When talking about the history of our branch of the Heiden Family, the stories were always that August Heiden, his wife, Rika, and their first three children came to America from "Mecklenburg" in Germany.

The general term "Mecklenburg" refers to a region on the northern border of Germany next to Poland. When our ancestors lived there, it was called the Duchy of Mecklenburg-Schwerin. It is now called Mecklenburg-Vorpommern under the modern German republic.

When August Heiden and Heinrich Rambow with their families emigrated from Germany in 1873 and 1874 respectively, the ruler of Mecklenburg-Schwerin was Grand Duke Frederick Francis III (1851-1897) (right).

He was the last "ruling" Grand Duke prior to the consolidation of all the Dukedoms and other regions into a unified Germany in 1871. There was only one more person to hold this title which was his son, Frederick Francis IV, who was forced to renounce it in 1918 at the end of World War I.

The documents that granted August and his family permission to emigrate came from this unit of government. In these papers, they had to denounce their allegiance and citizenship once they relocated to another country.


The rural areas where our Heidens originated lies about 30 miles inland from the port city of Rostock on the Baltic Sea. It is also about 145 miles from Hamburg and around 120 miles from Berlin. Güstrow is the district center and Teterow is a larger town closest to the home area of the Heidens.

To locate the tiny villages where our ancestors lived takes a very detailed map (although now you can find them with a Google search). August's home village was Groß Wokern or Gross Wokern (also spelled Gross Wockern on some older maps).

Even today, these burgs are extremely small. They are rural communities made up of small clusters of houses and other buildings scattered along short stretches of the roads of the district. Places like Klaber and Bergfeld appear to contain only a few households while Mamerow and Gross Wokern may have a few hundred inhabitants. When our ancestors left there in the mid to late 1800s, these places may have been a little larger since the areas population was much larger at that time...before the great emigrations.

It is a very short distance between the towns and, even in the days of horse and buggy or, more likely, foot travel, covering the distances would not be a great inconvenience. Imagine young August Heiden walking along the road a few miles in the evening to visit his future wife, Fredericka.

Gross Wokern was only 3 miles from Mamerow to the west and 3 miles from Nienhagen to the south. The closest larger village, Teteröw, stands 4 miles to the north. Güstrow, the provincial headquarters is only 12 miles to the west of Gross Wokern. Relatives who moved to the city of Rostock were only 30 or 40 miles away from the home villages.

Other geographical locations of significance to the Heidens included the following: