It’s time for my big visit, the one I’ve been waiting for, a trip to Bremerhaven on the North Sea, to the Deutsches Auswandererhaus (German Emigration Museum). I came across it early via research on my thesis, and I’ve wanted to visit ever since.
Angela sets me up with a friend in Bremen — Doro –who lets me use her office apartment (and Apple Computer). From Bremen I take the train to Bremerhaven, a port city and emigration center. From here Europeans left daily for centuries, headed for North America, South America, Australia — points all over the globe.
Records show that Michael Harm emigrated from Le Havre, France. But as I walk from the bus to the harbor, I’m loving it already. A three-masted packet ship similar to the Helvetia (the ship of Michael Harm’s voyage in 1857), is docked along the pier.
In the Auswandererhaus, there is so much to take in I spend most of the day. I linger over the succinct, to-the-point summaries of different periods of history and reasons people chose to make such a difficult journey, 
and spend a long time in the living history exhibit of steerage class accommodations on a mid-19th century ship.
At the end of the exhibit, I am reminded Michael Harm did ship out of this port, not the first time he traveled from Germany in 1857, but the last, in 1893. Via the computer at the end, I find both his name and his friend Michael Hoehn’s name on a passenger list of the steamship Columbia.