Out to Sea

12/30/1910 First page of letter 
from Josef to Lisi on  F. Missler stationery

This post was originally published on Dec. 31, 2010, 100 years to the date that Josef Gärtz boarded the ship for America.

Once Josef arrived in Bremen, and his path to America seemed clear, he wrote to Lisi. Not only had Friedrich Missler,  probably Bremen's most successful ticket agent, given thousands of passengers a brown, canvas wallet like the one in which I found Josef’s diary, he also provided stationery emblazoned with “F. Missler” and the agency's address at 30 Bahnhof Strasse [literally: Train Station Street], proving Missler was a marketing wizard of his day. Many descendants who have these wallets have mistakenly thought "Missler" was the name of the ship pictured and researched in vain to find it.

Here’s the first page of Josef’s letter to Lisi, written on Missler stationery. If you look closely, you can see the date at the start of the letter (the date is first and the month follows in Roman Numerals).

30/XII 1910

December 30, 1910

Dear Lisi,

I want to tell you that I have arrived in Bremen happy and healthy. Now I want to tell you about my nightmare trip.

At this point Josef describes his misadventures and narrow escapes, which have already been shared in previous posts, so I’ll skip over that part and start with Bremen: [If you missed those narrow escapes, see Terror Atop the Train and Threats to the Dream.]

Thank God I am here, and I thank our Lord God again many times for the good thoughts he gave me. But such a trip! I thought it would undo me!

Missler Emigrant Hall, Bremen, 1907
Perhaps this is where Josef sat with his new-found friends

We’re sitting here at F. Missler, and already it’s going a bit easier because each person [fellow travelers he’s met] makes the other happy, and so we are getting along fine.

Tomorrow, December 31, 1910, we’re going to board the ship, as long as we remain healthy. Every day we are checked by a doctor, and up to now, I am completely healthy. Many people, who got sick on the trip, have already been here in Bremen for eight weeks. One woman, who had eye inflammation [probably trachoma--pink eye] has already been waiting here four weeks. She’s finally received authorization to depart for America.

With heartfelt greetings, I end my letter. Please, dear Lisi, tell me in your first letter what you have heard of my colleagues. [To read my recent discovery of what happened to the two friends with whom Josef started his trip, see the end of this post: Threats to the Dream]

With greetings to all, 

Gärtz, Josef, Bremen

We must look to his diary now, to see into the heart and mind of a young man, his written emotions  a reflection of what thousands of others must have felt at this point in their journeys, as he travels the final leg that will transport him to an unknown land and future.

Friedrich der Grosse, ship that brought Josef Gärtz
to America. Thanks to Norway Heritage for image

December 31, 1910 

Early Saturday morning at 4 am, we saw a doctor who looked us in the eyes and inoculated the left hand with four shots. At 7a.m. we took a two-hour train to the ship. We boarded the ship at 10:30 a.m., and at 11:30, it departed directly for America.

Throngs at the Port of Bremen. Not the era of Josef's
departure, but gives a sense of the kind of crowd
 he describes. 
(From the collection of Maggie Land Blanck)

I was moved by sadness, joy, and fear as the mighty colossus pulled us far out over the waves of the great sea. Everyone on land waved after us with their handkerchiefs as they wanted to share with us a last and friendly farewell. They know such a trip deals with life and death, and we’re never certain if we’ll see each other again.

Josef truly rang out the old on New Year’s Eve, 1910, departing from everything familiar -- and hoped to ring in 1911 with a new life in America. But first he had to endure the harsh winter crossing over the frigid, stormy Atlantic seas.

German Mojo Defeats Cryptic Cursive

portion of my Grandfather's letter to view cryptic cursive

Cryptic cursive was the number one barrier that held a century of letters hostage. The second, less daunting, but still real barrier, was the language, German.

Postcard of Frauenkirche
 from my Scrapbook 1969-70
"Ein Jahr im München" 

As I mentioned in a recent post, I chose German as my major in college and spent a year studying in Munich. Then twenty-five years passed. Poof! German had barely crossed my lips until an extension class at a nearby high school caught my eye: “German for Parent and Child.”

My first son, Evan, was six, and I thought, “What a fun way to spend quality time with my boy, introduce his pliable brain to a foreign language, and indulge in a little refresher for myself.” The class was tiny -- about 4-6 couples of parent and child. The teacher, Antje, a native of Germany, delightful. She filled the class with games and activities through which vocabulary was painlessly introduced and learned. I couldn’t have pulled most of those basic words from my quarter-century-old studies, but I was amazed at how simple reviews reignited long dormant brain cells. It was the start of my German language revitalization!

Family members at funeral of Lillian Gartz, 8/1994

My mother’s death in 1994 also drove home what we all acknowledge, but only truly absorb through personal experience: Life is short. Death is final. It was time to stop talking about travel and do it! I planned for the whole family to go to Germany the following summer, lest another 25 years zoom by.

Visiting Gärtz family in Crailsheim Germany. 2nd from left
is Hans Gärtz, whose grandfather, Michael Gärtz, was my
grandfather's half brother. Far right Hans Jr., my generation.

So in June, 1995, we landed in Munich’s airport and drove to Crailsheim, where, for the first time, I met my distant cousins -- the Gärtz family that had lived in the same Romanian town, Neppendorf, and the same house as my grandfather, Josef. This branch of the Gärtz family is descended from Josef’s half-brother, Michael Gärtz, twenty-two years older than Josef. Their father had remarried in his 60s, and Josef was the result.

