The website serving up all the great church records and other information relevant to the Ortman family is called Porta Fontium and provides digital historical source material for Bavarian-Czech research.
In addition to church records for Planá, they also have some historical photographs that would show what the town looked like back in the days when the Ortman family had their inn there. The last photo in the set was taken during World War II when the village was occupied by the German army – this was, of course, long after the family left. See the photo gallery below.
Planá had a sad history, at least for its German-speaking inhabitants. From the town’s website:
On May 6, 1945, the town of Planá was liberated by the US Army. After the end of the World War Two, most of the German population was forced to leave the town. By August 1947, almost thirty six thousand inhabitants of the then Planá district were displaced and the new people were moving in.
Ferdinand left in 1883, and sent for his family to follow him in 1884. His wife Elizabeth would have traveled with six children: Josephine (the oldest) plus Charles Winslow, Anna, George, Anton Edward, and Elizabeth. Another daughter, Mary, was born after the family arrived in America.
They supposedly sailed on the S.S. Rhein, arriving from Bremen in May of 1884. I was able to find that a ship called Rhein did arrive from Bremen on May 29, 1884 but the records are horrible and practically illegible. There is a “Hartmann” family on board the ship and I suspect this is actually Elizabeth and her kids; hard to tell, though.
