German-Americans - The silent minority

The Economist ^ | February 7, 2015

[2ndDivisionVet]

America’s largest ethnic group has assimilated so well that people barely notice it.

KOHLER, WISCONSIN - ON A snow-covered bluff overlooking the Sheboygan river stands the Waelderhaus, a faithful reproduction of an Austrian chalet. It was built by the Kohler family of Wisconsin in the 1920s as a tribute to the homeland of their father, John Michael Kohler, who had immigrated to America in 1854 at the age of ten.

John Michael moved to Sheboygan, married the daughter of another German immigrant, who owned the local foundry, and took over his father-in-law’s business. He transformed it from a maker of ploughshares into a plumbing business. Today Kohler is the biggest maker of loos and baths in America. Herbert Kohler, the boss (and grandson of the founder), has done so well selling tubs that he has been able to pursue his other passion—golf—on a grand scale. The Kohler Company owns Whistling Straits, the course that will host the Ryder Cup in 2020.

German-Americans are America’s largest single ethnic group (if you divide Hispanics into Mexican-Americans, Cuban-Americans, etc). In 2013, according to the Census bureau, 46m Americans claimed German ancestry: more than the number who traced their roots to Ireland (33m) or England (25m). In whole swathes of the northern United States, German-Americans outnumber any other group (see map). Some 41% of the people in Wisconsin are of Teutonic stock....

[wastoute]

The Palatine Germans. I am the descendant of one. We had two members of the family in the Revolution.

[VanShuyten]

“...being anti-Kaiser was good business.”

My great-grandfather moved his family, including my young grandfather, to the US because he didn’t want any of his sons drafted into the Kaiser’s army.

Some of his relatives moved to Brazil, so now there are more of us in the New World than left in the old.

[QBFimi]

Meine frau ... er, ah - my wife had relatives in Vienna who were quite knowledgeable about “die Hutten” (the Hutterite immigrants to America). Although their sermons are in German, they speak “Hutterisch”, a German dialect originally spoken in Carinthia and Tirol. It is not much changed from when they arrived here in the mid 18th century.

Austrian university researchers come here to study it!

Gruss Gott! (Sorry, ain’t got no umlaut on this here keyboard.)

[nathanbedford]

That region along the Rhine which produced these Germans to enrich America must have been one of the most hellish places on earth. I have read accounts of the dreadful depredations committed by both sides in the Thirty Years War culminating in 1648. But there were subsequent wars that were just as bad in local places.

Whole towns were simply exterminated including the livestock and dogs. One town where my ancestor came from describes one of these wars as far more devastating than World War II. These were the worst of all conflicts, religious wars and civil wars combined and the carnage was terrible.

These people from Switzerland and the area along the Rhine River in Germany were both religious refugees, war refugees and, considering the devastation of the land, economic refugees, all in one. Yet upon their arrival in the colonies they became extremely successful contributors to the society and patriotic Americans. My ancestors, for example, began fighting our wars with the French and Indian War.

[BigEdLB]

:) Grandfather immigrated as a Teenager. Grandmother’s parents were immigrants. Father born here. Lutheran services were in German in my dad’s hometown in S Illinois.

[ExCTCitizen]

The Welsh and the Italians melted into the melting pot, too...my grandfather left Italy because of Mussolini my other grandfather left Wales because he thought America would be better...

[nathanbedford]

Gruß Gott aus Bayern :-)

[Jim Noble]

Hannover and Wurttemberg here. Most of my ancestors came 1848-1879.

[EternalVigilance]

I bet most have more English and Scottish stock than they realize. I grew up thinking I was mainly German on my dad’s side (I have a German last name) and Irish on my mom’s side, which turned out to be only very partially true.

Once I really researched the whole family tree, I found that most of my lines go back to Englishmen who came here in the 1600s and the 1700s, some all the way back to Plymouth and Jamestown. Throw in a few Dutchmen, clear back to the original New Netherlands, and a few French Huguenots.

Turns out that most of the lines I thought were Irish were really Scots who transited through Northern Ireland.

The German lines came mostly in the early to mid 1800s. My dad’s family settled in Sac County, Iowa, where they broke the sod, built their own country church and school, and primarily spoke German for a long time. But eventually those families completely assimilated, marrying into families with all the usual English lines in them.

It’s all intensely interesting to study. I recommend it for anyone. It casts a whole new light on one’s understanding of American history. And the chances are, you will be quite surprised at what you find.

