Johann Georg (George) Holl was born in 1850 in the small farming village of Oberpreuschwitz, now incorporated into the city of Bayreuth, Bavaria. He was the third son of farmer Johann Holl (1818-1886) and his wife, Anna Barbara née Hacker (1821-1893). In 1870, he received an emigration permit from the Bavarian government and departed for the United States in company with relatives. After briefly living in Economy, Pennsylvania, he traveled on to Alton, Illinois. He worked as a cooper in business with Jacob Mueller, another German immigrant, and in 1873 married Mueller's daughter Therese. After the failure of the cooperage business, he worked at a plow factory for several years and then migrated to Lincoln County, Kansas, where other relatives had migrated, and became a farmer. George Holl and his wife Therese had six children, of whom four survived to adulthood, and he passed away in Kansas in 1946. The Holl collection includes 118 letters sent to George Holl by his siblings in Germany and other relatives in both Germany and the United States. The letters were inherited by George and Therese Holl's daughter Barbara, preserved by their granddaughter Marguerite Holl Gabelmann, and then descended within the family to the contributor, Scott Holl.