Providence, that’s what it was. Or fate or kismet, or coincidence…take your pick.

Last Saturday, I attended a birthday party for my sister-in-law. The guests included a couple that I had met before, but didn’t know well. As we were conversing over dinner, I explained my adventures trying to make recipes from the Castle Cook’s notebook. As fate would have it, they were not only familiar with the area where my great-aunt had lived, they had relatives there and had studied the history of the area.

Since I know nothing about the castle at this point, we speculated about what type of place this might have been and whether it might still be around. I was concerned that the castle might have been bombed or fatally damaged during World War II and no longer exist. They assured me that it was unlikely, since this part of Germany had not been bombed much during with war.

I was also told that my aunt Frieda had probably not worked at what we Americans think of as a proper castle, since those are not common in Northern Germany. It’s far more likely that she worked in a Schloss, which is often translated as castle in English, but would be more like a noble house or manor house. A Schloss would have been built for nobility or by a wealthy patron as a country estate and most certainly would have had servants. Being a big fan of PBS’s Downton Abbey, I was thrilled to hear that. I could imagine that my great-aunt Frieda was something like Daisy, young and inexperienced, wanting to improve her station in life, born into tradition but flirting with some of the new freedoms arising for women in the 1920’s.

The next day, I received an email from Lisa, the woman I had been talking with at the party. Intrigued by identifying the Schloss, she had actually done some research for me! She sent me a list of Schloss’s in the area and pointed to two she thought were good candidates: Wish-hof in Krokau (the village my great-aunt lived in) and Schloss Bredeneek, which is 20km (12 miles away). Providence has me off to a good start.