This post, provided by Project Leader Paul Howes, describes how serendipity plays a role in discovering new information and for the unfortunate Leonhard Ruby how his surname dictated where he was was sent as a prisoner of war. When we were integrating two files of Ruby families of Swiss descent, initially received from Joe Brillhart and Gerhard Fischer, we noticed that there were war deaths of German soldiers throughout Europe and even beyond. As noted in an earlier blog post they stretched from England to Kazakhstan. I did a little figuring. There are twelve German Ruby men who died between 1941 and 1945. Three of them appear to have been old enough to have died from natural causes in their home towns, though interestingly perhaps, they all worked for the German railways. Of the rest four died in Russia, two in Romania,one in Kazakhstan,one in England, and one was not known, just “gefallen im Weltkrieg” (died in the world war). I didn’t think much mor