If you have some information about your most recent forebears, and you use the resources available today via the web, you will be amazed at the huge amount of information you can gather. At this point, we have almost all of our family lines figured out all the way back to the first-comers to this country. Only a few dead ends, a handful of which we’ll probably never figure out, for various reasons.

[ExCTCitizen]

Today’s INVADERS can go and ask for Food stamps, ‘free’ health care, ‘free’ phones, so they don’t have to assimilate - and the Marxists want them NOT TO!

[ExCTCitizen]

My friend, who is a member of the Pequot nation, always said the his ancesters greeted the Pilgrims and before them, the Vikings. He is a true American - Scot, English, Irish, German, Spanish, Danish and Greek...he is married to a Hawaiian.

[Viking2002]

Hear, hear! German stock on both sides of the family going waaaaaaaay back. Grandma was right off the boat. And Dad lived with family around Stuttgart back in the 50's.

[jim-x]

sure you do
(stolen from the vast interwebs)

On a PC (Windows):

The fail-safe method using the ALT-key:

• Number Lock should be ON
• Use the left-side ALT key (for most keyboards; try the right if it doesn’t work)
• Hold down the ALT key and type a number on the number pad as follows (while holding the ALT key down). When you release the ALT key, you will have the following character:

ALT 0223 = ß
ALT 0228 = ä
ALT 0246 = ö
ALT 0252 = ü
ALT 0196 = Ä
ALT 0214 = Ö
ALT 0220 = Ü

There are other ways to type these characters, depending on your system settings and what word processor you’re using, but the above should work in all environments, even DOS if needed. But if you prefer some of the ‘easier’ methods, please do a web search or see this page, which is the best summary I’ve seen:
http://lrcnt.fas.harvard.edu/Resources/Documentation/accents.htm

On a Mac:

Use the OPTION key. Hold down OPTION and push ‘s’ to get ß. For the umlauted characters, hold down OPTION and push ‘u’. Release OPTION, then type the desired base letter (a, o, u, A, O, or U). The umlaut will appear over the letter you typed. (So to type ü, you should hold down OPTION, press u, then release OPTION and press u again.)

There is also a way to configure foreign keyboards in windows and then switch easily between german & english but you will need to look that one up yourself.

[AlaskaErik]

I am a first generation American. In fact, I speak English as a second language. But, we are so assimilated that my daughter has no idea of any German customs. Every German custom has been totally erased in one generation. I refuse to be a hyphenated American and I made sure my daughter knew nothing of her German past.

[BigBlueJon]

Great article here. Our family is mostly German / Scot and can trace our crossing to New York in 1708. Can trace further back, the paternal line, to 1440 in Marienthal, Zwickau, Sachsen, Germany.

[Beer30]

You can always tell a german, you just can’t tell them much.

3/4 kraut, 1/4 irish. As a child I knew my middle name was Henry, as an adult, I was proud to understand I bore the name of my grandfather Heinrich.

I can still here my Grandma call my name in her halting english.

They came to be Americans, and I am the fortunate American.

United States of America.

Land of the free and home of the brave.

[alexander_busek]

Gruss Gott! (Sorry, ain’t got no umlaut on this here keyboard.)

Grüß Gott!"

Regards,

[Fiji Hill]

The Palatine, or Rheinpfalz experienced considerable redevelopment and population control during the Thirty Years War as well as the War of the League of Aubsburg, or Nine Years War (1688-1697), when France invaded the electoral principality and tried to turn it into a “desert.” One can still see the ruins of castles destroyed by the French at that time, including the one at Heidelberg.

Thousands of people from the region departed in the early 1700’s, most heading for America, but a few going to Britain or Ireland. My own ancestors were from Lorraine, just to the south, but of essentially the same ethnicity, and they left in 1740.

Today, the Rheinpfalz is the home of the Weinstrasse (Wine Highway), a two-lane highway that winds from Bockenheim in the north to the French border through some of Germany’s finest wine country.

[larryjohnson]

We are winding up a river cruise which spent a week on the Rhine.
Our guides were just polite when we told them our ancestors were German.my wife’s Pennsylvania,mine Virginia.
I wish I knew more how they got there so, NB, I will contact you.

[Chgogal]

What! No mentions of Kohler bathrooms? ; )

http://www.us.kohler.com/us/Bathroom-Artist-Editions-Bathroom-Products/category/430703/429204.htm