Karl Ritter von Gonnermann

[Guest Rick Research]

In 1984, I obtained these as individual lots from Kube's Auction 44/45 in Bavaria:

1897 Centenary Medal document

[attachmentid=56937]

[Guest Rick Research]

1905 Luitpold Jubilee Medal document:

[attachmentid=56938]

This arrived in his mail in 1914:

[attachmentid=56939]

[Guest Rick Research]

Let's open that up and see what's inside

[attachmentid=56940]

...

[attachmentid=56941]

...

[attachmentid=56942]

[Guest Rick Research]

NOT the award dcoument, but the Letter of Notification by separate cover!

[attachmentid=56943]

[Guest Rick Research]

Jumping forward to the final bit... even war heroes given personal nobility got the same old mass produced form paperwork as everybody else--

his name wrong on the Kyffh?userbund Medal document:

[attachmentid=56944]

And now, after more than 24 years of my guardianship, these are going on to reunification with the bulk of Ritter von Gonnermann's papers...

because that is the RIGHT thing to do.

Scattered to the winds by indifference and short-sighted or indifferent greed, what has been carefully brought BACK together deserves these

very very large "bits" in my little collection, but small and vital pieces of an almost-whole to the amazing main collection.

Money doesn't enter into it. That's not what collecting is about, for true collectors. What the Pre-Internet tore asunder, the Internet now brings back together.

And so I bid farewell to "my" treasures, and say goodbye with these final scans as they go to a better home than I could give them.

And 84 years from NOW, I hope that someone yet unborn will tend the almost-whole with the same sense of stewardship that has laboriously brought the scattered pieces back together from our big wide planet.

[David Gregory]

Rick,

A great gesture and the definitely the right thing to do.

Let us hope that the Internet will allow other split groups to be re-united over the years.

My only luck so far has been to find an EK2 award document that once belonged to man whose Milit?rpass I have. I just wonder what else is missing or if the two items are all there ever was in the group.

David

[VtwinVince]

I doff my hat to your laudible efforts, Rick. In the same spirit I've been trying for some twenty years to track down and reunite the papers and ephemera of my uncle, Major Dr. Albrecht Ochs. Many of his items, stolen in 1945, I've tracked to collections and archives in Germany, with little success so far in retrieval.

[Ulsterman]

Good for you Rick-history is preserved. Any chance the complete set will be posted here so that we all could enjoy them?

Thanks!