Dear Listers,
My Grandfather told us that he jumped ship in New York. He hated food cooked with a pressure cooker, because he had spent time in the German Merchant Marine. A few years back I had the pleasure of meeting his great niece and she had another twist to his story and that was that he had missed getting back to his ship.
No, your ancestors did not swim across. You probably need to dig into the records deeper. Sometimes, the answers do not come very easy. To find my husband's 2nd Great-grandfather's place of origin in Germany I had to do research in Manhattan on his brother and his family. Cluster Genealogy is another method that you can use. Learn all you can about the people in a community, if they settled in a rural community in the United States. Many emigrants came together, so check out the information about their fellow passengers. We were researching a German line for my cousin and we thought that their oldest daughter was born in the United States, because of what was recorded in the Census and other records. When the family was found arriving in New York, the oldest daughter was a one year old toddler traveling with her parents. Never say never, when you do research, because that is how you will find their records. My husband's people actually came by boat, even though they
might have been good swimmers. Perhaps, your people came steerage and the captain did not list all those, who traveled in that manner.
Too bad the men in Bremen destroyed the records, but the Hamburg officials were smarter. They found storage for their records. The boys in Bremen should have let a woman find some storage for them. Most women know how to stash things away in really small storage areas and safe ones, too.
I bought plastic storage bins for my genealogical records and I have them color coded for each grandparent. This helps, because I have been working on my ancestral lines, since 1965. Yes, there is always more research to do.
Here's wishing that you can all get around that Brick Wall.
Karla Stegelmeier Nurnberg