This collection of letters, dating from 1869 to 1932, includes letters exchanged by members of the extended Baur/Eichner family. Most of the letters were sent to Christian Baur, who immigrated to the United States in the 1860s and eventually settling in Reading, Pennsylvania; to his sister Fredericka Baur Eichner (who also immigrated to Reading); and to Fredericka Baur Eichner's daughter Florence Eichner Seiz. The most frequent letter author is Pauline Baur Schwald, sister of Christian and Fredericka Baur.

The Benecke Family Papers, held by the State Historical Society of Missouri, contains several thousand items reflecting the lives of immigrants Louis Benecke (1843-1919) and his wife Josephine Amerlan Benecke (1845-1908), as well as the lives of their families, friends, and descendants. Josephine Amerlan Benecke was born in Prussia and married Louis Benecke in 1868, in New York. The digitized letters in this collection were sent to her by her relatives in Germany, above all her sisters Frieda Amerlan (a children's book author) and Auguste Amerlan Schorss. Please note that the digitizations are taken from photocopies of the original letters.

Letters sent by Christian Benedix, an immigrant from Germany who eventually settled in California, to relatives in Germany.

Letters sent to the Blumenberg family from relatives in Hannover.

Letters and other material uploaded by our contributors.

This collection of letters, largely dating from 1882 to 1902, centers on immigrant Christian Conz and his siblings. Christian Conz emigrated from Güglingen, Württemberg, and eventually settled in Reading, Pennsylvania. He received numerous letters from his relatives who remained in Güglingen, in particular his sister Johanna Conz Pinsot and his brother Christian Conz. His aunt and uncle, Wilhelmina and Jacob Gross, were also frequent correspondents.

Carl Hermann Crede immigrated to Missouri from Cassel, Hesse, in 1853 with his brother Wilhelm. He joined the household of his maternal grandmother, Margarete Versen Schroeder Classen, who had immigrated in the 1830s. In 1855, another Crede brother, Carl Albert Crede, also immigrated to Missouri. Among the siblings the Crede brothers left behind was their sister Therese Crede Winhold, known in the family as “Rösel.” Carl Albert Crede was killed in 1863 during the Civil War while serving as a member of the Enrolled Missouri Militia, an organization which fought for the United States. Hermann Crede became a farmer and local official in Osage County, Missouri; his brother Wilhelm (who anglicized his name to William) also lived in the same area.

<p>The group of letters shared here is a small portion of the Dobberpuhl-Krueger Family Collection, a rich archive held by the Max Kade Institute for German-American Studies documenting five generations of a family whose members first immigrated to Wisconsin from Pomerania in the 1840s. These letters were largely sent to Carl Christian Friedrich Dobberpuhl (1784&ndash;1848) and his wife Caroline Friederike Klug Dobberpuhl (1798&ndash;1875), who came to southeastern Wisconsin in 1843, settling near what is now the city of Cedarburg not far north of Milwaukee. The Dobberpuhls were part of a larger movement of Old Lutherans who emigrated from Pomerania in the face of the Kingdom of Prussia&rsquo;s campaign to establish a single state church by merging together the Lutheran and Reformed denominations and forcing each to abandon aspects of their spiritual beliefs. Given the important role of religious liberty in shaping the Dobberpuhls&rsquo; decision to emigrate, it is not surprising that the correspondence they received from relatives in Germany&mdash;particularly Caroline Klug Dobberpuhl&rsquo;s brother Gottlieb Klug&mdash;is rich with expressions of faith. For further information on the Dobberpuhl family, please see Mark Louden, &ldquo;Introducing the Dobberpuhl-Krueger Family Collection,&rdquo; <em>Max Kade Institute Friends Newsletter</em>, Fall 2019.</p>

This collection centers on Dorothea Handel Schuhmacher, who was originally from Bretten in Baden-Württemberg and immigrated to the United States in 1855 with her husband Peter Schuhmacher; the couple eventually settled near the town of Rome in central New York state. The collection includes letters exchanged between Dorothea Handel Schuhmacher and her father Gottfried Handel and other letters from family friends. The letters were inherited by Dorothea Handel's daughter Minnie and contributed to the German Heritage in Letters project by Minnie Schuhmacher's great-granddaughter Linda Stauf.

