Category Archives: Cleveland and Ohio history

Primary and secondary sources

Posted on April 9, 2010 | 1 comment

I wonder what the percentage of U.S. Citizens claiming German heritage will be for the 2010 census. On the 1980 census, it was 26.1 percent — one in four citizens. According to a 1983 Report on German Americans, 5.5 million Germans immigrated to the U.S. between 1816 to 1914, because of economics, of drought, political ideologies and differences, because of religious persecution, and on and on. So many of our stories are lost.

It is rare to have primary source material, such as letters from the time period, and even then, the translation marches along a torturous path. Here is the oldest letter in our possession, written by my greatgreatgreatgreatgrandfather Philipp Heinrich Handrich, shortly after his arrival in Cleveland in 1840.
Lieber Tochtermann!

Euren Brief erhielt ich richtig in 26 Tagen, nun (?) wollte ich Euch mit diesem Schreiben in Kenntnis setzen, dass es uns allen gut geht, und wir gesund sind. Sodann Ihr uns schriebet, so mögte ich ___________ erfahren was mein Schwager und seine Frau macht, nebst ihren Mädchen, ob ihr alle gesund seyd, und die Mädchen machen ledige Stande (?). Meine Söhne arbeiten hier auf der Küfer Grofe (Profe?) und verdienen in einer Woche bis 5 Thaler und meine Tochter Margaretha ist hier in Dienst bei Wirth Biffer (Stiffer?). Wir haben im Sinn für (mehr) noch einige Zeit hier zu bleiben da wir zu etwas besserm noch keine Ausicht haben um Güter zu kaufen wollen wir uns noch nicht umsehen und wenigsten noch ein Jahr lang warten.
**********
Hence, from letters written in faded ink on crumbling paper in old Gothic German, my cousin translates the text (what’s legible, that is) into modern German. Then, English:
************
Dear daughter’s husband („daughterman“)!
Your letter did I receive rightly in 26 days, now (?) I intended to let you know through this letter that we are all well, and we are healthy. Then you wrote to us, so I should_____________ learn what my brother-in-law and his wife are doing, next to their girls, if you are all healthy, and the girls (make?) unmarried state. My sons are working here on the cellarmen (cooper) (profession) and earn within one week 5 Thaler and my daughter Margaretha is here in service at innkeeper Biffer’s (Stiffer?). We have in mind to stay here (more) still some time as we don’t have perspective on something better to buy land we still want to look around and wait at least one more year.
***********
It makes me very happy, therefore, to have secondary source material visiting at the moment — German descendants of the brother of my great-great grandfather. My relative lives in the town of Michael Harm, the town of Freinsheim, Germany. Secondary sources rock!

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Posted in Cleveland and Ohio history

Not quite lost in translation

Posted on March 7, 2010 | 3 comments

As I searched the passenger lists of ships arriving in New York’s harbor in 1857, here’s what I knew:
– that my great-great grandfather was “scarcely sixteen” (from his obituary), and that he was born in 1841.
– that he traveled on his own, without other family members
– that he was from the Rheinpfalz, then a part of Bavaria, based on how the letters were addressed:

H Johann Philipp Harm
Freinsheim
bei / close to Dürkheim
an dem Hartgebirg / at the Hart mountainchain
Königreich Bayern / Kingdom Bavaria
Rheinkreis / Rhine province
Europa

– that he probably left from Havre, France and arrived in New York, because his Uncle John Rapparlie recommended this route, in a letter dated September 8, 1850:

And if you should come so don’t take anything along except for what you have and don’t buy new pieces. Don’t take more than you need on the journey as you can buy everything here to a low price and then everything here is after a different fashion because the luggage fee costs more than it is worth. Don’t take more shoes and boots with you than you need for approximately 3 months the sea water spoils them here they are better, too. Don’t take more along than 1 to 2 boxes and turn everything into money and take checks /bills of exchange to Neujork. From there to Kleveland then none will be stolen from you and won’t get lost. And when you come so come only for yourself and don’t say my brother-in-law has lured me in. You have to come on your own risk and not accuse anybody and think I will now go to Amerika.
Another thing if you come don’t take a ship in any case from England, but from Havre, it is much more secure.

I’ve made a copy of the passenger list. The list begins with ship information:

June 30, 1857, the good Ship Helvetia

Michael’s name appears as number 262. At least I think it does. His name is spelled Michel Harm. Or maybe Michel Harne. He arrived in New York June 30, 34 days after his sixteenth birthday, May 26.

A page from the Ship Helvetia's passenger list, 6/30/1857

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Posted in 19th century history, Cleveland and Ohio history, Freinsheim and Palatinate history

Politically incorrect

Posted on March 4, 2010 | Leave a comment

I’m in a class with Carmen Bernier-Grand, and as we are workshopping our novels-in-progress, she raised a valid question.

“Do you have to refer to the nineteenth-century Indians as ‘wild’ and ‘brown'”?

The terms bother me, too. But I’m basing my novel on real letters from the mid-nineteenth century, and this is the language Jakob Handrich used. Here is a quote from his letter, which accompanied a package that contained vests and moccasins, written in 1849:

“The shoes, that is the work which the wild people or the brown Indians make.”

It seems it was a common reference — I’ve also come across the term in the book Pfälzer in Amerika. ‘Brown’ and ‘wild people’ are politically incorrect terms, and for that matter, just plain inaccurate, yet they seem gentle when compared with language used by the Yanks. Here’s one example I found in a speech by Ohio’s Governor Arthur St. Clair to the Ohio State Legislature in 1812:

“The government of the United States has ever with an unceasing philanthropy, and great expense, labored to civilize the Savages on her borders–to diminish the ferociousness of their natures–to cultivate among them the arts of peace–to estrange them from the cruel rites of Molock–and to inspire them with a true knowledge of a beneficent Deity.”

Hmmm. He goes on to say that, thank goodness, the U.S. has passed laws to extinguish the territorial entitlements of these “heathen remnants.” Ye gads! A glimpse of the white, barbaric mindset of the nineteenth century. It’s like we Ohioans were savages or something.

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Posted in Cleveland and Ohio history, Freinsheim and Palatinate history

Sad but true

Posted on March 4, 2010 | Leave a comment

In the book “Ohio: the History of a People” by Cayton, one paragraph sums up the decimation of the native tribes of Ohio.

“The population of Ohio exploded in the first half of the nineteenth century. From 45,365 in 1800, it rose to 230,760 in 1810, 581,434 in 1820, and 1,980,329 in 1850. Virtually barren of English-speaking residents in 1790, Ohio was the third largest state in the Union by 1850 … The U.S. had extinguished the claims of Indians through treaty cessions, most notably the Treaty of Greenville in 1795, an 1817 Treaty with the Wyandots, and St. Mary’s Treaty of 1818.”

By 1832 the Wyandots, Shawnee, and Senecas were confined to the Upper Sandusky. By 1842 they were moved west of the Mississippi.

According to Cayton, the mood of the Ohioans in the early nineteenth century was one of progress, of “the triumph of civilization over barbarism.”

In my research I’m discovering evidence that many German immigrants thought differently, their thinking influenced in part by romantic poets and ideas of the day. Key principles of the romanticism movement included a spiritualized view of nature, and the desire to lose oneself in it.

In 1849, Uncle Jakob sent two Indian vests and a pair of moccasins to his nephews and niece in Germany. I’d like to believe he saw the Indians as artisans, and as human beings.

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Posted in Cleveland and Ohio history, Freinsheim and Palatinate history

Not so commonplace

Posted on February 18, 2010 | Leave a comment

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.

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Posted in Cleveland and Ohio history