Can ‘home’ be a place where you’ve never lived? And a place you only learned about late in life? I discovered Herxheim only 20 years ago but when Padma and I travelled there in mid-June it felt like going home.

Herxheim is the ancestral home of my father’s father’s family. My great-grandfather, Jacob Adam, was born in Herxheim in 1864 but immigrated to Cincinnati in 1880. He left behind a long string of Adam ancestors stretching back at least to my eight great grandfather Johann Georg Michael Adam who was born in Herxheim around 1640. My ancestors were probably in Herxheim long before that but records before the plague of the early 1600s are hard to find.

My fifth cousin, Wolfgang Adam, makes Herxheim seem even more like home and Padma and I are always excited to see him once again. He wanted to make our fourth visit to Herxheim special and asked that we arrive to the family reunion a few hours early. He organised a translator and then took us on a walking tour of Herxheim. He showed us a home where my great great grandmother, Barbara Mueller, had lived as well as an ancestral Adam home that our sixth great grandparents had built.

Wolfgang then took us to St Mary of the Assumption and showed us the baptismal basin where my great grandfather and many of his grandparents had been baptised.

We climbed some rickety stairs up to the roof of the church and into the belltower where Wolfgang was able to make a special clang of the bell as if to announce our arrival to the villagers.

We concluded our day in Herxheim with an Adam family reunion. It was the third one Padma and I have attended so once again we met my distant cousins and it truly seemed as if I had come home.