The Dreyer Family Papers is a collection of 30 letters between 1860 and 1872. This collection of letters, from the Bancroft Library at University of California, Berkeley, is apparently associated with an immigrant named John Dreyer (1831-1906) and his wife Anna Catrina Döscher (Dreyer) (1835-1905) who was from the Cuxhaven area and migrated to California in the mid-19th century. John Dreyer was a rancher and the family wrote and received letters from their relatives in Germany as well as relatives who had also emigrated to the U.S. and exchanged information about their own state of health, financial situation or information about their daily lives.

This collection contains letters sent to Karl Emmel of Green Bay, Wisconsin, the bulk of which were written by his parents Caroline and Wilhelm Emmel, with additional letters written by Karl Emmel's sister Johanna. Karl Emmel immigrated to the United States in 1925. His parents, Caroline and Wilhelm Emmel, of Wiesbaden, Hessen-Nassau, wrote lengthy letters to their son almost every month until they also chose to immigrate to the United States in 1927. In 1937, the couple returned to Germany and lived there until their deaths. Between 1937 and 1941 they once again took up the habit of writing a letter each month to their son in the United States. The final letter in this collection was written in 1945, just after the end of World War II in Europe. The early group of letters describe Caroline and Wilhelm Emmel's preparations for migrating to the United States. In the second group of letters, their experiences of living with rationing and making do in the context of war are primary themes.

This collection consists of letters sent by three siblings, Charlotte, Sophie, and Theodor Engelmann, to their sister Margarethe. The three Engelmann siblings emigrated to Illinois with their parents, Friedrich and Elisabeth Engelmann, in 1833. Margarethe Engelmann, who was married with Georg Hilgard, remained in Speyer, Germany. This group of letters is drawn from the Engelmann-Kircher Family Papers, a collection held by the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library in Springfield, Illinois.

This collection of letters is drawn from the Eugen and Emma Klee Papers, held by the Joseph P. Horner Memorial Library of the German Society of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. The bulk of the letters presented here were sent by Eugen Haas of Knittelsheim (a small settlement located near Karlsruhe) to his uncle Eugen Klee, a musician who had settled in Philadelphia in the early 1900s. They record Haas’ life in Germany before, during, and in the years after World War I. Letters from other relatives of Eugen Haas, including members of the Cherdron family, are also part of the collection. A separate collection of Eugen Klee letters from the Historical Society of Pennsylvania includes letters dating from the 1890s to 1911, many of which were written by the same family members. To view the letters in this collection in chronological order, click here.

This collection of letters, drawn from the Eugen Klee Papers held by the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, includes correspondence sent between 1893 and 1911 to the choral conductor Eugen Klee, who immigrated to the United States in 1893 from Otterberg (Rhineland). Klee was an active member of the German-American musical community in both Philadelphia and New York. A separate group of Klee’s family letters, dating from the 1900s through the 1920s, is held by the German Society of Pennsylvania and can be reviewed by visiting the following link.

Letters sent to Lewis (Ludwig) Eversmann, who immigrated to Missouri in the 1820s, by his family, including his brother Julius, who lived in both Germany and Mexico (where he served as consul in Tampico).

This group of letters is drawn from the Clarence A. Moore Papers, held by the Joint Archives of Holland at Hope College Library (Holland, Mich.).

A collection of letters sent to George Neubert, an immigrant who lived in Missouri in the 1890s, contributed by a descendant. The letters were largely sent by Neubert's sister Marie Hirtes and his nephew Karl Hirtes.

