Chapter 1 - German Emigration
My Mother's 4 Grandparents were all born in the State of Neidersachsen (Lower Saxony), in the north of Germany. The map of Lower Saxony is show on the left. Towns of note in Lower Saxony include Oldenburg, Hannover, Bremerhaven, Celle and Uelzen.
A good web-site to reference information about Neidersachsen is http://www.allgerman.com/niedersaschen.htm.
Part of the city of Hamburg is in Lower Saxony, but most of Hamburg is in the state of Schleswig-Holstein. There is an abundance of North-east Nebraska emigrants from these two states. Most of these immigrants traveled to America through the port of Bremerhaven.
A good web-site to reference information about Neidersachsen is http://www.allgerman.com/niedersaschen.htm.
Part of the city of Hamburg is in Lower Saxony, but most of Hamburg is in the state of Schleswig-Holstein. There is an abundance of North-east Nebraska emigrants from these two states. Most of these immigrants traveled to America through the port of Bremerhaven.
I recently ran across this website: http://www.auswanderer-oldenburg.de/ This was the start to actually finding where my Grone family originated.
This website was created with the support of the Oldenburg Archives, where there are some emigration records for the old State of Oldenburg. You can click on the American Flag in the upper right corner to get an explanation of the website in English. If you use Google Chrome for your browser, you can use the "Translate" feature on many of the pages that are only available in German.
A bit of a hint when it comes to searching for German Surnames - name translations to English happened often due to the German language use of umlauts (ä, ö, etc.). For example, the name Gröne was typically translated to either Grone, or Groene. Küster became Koester, Kuester or Kuster. If you want to search using the umlaut, you can type those characters by holding down the ALT key while typing 4 numbers. Here are the codes:
ä - 0228
ë - 0235
ï - 0239
ö - 0246
ü - 0252
You may have to search using more than one spelling in order to find the person you are looking for.
The first 3 names that came up from my Gröne search were Bernhard Christoph Martin (my great-grandfather), George Diedrich (Bernhard's "cousin") and Sophie Margarete (Bernhard's younger sister)!
This website was created with the support of the Oldenburg Archives, where there are some emigration records for the old State of Oldenburg. You can click on the American Flag in the upper right corner to get an explanation of the website in English. If you use Google Chrome for your browser, you can use the "Translate" feature on many of the pages that are only available in German.
A bit of a hint when it comes to searching for German Surnames - name translations to English happened often due to the German language use of umlauts (ä, ö, etc.). For example, the name Gröne was typically translated to either Grone, or Groene. Küster became Koester, Kuester or Kuster. If you want to search using the umlaut, you can type those characters by holding down the ALT key while typing 4 numbers. Here are the codes:
ä - 0228
ë - 0235
ï - 0239
ö - 0246
ü - 0252
You may have to search using more than one spelling in order to find the person you are looking for.
The first 3 names that came up from my Gröne search were Bernhard Christoph Martin (my great-grandfather), George Diedrich (Bernhard's "cousin") and Sophie Margarete (Bernhard's younger sister)!