Romanian dictator, Nicolae Ceausescu, giving last
speech on12/21/1989 in Bucharest. He misread the
increasingly hostile.  crowd. The next morning, he
was whisked away by helicoptor. He and his wife, Elena,
were tried and executed on 12/25/89.
http://visualcultureblog.com/tag/nicolae-ceausescu/

After enduring the brutal Romanian dictatorship of Ceausescu and his lunatic wife, thousands of ethnic Germans, including my cousins, reversed the immigration process of the previous 800 years and left Romania, returning to their ancestral Germany, where they were guaranteed citizenship as ethnic Germans.

Maria, my second cousin, twice removed, is my only contemporary female relative. (I have no aunts, no sisters). We hit it off immediately, and I feel I found in her the sister I never had. Speaking the language all day with my extended family abroad oiled up my German skills.  I realized how much I liked expressing myself in a foreign language and how it breaks down barriers when traveling. Upon our return home, Evan and I continued the German classes for six more years, building my vocabulary, comfort level, and confidence with the language.

Left: me; right: my 2nd cousin twice removed, Maria Gärtz,
 visiting Würzburg, June, 1995

Fast forward to 2009. That summer is when I received the email from Uli, the German Professor we had met on our roots-finding trip to Romania, asking me if we had any letters. Realizing he might be able to help a bit with illegible German, Uli’s email was the spur I needed to look at the letters more closely.

Approximately 35 old letters were found bunched together
in a  second Missler Wallet in Box #14 "Correspondence"

So how to begin? On September 9, 2009, I hauled out box #14 and began looking through the piles of letters. One group stood out--folded inside yet another Missler Wallet.

(Remember the one in which I found my grandfather’s diary? Well, one of the ubiquitous Missler wallets came to America with my Grandmother too, and she used it to store some of her most precious letters).

Stuffed inside, folded together into thirds were a fat bunch of missives. Amazingly, most were not brittle or yellowed. I can only assume the paper back then was far more acid-free than today.

In grease pencil, she had written across the bottom of the one enfolding the bunch:
“From Jickeli, Lisbeth, Mutter Gärtz (Josef’s mother) and Father Ebner (her dad). All very good”

This seemed a fine place to start. At least I knew what signatures to look for. I found more than I had ever dreamed existed, but plenty of unknowns remained. In the near future, I’ll share my first stab at unravelling the mystery of the authors.

But first, I'm starting a regular weekly post, "Traveling Tuesday," to share the discoveries of our roots-finding mission to my grandparents' native land as well as to introduce the beauty and historical sites of Transylvania to anyone who loves travel. Read about it on the introductory post next Tuesday, 1/18/11.

Out to Sea

12/30/1910 First page of letter
from Josef to Lisi on  F. Missler stationery

Once Josef arrived in Bremen, and his path to America seemed clear, he wrote to Lisi. Not only had Friedrich Missler,  probably Bremen's most successful ticket agent, given thousands of passengers a brown, canvas wallet like the one in which I found Josef’s diary, he also provided stationery emblazoned with “F. Missler” and the agency's address at 30 Bahnhof Strasse [literally: Train Station Street], proving Missler was a marketing wizard of his day. Many descendants who have these wallets have mistakenly thought "Missler" was the name of the ship pictured and researched in vain to find it.

Here’s the first page of Josef’s letter to Lisi, written on Missler stationery. If you look closely, you can see the date at the start of the letter (the date is first and the month follows in Roman Numerals).

30/XII 1910
December 30, 1910

Dear Lisi,

I want to tell you that I have arrived in Bremen happy and healthy. Now I want to tell you about my nightmare trip.

At this point Josef describes his misadventures and narrow escapes, which have already been shared in previous posts, so I’ll skip over that part and start with Bremen:

Thank God I am here, and I thank our Lord God again many times for the good thoughts he gave me. But such a trip! I thought it would undo me!

Missler Emigrant Hall, Bremen, 1907
Perhaps this is where Josef sat with his new-found friends

We’re sitting here at F. Missler, and already it’s going a bit easier because each person [fellow travelers he’s met] makes the other happy, and so we are getting along fine.

Tomorrow, December 31, 1910, we’re going to board the ship, as long as we remain healthy. Every day we are checked by a doctor, and up to now, I am completely healthy. Many people, who got sick on the trip, have already been here in Bremen for eight weeks. One woman, who had eye inflammation [probably trachoma--pink eye] has already been waiting here four weeks. She’s finally received authorization to depart for America.

With heartfelt greetings, I end my letter. Please, dear Lisi, tell me in your first letter what you have heard of my colleagues.

With greetings to all,
Gärtz, Josef, Bremen

We must look to his diary now, to see into the heart and mind of a young man, his written emotions  a reflection of what thousands of others must have felt at this point in their journeys, as he travels the final leg that will transport him to an unknown land and future.

Friedrich der Grosse, ship that brought Josef Gärtz
to America. Thanks to Norway Heritage for image

December 31, 1910

Early Saturday morning at 4 am, we saw a doctor who looked us in the eyes and inoculated the left hand with four shots. At 7a.m. we took a two-hour train to the ship. We boarded the ship at 10:30 a.m., and at 11:30, it departed directly for America.

Throngs at the Port of Bremen. Not the era of Josef's
departure, but gives a sense of the kind of crowd
 he describes. 
(From the collection of Maggie Land Blanck)

I was moved by sadness, joy, and fear as the mighty colossus pulled us far out over the waves of the great sea. Everyone on land waved after us with their handkerchiefs as they wanted to share with us a last and friendly farewell. They know such a trip deals with life and death, and we’re never certain if we’ll see each other again.


Josef truly rang out the old on New Year’s Eve, 1910, departing from everything familiar -- and hoped to ring in 1911 with a new life in America. But first he had to endure the harsh winter crossing over the frigid, stormy Atlantic seas.