Ralph Heiden - I also have some papers here from the German government that gives August and his family permission to leave Germany. It is for August and his wife, Rika, and three children, Heinrich, Ernst and a little girl, Meta.

Helma (Heiden) Nickel - Meta was the one that died on the ship on the way over. August and his family arrived about a year before William was born on April 1, 1874.

Jeanie & Wilma (Heiden) Bicking - We always heard that she died on the boat and was buried at sea.

Ralph Heiden - Unfortunately, the ship’s records do not show that happening. Normally, if someone died on the ship, that would be noted and there is nothing on the list to indicate that Meta died on ship. The ship’s list that I have shows August Heiden's age 34, a mason.

Norma "Jeanie" Heiden - A mason? Oh, you mean a bricklayer, not a member of the Masons.

Ralph Heiden - Yes. It also lists Rika, 31, his wife, Herman, 6 years old, male, Ernst, 4 years old, a male, his children, and Meta, 9 months, his baby.

Helma (Heiden) Nickel - Herman? That should be Henry.

Ralph Heiden - You’re right, it is Heinrich (right). But there was no mention of anyone buried at sea.

Wilma (Heiden) Bicking - We all heard the story that a baby was buried at sea.

Ralph Heiden - That would seem logical since there doesn’t appear to be a record of her here in Michigan. At least not that I have found so far.

(Note: Later research discovered that Meta made it to America but died on June 16, 1873 only 12 days after they arrived from Germany. She is buried at the Zion Lutheran Church cemetery in Monroe, Michigan.)

Norma "Jeanie" Heiden - Ma’s grandmother, Miller (or Müller), died in Germany before they came over to America. According to Ma, she was old anyway and did not know for sure if she wanted to come over here. Of course, that’s the Rambow’s side.

Wilma (Heiden) Bicking - August landed in New York? How did they get to Monroe?

Norma "Jeanie" Heiden - Normally, they had someone over here sponsor them.

Wilma (Heiden) Bicking - Did the Rambows come on the same ship?

Helma (Heiden) Nickel - The Rambows and Milhans came over about the same time.

[Note: The Rambows came to America in 1874, one year after the Heidens.]

Wilma (Heiden) Bicking - It seems that they all came over about the same time because they knew somebody here. I’ve also got the cedar chest that Ma’s mother brought over from Germany. Ma used it as a hope chest.

Ralph Heiden - When I got the ship list originally, back in 1974, I contacted a lady in Washington D.C. who, for a fee, looked it up in the National Archives.

Now, there are some books that list all the ship logs for the mid-1800's that left Germany for the U.S. I contacted a person on the computer network, Prodigy, and they looked it up for me and found the same information that appears on the information I had.

They also found at least one other Heiden that came over on the ship but I did not recognize the name.

Norma "Jeanie" Heiden - Did August Heiden have any brothers?

Ralph Heiden - Not from what I could find out. He did have a half-sister, however.

One of the other things that I got from Aunt Agnes was a bunch of letters from Germany to August and Rika (Knaack) Heiden back in the 1920's. Most of them were signed from a Maria Dohmstrich from Rostock, Germany. That is only about 30 or 40 miles away from the little towns where our ancestors lived.

On some of the letters she adds “geb. Schmidt” after her name which means that her maiden name was Schmidt. Well, it seems that August’s half sister  (left) married a man named Schmidt and had a daughter, Maria.

So, the letters are from August’s half-sister’s daughter. His niece. She was born in 1866 so she would have been in her sixties at the time the letters were written.

My great-grandmother, Rika, must have sent them the occasional five dollars. That was a huge amount back then because of the inflation going on in Germany at the time. They really appreciated it.

Wilma (Heiden) Bicking - I didn’t know that her grandma was a Knaack.

Jeanie & Helma (Heiden) Nickel - Yes, she was.

Wilma (Heiden) Bicking - So, Maria Heiden never married Kannseyer?

Ralph Heiden - No, and who knows why. From what I’ve read, they were having a population problem in Germany so they made it very difficult for people to get married. But, people being what we are, they went ahead and had children anyway. A very large percentage of the births during the mid-1800's were out of wedlock.

But they never did get married. When she died in 1874, she was still listed as Maria Heiden.

Wilma (Heiden) Bicking - So, how many children did she have?

Ralph Heiden - Just the two as far as I know. August in 1838 and the daughter, Fredericka, in 1832. She was the mother of the one who wrote the letters.

Ralph Heiden - Here is a picture that says it is great-great-Grandma Heiden.

Norma "Jeanie" Heiden - Let’s see a picture of her. So that’s where this all got started!

[Note: Later we discovered that the picture was actually of August's half-sister shown in Excerpt 1 above.]

Ralph Heiden - A lot of the information I have came from the Mormon Church records. They have a belief that, if you can find who your ancestors were, they can be baptized after death into the Mormon religion.

That’s why they went all over the world microfilming old church records. If you know what church your ancestors attended, you can get the microfilm from Salt Lake City. The problem is that the records are in old script writing and the microfilming is not always readable.

Wilma (Heiden) Bicking - Pa always said they came from Mecklenburg. Is that a county or what? When we were in Germany we saw a sign for a town called Heidenfahrt!