This selection of letters drawn from the Mary L. Geschwind Papers, held by the Library of Virginia, focuses on business and personal correspondence of the Haase family of Richmond, Virginia, from the late nineteenth century until the 1920s. The patriarch of the Haase family, Charles Haase, immigrated to the United States in the 1850s and by 1867 had established himself in the fur trade in Richmond. This collection includes several letters sent by Leopold Haase (18??-1917?), a cousin of Charles Haase who had moved to the city of Reval, in the Russian empire (now Tallinn, Estonia) as a young man and was also established in the fur trade.

The Grupe Family Letters is a collection of 22 letters mostly sent to immigrant Marie Franziska Elisabeth Grupe (1825–1923) between 1898 and 1919. Marie Grupe was born in 1825 in Hamburg, Germany, and christened with her mother's last name Uphoff; her father was reportedly a man named Johann Carl Friedrick Kreplin, and she used this last name after immigrating to the United States in 1850. Later that same year, in New York City, she married Charles (or Carl) Grupe (1826–1893), a shoemaker and farmer who was an immigrant from Hanover. Later in the decade the couple settled in New Canaan, Connecticut, where she would live for the rest of her life. The letters were written to Marie Grupe by Gustave Grupe (1847–1930), a nephew of Charles Grupe, who was a master mason in Hamburg.

Correspondence sent to journalist and entrepreneur Henry Villard from his German relatives. Villard, born Heinrich Hilgard in 1835, in Speyer, was born into a wealthy family and first traveled to the United States in 1853. He spent his first years in the United States living with cousins who had immigrated to Illinois, but by the early 1860s was launched on a career as a journalist and business promoter. The bulk of the letters in this collection, drawn from the Henry Villard Papers held by the Houghton Library at Harvard University, were written by his sister Emma Hilgard von Xylander and other Hilgard family members.

This group of letters is part of the Heinrich A. Ratterman Collection of German-American Manuscripts, held by the Illinois History and Lincoln Collections division of the University of Illinois Library. The letters were sent to Friedrich Wilhelm Hess of Cincinnati by his mother, Marianne von Rappard Hassel, and his sister, Emilie Hassel, between 1871 and 1877. Hess was evidently born with the name Adolf Hassel in Hamm, Westfalen, but for reasons that are unclear adopted the name Hess at some point after arriving in the United States.

This collection of letters centers on the Hinrichs family, originally from the Aurich region of Hannover, who immigrated to Missouri in the 1850s. The collection is drawn from the Oliver Latimer Papers, donated to the State Historical Society of Missouri by the family of Oliver Latimer and his wife Yettie Bauerrichter Latimer, who was a descendant of the Hinrichs family.

This collection of letters is taken from the Höfeln Family Papers, held by the Newberry Library in Chicago, Illinois. Almost all of the letters were sent to Charlotte Fischer (later von Höfeln), who was born in 1819 in Nuremburg and immigrated to Illinois around 1851. In 1852, she married Andreas von Höfeln, and they eventually settled in Washington, Illinois. Most of the letters were sent to Charlotte Fischer von Höfeln from Kirchheim unter Teck, Württemberg, one of the communities where she lived in Germany before migrating to the United States.

This collection of letters, dating from between 1866 and 1901, was sent to [Johann] Bernard Husam, who immigrated to the United States in 1855 and settled in Adams County, Illinois. The letters were sent to Husam by his relatives who lived in and near the village of Albersloh and the city of Münster, in Nordrhein-Westfalen. Partial translations of some of the letters were created by Joan Schell, a descendant of Johann Bernard Husam. She passed the letters and her translations on to her nephew, Steve Schell, who provided the collection to the German Heritage in Letters project. The largest number of letters were sent to Bernard Husam by his sister, Luetke, who was first married to a man named Geisker and then a man named Steinhorst. Bernard's brother Heinrich also wrote him multiple letters.

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.

Letters received by and sent from Marie Hansen Taylor. Born in Gotha in 1829, she married American author Bayard Taylor in 1857. The couple traveled throughout Europe for the first decade of their marriage but eventually returned to Taylor's home state of Pennsylvania. The bulk of the letters were sent to Marie Hansen Taylor by her mother Lina Braun Hansen. Her father, Peter Andreas Hansen, was director of the astronomical observatory at Gotha.

