Lost Treasure of the Teutonic Knights Mystery Cache
Lost Treasure of the Teutonic Knights
-
Difficulty:
-
-
Terrain:
-
Size: 
(regular)
Please note Use of geocaching.com services is subject to the terms and conditions
in our disclaimer.
The cache is not at the given coordinates. To find the treasure, solve the mystery below.
I have always been fascinated with family history, and when I was younger my great grandfather told me stories about Georg Leonhard Neuberger, the immigrant ancestor of the Neuberger family. His life story was legendary, to the point where you don’t know what is true and what is legend. Georg Leonhard was born in the town of Feuchtwagnen, which is in Bavaria, on 12 July 1765. His father Georg Michael was a local farmer and his mother came from very educated parents. They had a farm just outside Feuchtwagnen in the village of Oberansbach. He entered the local school at an early age and was advanced beyond his years. His favorite subject was Mathematics and was mastering Algebra by age 8, geometry by age 9 and Calculus by age 11. He entered Gottingen University at the age of 13 and studied Mathematics. It took Georg 4 years to graduate with a Masters in Mathematics and a Masters in Germanic History. The University of Gottingen offered him a professorship at the age of 18, becoming the youngest professor in the German University System.
History was another of Georg Leonhard passions and it showed since one of his many hobbies was genealogy. He was proficient analyzing church and local town records and soon became the person that wealthy merchants and businessmen called when they wanted to learn about their family history. Not only did he help others in searching for their ancestors, he searched for his own ancestors. He discovered a line from his mother’s mother that supposedly went back to Teutonic Knights. This really excited him. He also was able get the Neuberger line almost to the Protestant Reformation, which was quite a feat to do, even back then.
Not just being a book smart person, Georg Leonhard was an outdoorsman and in the summer during school breaks would travel to the Alps and live in a little cabin he built. He would survive off the land and work on his teachings for the next school year. Many times his friends would come to visit him and he would not be in the cabin. No one would know where he went. There were rumors though that the reason he spent his summers alone was that he was treasure hunting. When he would gather with friends and acquaintances at the local Beer Hall, and he would have too much beer, he would start talking about the lost treasures of the Teutonic Knights and that he would discover them one day. People would laugh at him.
In 1790 he married the sister of one of his students, Anna Maria Winter, and two years later, Georg was offered a professorship from the University of Pennsylvania. He accepted the offer and took his wife and new born son, Georg Leonhard Jr. and headed to the newly formed United States of America.
He taught at Penn for 23 years before retiring. While at the prestigious school, he met many people and was well respected by his fellow professors. Even though he was German, he became involved with the power brokers of the area, and counted as his friends, a couple of Philadelphia mayors, and a couple of governors. He became friends with a fellow Mathematics professor from Penn, Robert Patterson and his son Robert M. Patterson which through this friendship was able to meet President Thomas Jefferson. He considered his meeting of the president one of his life’s highlights.
After retiring from Penn, Georg took a trip to Germany by himself. No one heard from him for almost two years, and at one point his wife Anna assumed he had died. And then out of the blue he appeared on ship that landed in Baltimore. He never mentioned anything about his disappearance, but after he returned, he never seemed to be wanting for money. He gathered his family still living in Philadelphia, and he purchased land in which he built a farm in the rural village of Mount Airy. Three years later, he bought a farm in Sykesville and lived the rest of his life there as a successful farmer.
There was always talk in the family about treasure maps and lost treasures but no one ever had any proof, only legends and stories. When my great grandfather died, my family was cleaning up the attic of his house, which had much family history in it, and they came across some of Georg Leonhard’s old notes. Most were from his teaching days and were fascinating, but in the back of one of his books were three sheets of old paper. They seemed to go together as they looked different from the rest of the papers in the book.
The next time I saw my dad, he showed me the two sheets of paper. On the first sheet there was a cipher. On the other piece of paper was a family tree. The writing on the sheets of paper was obviously from my immigrant ancestor. As my dad gave me the sheets of papers, he said they seem to go together, but no one knew how. Georg supposedly liked to leave papers with codes and ciphers around the house, but none of those have been found except for these three sheets. My dad’s brothers and sisters thought that the family tree stuck between the other two sheets was odd, and when they looked at the tree, they saw some strange things, which may be clues or they may not be clues. They noticed that the genealogy for the most part, only showed the direct Neuberger line with their wives and no one else. They know that Georg Leonhard had done research on all his ancestors so they found it odd that those lines weren’t on this specific tree. Secondly, the tree goes back to Johann Neuberger, but there have been other family trees which show the Neuberger line going back another 3 generations from Johann. No one knows if that means anything or not. Thirdly, Georg’s mom’s mom, where the supposed Teutonic Knights family line comes from, is listed in the tree, but strangely only her death. Georg really loved his grandma and held a memorial on the anniversary of her death every year.
My dad also said there was a third sheet of paper that contained a cipher, but he can’t seem to find it at this moment. He told me to start with these sheets of paper first, and maybe he will be able to find the other note by the time I figure out what they mean.
I’m still trying to figure out what these codes mean, but I am assuming that this leads to some treasure and possibly from the Teutonic Knights. If you figure out where this treasure is, I say go for it, but leave some of the treasure for those that find it after you.
Congratulations on Hixon, gabi&beecharmer, and TeamTDI on their FTF. I understand the work that Sue-Cat had for the group above in preparing for the trek to the treasure, but was not able to join them and I have no problem with her sharing in the FTF.
Additional Hints
(No hints available.)