, old churches,” Olsen said.

The tour included Vienna, Austria. A group photo was taken outside massive St. Stephen’s Cathedral, the mother church of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese and the seat of the Archbishop of Vienna.

The tour group included Al Forst of St. George who said a number of people he talked to in Europe were interested to know that young adults in rural Minnesota are able to make a good living if they are willing to work.

“We don’t really appreciate what we have here, compared to those we met,” said Forst. “But it seemed they were satisfied with what they have. They is a reason why some of our German ancestors left and came the to the United States, sometimes taking everything they could put in a trunk. I’m glad they did.”

Olsen said economic opportunities and other factors that required military service and high taxes are some of the reasons immigrants came to the U.S. more than a century ago. He said the Revolutions of 1848, a series of political upheavals in Europe beginning in 1848 that including republican revolts against European monarchies.

“Many great thinkers had a high price on their head and left. Some Germans went to Austria. Others went to the U.S. and Brazil,” Olsen said.

Objectives of the GBHS including promoting, developing and maintaining the culture and heritage, aiding individual research and sharing research, organizing tours and studying the homeland.

The open house Zoom meeting link is https://germanbohemianheritagesociety.com/