The Meyer Brothers Collection is drawn from the Meyer Brothers’ Store Records, held by the Hill Memorial Library at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge. The bulk of the letters were originally sent to the siblings Emanuel, Caroline, and Henry Meyer, who immigrated to the United States between 1855 and 1864, by their parents and other family members living in and near the small town of Lachen, in southwestern Bavaria. The Meyer siblings arrived in Louisiana and became involved in the mercantile business thanks to the guidance of their father’s half-siblings, the Levys, who had immigrated to Louisiana over a decade earlier. In addition to these family letters, the Meyer Brothers’ Store Records also includes substantial documentation of the day-to-day work of the brothers’ mercantile business in Clinton, Louisiana from the 1850s through the early 1900s. The letters were subsequently transcribed and translated thanks to the sponsorship of Jay Silverberg, a descendant of the Levy family. We thank him for making these transcriptions and translations available on German Heritage in Letters. The letters shared here represent those which were exchanged between the United States and Germany; a fuller collection, including in particular letters sent by family members within the United States, can be found at Silverberg's website, “Meyer Brothers Letters.” An interview with Jay Silverberg about his research can be found here.

Wilhelmina “Minnie” Vieting Nuss and her husband (Wilhelm) Gustav Nuss arrived in Philadelphia on June 21, 1883 with their four children: Clara Dora, Heinrich, Frederick and Pauline. They came from Langendreer in Westphalia (now part of the city of Bochum) and sailed from Antwerp on the Vaterland. They first stayed with relatives in Philadelphia who had come before them and later lived in their own home(s) in Philadelphia. These letters, mostly sent to Wilhelmina Nuss by her family in Langendreer, descended to her daughter, Clara Dora Nuss Fish, and then to Clara Fish's great-granddaughter, Cheryl A. Baggs, who contributed them to the German Heritage in Letters collection.

This group of letters was written by Peter Jöns to his family in Schleswig-Holstein between approximately 1887 and 1895.

This collection contains family letters of the Chicago journalist Hermann Raster, who emigrated from Germany in the wake of the upheaval of 1848 and was an active supporter of the United States during the Civil War. The collection largely includes letters Hermann sent to his sister, Sophie Raster, who lived in the town of Zerbst in Anhalt, and letters exchanged by Hermann Raster and his wife Margarethe Oppenheim Raster with her mother, Anna Oppenheim, who lived in Dessau.

This collection of letters is drawn from the Rustemeyer Family Papers, held by the State Historical Society of Missouri, and includes letters sent to Bernard Rustemeyer in the years after World War I, primarily from his cousin August Stockebrand. Bernard Rustemeyer was born in the community of Körbecke, in Westphalia, in 1866, and immigrated with his family to Missouri in the 1880s.

Letters sent to John L. Schulz (1833–1907), born Johann Lorenz Schulz, of Sappington, Missouri. Born in the Oberfranken region of Bavaria, he was largely raised in the community of Issigau. In 1853, he and his brother Johann Nicholas both emigrated from Germany to the United States. By 1856 Johann L. Schulz was living in Missouri and had married Maria Jahn (1837–1918), who was also an immigrant; her family was originally from Mährisch Altstadt, at the time a community in the Austro-Hungarian Empire but today the town of Staré Město in the Šumperk district of the Czech Republic. The couple eventually owned and operated a farm in southwestern Saint Louis County, just outside St. Louis city, where they raised fourteen children (twelve of whom survived to adulthood). The correspondence in this collection is largely made up of letters from John L. Schulz's siblings, other relatives, and friends in Issigau sharing news about family events, natural disasters, and everyday life. Information about the family background is drawn from biographies written by Carol Whitton, a descendant of John L. Schulz and Maria Jahn Schulz.

This collection of letters centers on Isaac Schweitzer, a merchant from the community of Mühringen who immigrated to the United States in the 1860s. He remained in the United States for almost twenty years, eventually marrying Isabella Guggenheimer, the U.S.-born daughter of two German immigrants. Eventually, Isaac returned to Germany with Isabella and remained there for the rest of his life.

