I am a little frustrated this morning.  My efforts to find a good story to write for this blog today were rather fruitless.  Because I am not in Altenburg, I look for a type of story that does not rely heavily on documents that we have in our research library.  Instead, I look for a story that comes from resources that are on the internet.  I do have a digital form of our German Family Tree on my laptop, but today I was not able to find a story.  I suppose if I had more time, I might have been more successful, but that is the other issue for me today.  Not only do I have a granddaughter who is about to wake up, but my wife and I have a visit scheduled later this morning with another person from Perry County who now lives here in Minnesota.  He is a Frohna Mueller, by the way.

What I did find while looking through our German Family Tree were a lot of references to people who arrived in St. Louis on January 24, 1839.  They were the passengers who had traveled to America aboard the Johann Georg, and then came up the Mississippi River aboard the steamboat, Clyde.  I wrote a blog post about this event two years ago on January 24, 2017.  I encourage you to return to that story and read it again.  It can be found by clicking on the link below.

And Then There Were Two

While the recently arrived immigrants were disembarking from their riverboat in St. Louis, the boat carrying Teacher Winter, the Knickerbocker, was proceeding upriver about 200 miles to the south.  Three of the pastors who were part of the Gesellschaft were now in St. Louis….Rev. Keyl, Rev. Walther, and Rev. Buerger.  Rev. Loeber was aboard the Knickerbocker.  That ship would get to St. Louis on January 30th.

Teacher Winter did not have much to say on January 24th.  It can be seen below.

“On the 24th we passed a region that was once again very low….”

Back in 1839, the area around Missouri’s Bootheel was one big swamp.  The drawing below illustrates this.

This type of terrain must have been very different from the familiar hilly surroundings of these immigrants’ homeland.

One other thing:  Today is the birthday of our museum director, Carla Jordan.  If you get the chance, wish her a blessed birthday.  She is such an important person in helping our museum carry out its mission.  So today, Teacher Schmidt will also send a very short note to her:  Happy Birthday, Carla!