Riverside-Brookfield High School German teacher Patricia Reaves didn’t use her summer months off to concentrate on anything other than education, rather she basked in it.

Recently back from a three-week trip to areas in Germany including Rodewald and Hanover, Reave’s mission was to soak up as much history illustrating their connections with her local communities and gain more information on genealogy.

“I’ve always enjoyed history,” Reaves said. “It’s about the language and the culture.”

Reaves, who lived in Hamburg until she was 11 years old, is the history chairwoman of Westchester’s Franzosenbusch Heritage Project and with a team of individuals the group is working to piece together the clearest possible account of German immigration to the area.

Westchester’s Wolf Road Prairie House has offered itself as a large clue to uncovering background on the earliest American settlers of the 19th Century.

Reaves, a Brookfield resident, said she found similarities in the way both the prairie house and the German homes were constructed and they also learned a great deal about the German immigrants who lived in the house from a school teacher and his family to farmers.

“It begged the question of what went on there and why did they come,” Reaves said.

Reaves and the Heimat Museum in Rodewald, Germany are working together to share knowledge and documents to create a better understanding of why mass amounts of German citizens left and settled in areas such as Westchester, Hillside and Brookfield.

“It’s a wonderful way to give people their history back,” Reaves said.

Valerie Spale, executive director of Save the Prairie Society, an affiliate of the historical group, said Reave’s trip was important to others because it demonstrates the amount of available genealogical information.

“I think it’s more than just knowing about who they are and where they came from,” Spale said. “It’s an example that people can track their own ancestry. If they research enough they can find the origin of their own family.”

Reaves, along with her husband and daughter, said the trip allowed them to gain insight to how the German’s around Rodewald and Hanover lived, why they decided to leave and how they adapted to the American culture.

“We learned a lot,” Reaves said. “It’s an interesting way to communicate to a town and do research.”

Although Reaves and the historical group are continually working to better understand why German immigrants settled in several Cook County communities, they believe one reason may be they came to follow a dream of starting over.

“The lure of the land in America was unbelievable,” Reaves said. “We always like to have our eyes and ears open and learn how people lived back then.”