This collection contains letters sent to Sophie Sosnowski, who was born at Pforzheim, Baden in 1809. The daughter of Christian Wentz, who was court physician to the Duke of Baden, in 1835 she married Polish aristocrat Joseph Sosnowski. They immigrated to the United States not long afterwards. Sophie Sosnowski became a widow with three children upon Joseph Sosnowski's death. She supported her family by teaching at a succession of schools for wealthy young women, first in New York State and eventually in Georgia and South Carolina. The letters in this collection were sent to Sosnowski by her sister, brother-in-law, and niece, who remained in Germany.

The correspondence in the Weinhardt Family Letters centers on the experiences of John V. (Hans) Weinhardt, who immigrated to the United States in 1925. In 1923, Hans, then a fifteen-year-old student doing an apprenticeship at the city hall of his hometown, Schwabach, Bavaria, began researching his family's history in old city records. He eventually discovered that a branch of his family had emigrated to Indiana, and within a year he had made contact with William W. Weinhardt, a distant cousin who ran a detective agency in the city of Lafayette. William Weinhardt and Hans Weinhardt's father, Johann Weinhardt, were third cousins; William Weinhardt's father and grandfather had emigrated to Indiana from Schwabach in 1848. William Weinhardt encouraged Hans and his family to consider immigrating to the United States and promised to sponsor them. Eventually, in February 1925, Hans departed Germany on the White Star ship Arabic and made his way to Lafayette. There, he came to be known as John, rather than Hans, and he lived with William and his wife Carrie, who had no children, until his marriage in 1936. John V. Weinhardt became a United States citizen in 1930. He later wrote that William and Carrie, whom he came to call Uncle Bill and Aunt Carrie, “were like parents to me and most people thought I was their son... I shall always be grateful to them.” The collection includes correspondence between the Weinhardts in Schwabach and William Weinhardt before Hans left Germany, and Hans' correspondence with his parents and other family members after leaving Germany, dating from 1923 through the 1930s. As a U.S. citizen, John V. Weinhardt later sponsored the immigration of his younger brother Philipp and his family to the United States after the Second World War, much as William Weinhardt had done for him. The letters presented are drawn from the family collection of John V.'s son William J. Weinhardt. Our thanks to John G. Weinhardt, the son of Philipp Weinhardt, for spearheading the inclusion of the Weinhardt Family Letters in the project and for generously sharing his transcriptions and translations of the letters as well as the background research for this collection description.

The Wuellner Family Letters represent correspondence sent to John Joseph Wuellner, who emigrated from Schwaney (near Paderborn) to the Alton, Illinois area in 1881, at the age of 19. Having apprenticed as a cabinet maker in Germany, he launched a long-lasting construction company in Alton.

Franz (Frank) Ziegenhagen and Dorothea (Dora) Schmidt, his second wife, emigrated from Steinborn, Kreis Schlochau, West Prussia (now Słupia, Gmina Debrzno, Poland), a small farming community. Franz and his adult son, Franz (also known as Frank), immigrated to New York in July of 1880, via Hamburg. They settled in Millerville Township, Douglas County, Minnesota. Other emigrants from their area were already living in this farming area. Two months later, Dora, her four young boys, aged 1 to 7 years old (Oscar, Albert, Arnold and Theodore), her two adult stepdaughters, Antonia and Maria Ziegenhagen, and Maria’s young daughter Ida Ziegenhagen immigrated together. The family traveled from Stettin to Hull, England, then to New York via Liverpool. Franz and Dora lived in Minnesota for a short time before settling in rural Kidder Township, Day County, South Dakota, where they became homesteaders. A few years after Franz’s death, in 1901, Dora moved to the nearby town of Bristol, Day County, South Dakota. Dora and Franz had five more children born in the US, three surviving past childhood; John, Ernest and Nellie. The family were Catholics in Prussia and also in the United States.