[Fiji Hill]

Catherine II “the Great” was a German princess who only learned to speak Russian after moving to Russia.

[Stonewall Jackson]

Yep, my family lived in her father's principality until it was time to marry Catherine off. Apparently daddy was a real tightwad, so he decided to save a bunch of money and get rid of about 10,000 excess serfs by giving them to the Russians so that they could "teach the Russian farmers how to properly farm the land". The thing is, the Russian farmers were all happy with the way they were already farming, so the Germans formed their own villages and stuck mainly to themselves.

My family got out of Russia in 1911 and caught a tramp freighter out of Hamburg heading for Galveston the next spring. My great-grandmother went into labor with my great-aunt Mary as the ship was entering Galveston Bay, so she was taken straight off the ship, thus bypassing immigration. If this hadn't happened, she most likely would not have been allowed into the country, due to a birth defect she had.

Once she was out of the hospital, they caught a train out of Houston to Colorado, where they met up with other Germans who'd been fleeing the crumbling Russian Empire.