What’s this? I’m trying to blog once a day for 50 days! Inspired by Forking Mad and Lou Plummer.

What woman in your family do you most admire and why?

First, I love and admire my mom. She’s a great mom! She stayed at home to raise my siblings and as an adult I can imagine how difficult that was at times. She’s a tough lady who’s always put everything she has into caring for us.

My mom comes from a long line of tough women, in fact. I want to highlight one in particular: Bertha Abraham.

I don’t have a lot of information on Bertha, but a few years ago I was filling out her profile on Geneac. When I found evidence of her immigration on Ancestry.com, I was intrigued. According to the ship records, Bertha arrived in the Port of New York on July 19th, 1888, on the Gothia ocean liner. The records indicate that she was traveling with only her sister, Emma Abraham. Bertha and Emma married two brothers, Charles and William Enzenauer, who were farmers in Steele County, Minnesota.

record of Bertha and Emma on the Gothia

What an amazing coincidence! I went to get the record1, and it turns out that Bertha’s arrival date was exactly 136 years ago today!

That’s about the extent of my knowledge about Bertha specifically. I know she had several children, including Ida Enzenauer, who was my great-great-grandma. Ever since finding out all of this, I’ve wondered: what was she like? What was the reason she left Germany? A cursory look makes it seem like she had siblings here already, so they had likely sent for her and Emma - perhaps they knew the Enzenauer family already, and the marriage was arranged ahead of time. Still, traveling on one of those 19th-century transatlantic ships took some real guts, and moreso as two women traveling alone at the time. Did she speak English when she arrived? What did she think of New York?

I’ll probably never have the answer to these questions, but it only deepens my belief that immigration is what makes America truly great and that is something worth preserving.

Sources:

  1. Year: 1888; Arrival: New York, New York, USA; Microfilm Serial: M237, 1820-1897; Line: 1; List Number: 979. www.ancestrylibrary.com/imageviewer/collections/7488/images/NYM237_523-0168. Accessed 27 Aug 2021.