Ralph Heiden - Mecklenburg is a region of Germany. The Heidens came from tiny little towns called Gross Wokern, Mamerow, Klaber and a bunch of others.

Now, where did your grandfather, August, live here in Monroe County?

Helma (Heiden) Nickel - August always lived on South Custer where Uncle John lived. That’s the only place they lived as far as I know. The same with the Rambows.

Norma "Jeanie" Heiden - Did August Heiden have any brothers?

Ralph Heiden - Not from what I could find out. He did have a half-sister, however.

One of the other things that I got from Aunt Agnes was a bunch of letters from Germany to August and Rika (Knaack) Heiden back in the 1920's. Most of them were signed from a Maria Dohmstrich from Rostock, Germany. That is only about 30 or 40 miles away from the little towns where our ancestors lived.

On some of the letters she adds “geb. Schmidt” after her name which means that her maiden name was Schmidt. Well, it seems that August’s half sister married a man named Schmidt and had a daughter, Maria.

So, the letters are from August’s half-sister’s daughter. His niece. She was born in 1866 so she would have been in her sixties at the time the letters were written.

My great-grandmother, Rika, must have sent them the occasional five dollars. That was a huge amount back then because of the inflation going on in Germany at the time. They really appreciated it.

Wilma (Heiden) Bicking - I didn’t know that her grandma was a Knaack.

Jeanie & Helma (Heiden) Nickel - Yes, she was.

Wilma (Heiden) Bicking - So, Maria Heiden never married Kannsehr?

Ralph Heiden - No, and who knows why. From what I’ve read, they were having a population problem in Germany so they made it very difficult for people to get married. But, people being what we are, they went ahead and had children anyway. A very large percentage of the births during the mid-1800's were out of wedlock.

But they never did get married. When she died in 1874, she was still listed as Maria Heiden.

Wilma (Heiden) Bicking - So, how many children did she have?

Ralph Heiden - Just the two as far as I know. August in 1838 and the daughter, Fredericka, in 1832. She was the mother of the one who wrote the letters.

The letters are rather sad overall. They were having some very tough times in Germany then and they were always asking their Aunt Rika, my great grandmother, for money.

Mildred (Roggerman) Heiden - In one of them, they ask for some money for a house and some land. Then, later they say they bought the house but needed more money for the land.

Marie (Heiden) Tommelein - Did they ever help them?

Ralph Heiden - Yes, they sent money when they could and they were always very appreciative of it and told what the money would buy.

Brick Tommelein - My dad said that at that time, everyone over in Europe called America “the land of opportunity.”

Ralph Heiden - A lot of people here were helping their relatives then too. In one of the letters, they ask Rika to send her letters registered because people were stealing things from mail from America because those envelopes were likely to have money in them.

Helen (Henning) Heiden - Now are these letters all from Mecklenburg?

Ralph Heiden - Yes. They are from the area called Mecklenburg and the port city of Rostock. The little villages where our ancestors came from are the size of Grape and Maybee and they are about 50 miles from Rostock.

Helen (Henning) Heiden - From the Hennings, I heard them say that the people were like slaves back then in Germany. They worked for all these big rich people. They provided pay for them and took care of them but they couldn’t get ahead. They didn’t want them to get married because there were already too many of them to take care of. That is where the Hennings came from too.

Mildred (Roggerman) Heiden - Didn’t you say that our name should be something other than Heiden?

Ralph Heiden - Yes, my great grandmother, Maria Heiden, did not marry the father of August. So, he took her name rather than his father’s which was Kannsehr or Kanseyer.

Helen (Henning) Heiden - That’s the same way with my grandpa Henning. Grandma wasn’t married when she had those two kids.

Ralph Heiden - That was a real common occurrence back then.

Mildred (Roggerman) Heiden - They wouldn’t let you get married unless you could support yourself.

Ralph Heiden - They technically weren’t slaves but there was nowhere else for them to go except to another big estate to work and they were full too. Also, the landowner had the responsibility to take care of the people on his land so he was stuck too.

That is why they pushed a lot of them to leave and go to America. Also, the illegitimacy rate went way up because even though they weren’t legally allowed to marry, people continued to form couples and do what they needed to do.

Helen (Henning) Heiden - You wonder why the Heidens would come here but they said on the Henning side that they would send money back to Germany to help others come here.

Ralph Heiden - But with the Heidens, we don’t know who was here to pave the way for them. Maybe with this Laas connection, there might be something to go on.

The Rambows came a year later. They came here in 1874 and I don’t know if they came from the same part of Germany as the Heidens. I haven’t looked into that yet.

I think about the only way we are going to learn why the Heidens came here is if we stumble onto somebody in one of the other branches that has an old box of papers up in the attic that someone gave them long ago. Otherwise, the reason may be lost to history.

[Note: According to Karen (Berns) Wheaton, the Rambows did come from the same area in Germany. Later research confirmed that the Rambows and Heidens all lived in the small town of Gross Wokern, Germany. The Heidens came to America in 1873 and the Rambows in 1874. Both settled in Monroe County only a few miles apart. We don't know for sure but it would seem that it was probably planned this way.]