The second man from the right has become as the "Lipstick Killer".
After US vice-presidential candidate Tim Walz was revealed to have Luxembourgish ancestry this week, volunteer initiative Luxroots shared more details from their ongoing registry.
Earlier this week, Kamala Harris' VP pick, Democrat Tim Walz, was revealed to have Luxembourgish origins - 12.5%, to be exact, as his great-great grandfather grew up in Kehlen before emigrating to America.
The news triggered more deep dives into Luxembourgish ancestry, assisted by local ASBL luxroots.org - an online database compiled by volunteers over the last two decades, which allows emigrants to look up their family origins in a matter of seconds.
Amateur enthusiasts set up the initiative twenty years ago, starting with the canton of Clervaux, before expanding to the whole country and greater region.
The majority of sources are handwritten files, often in traditional German script, and can include documents from parish registers, or municipal archives, up until 1923. After that year, data protection laws come into play, which mean that birth or death announcements must be looked at, or else private documents. Some sources even date back as far as 1600.
Georges Eicher / © Jeannot Ries / RTL
Around 80 people volunteer for Luxroots. Users can purchase a yearly subscription for 22 euros in order to access the database. There are currently 2,000 subscribers, including 300 from the USA, in search of their roots. And Tim Walz is no exception, with his 12.5% Luxembourgish origins, says Georges Eischer, founder of the project.
Some 70,000 Luxembourgers are thought to have emigrated across the Atlantic in the past:
"So today, from those 70,000 emigrants, there are now a few million in the US. The population with Luxembourg origins in America is far larger in the US than we have in the Grand Duchy now, and naturally people are interested in their family roots. As well as US subscribers we have lots of French and Belgian users, as well as from other places such as South Africa or Australia. They come from all over the world."
Another US citizen with Luxembourgish origins is the disgraced former Speaker of the United States House of Representatives, Dennis Hastert, who was sentenced to prison in 2016 for financial offences related to the sexual abuse of young boys.
He is not the only felon with Luxembourgish roots, however; another prominent character on the Luxroots database is a man known as the "Lipstick Killer", an American serial killer who left a message written in lipstick on a wall after murdering one of his victims. He was later caught and admitted to killing three women and died in prison in 2012 after serving a life sentence. The murderer's grandfather hailed from Noertrange, near Wiltz, in northern Luxembourg.
