Not so commonplace

When I walked into the University of Washington, a complete neophyte, to begin my thesis based on old family letters, I first sought out the reference desk. “I’m looking for books about the German immigrant community in Cleveland in the mid-1800s,” I said.
The reference librarian nodded sagely and clicked a few keys on her keyboard.
“Steamboats might be a keyword,” I suggested, “or Erie Canal.”
“There are 11 entries.” The librarian turned the screen so I could see it too. We scrolled through the list. “You know,” she added, “my family is predominantly of German ancestry. We arrived in Ohio in that same time period.”
“Really? In Cleveland?”
“No, Toledo.”
So many people I tell about my thesis have stories about their German ancestry, and often, an Ohio connection. Yet there seems to be very little written about the mid-nineteenth century wave of immigrants. UW library did have A History of Cleveland in their holdings. The book notes that by far the strongest ethnic groups to settle Cleveland were the Germans, with the Irish running a distant second. The 1910 History notes: “[Cleveland’s] principal ethnic parts were the English, the Irish and the German, the last two greatly preponderating. Unfortunately there are no reliable data of the earliest arrivals in Cleveland of these emigrants.”
When these crinkled letters, wrapped in string, written in old-fashioned German script with loopy esses, appeared among my father’s belongings, we assumed the discovery was commonplace. It turns out, it was not.