Tombstone Tuesday - Lukas Family Headstone, Straubing, Germany

     

Lukas family headstone photograph

Growing up, I knew very little about my mother’s family. My mom was from Straubing, Germany. When she came to the United States at fourteen, she left behind her family, her language, and her country. She rarely talked about her childhood, and years later, during an interview, she was not able to recall the names of her grandparents and great-grandparents.

After she passed away, my sister found a photograph tucked among her possessions. That single image sparked my curiosity about the family Mom had left behind.

The photograph shows the Lukas family headstone. It names my mother’s paternal grandparents, Hans Lukas and Elisabeth “Eliese” Straubinger. The inscription identifies Elisabeth as Eliese Bräu; she had remarried after Hans’s death. My mother’s mother, Hedwig Lukas, née Walter, and three of Mom’s young siblings are also named on the stone.

The headstone is no longer at Friedhof St. Michael in Straubing, so this photograph is the only image of it I have. Grave plots in Germany are generally held through time-limited rights of use, with the terms governed by the cemetery’s rules. ¹ Those rights may be renewed, but when a plot is eventually cleared, its headstone may disappear. That makes this photograph especially precious to me: it preserves a trace of my mother’s family that I can no longer visit

¹ Straubing Stadtverwaltung, Ämter und Dienststellen, Stadt Straubing, https://www.straubing.de/rathaus-verwaltung/verwaltung/aemter-und-dienststellen/index.html?catID=1168&detID=14813&utm : accessed 21 September 2026.