SONOMA, Calif. – Dale Earnhardt Jr. had been planning to pop the question, and he chose a place of important historical significance to his family.
During a recent trip to Germany, Earnhardt proposed to long-time girlfriend Amy Reimann at a venerable church in Illesheim attended by his ancestors.
“My 10th and 9th grandfather lived there, went to church there, and that church is the church that they went to,” Earnhardt said on Friday before opening NASCAR Sprint Cup Series practice at Sonoma Raceway in advance of Sunday’s race (3 p.m. ET on FOX Sports 1). “It’s over 1,000 years old, apparently, a very old church. The town is very old. There were 300 people living in it 300 years ago and there are 300 people living in it today. Nothing has really changed.”
Earnhardt, 40, wanted to make the trip to confirm what he had learned via internet sources about his own genealogy. He found original documents that provided first-hand evidence about his forebears.
“We went to the city of Speyer and to the archives and actually held the book that this church used to document handwritten documentation of births, deaths, baptisms,” Earnhardt said. “I could sit there and read the individual writings of my 10th grandfather, my ninth grandfather when they were baptized and when they died. I could see it with my own hands and I’m holding the book, the original book.
“So that made me more confident to make the decision to propose to Amy in that church with that connection to that church. I don’t have a church because we race on Sundays. I mean I went to St. Mark’s Lutheran in Mooresville when I was a kid, but I don’t have a church. I’m Lutheran, and if I wanted to go to church and I could, I would go to St. Mark’s. But I just thought that was a place to do it.”
For Reimann, the proposal was a complete surprise.
“I’ve been planning on it for several months,” Earnhardt said. “I was hoping for years that Amy and I would get married, and it just seemed like over this last year, it made more sense to me and that the timing was right. And I picked that particular spot just because I wanted her to feel special. We talked about this trip for a while. I told her about this trip and we talked about it for two or three years and had done a ton of work on the genealogy stuff to understand what we were doing and making sure we were doing the right thing and going to the right places.
“So, she kind of knew how important the trip was. I think to do it at that particular time, at that moment while we were in that church, may make that moment more memorable for her. And I thought it was just a great place to do it. I thought about it. Every other spot that I could think of just didn’t measure up, you know? It just wasn’t good enough or special enough for her.
“She was blown away. She certainly didn’t have an idea that that was going to happen, I don’t think.”
Source: Reid Spencer / NASCAR Wire Service
