Emigration

Both of our families have mysteries in their origins and Christines Polish family is what we’re hoping to find out more about today.

The museum doesn’t open until 10.00 so we’re going for a coffee in the shopping centre. It’s under the dome on the right of this shot. The tall one is a hotel and the spaceship is the theatre

Under the dome the streets of the shopping centre are supposed to look like old Bremerhaven. Deserted of course as it’s Sunday morning

On the waterside walk there are these poles with the names of hundreds of German seaman lost or killed in WW2.

A tourist boat comes up to the lock into the inner harbour. *Behind the ships mast is a street with trees at the end. Our apartment is right next to the trees*

A statue to the Emigrating souls. 7.4 million from Bremerhaven alone

The Emigration museum. *The white building on the left is part of it too.* It’s very big

Names and the years of some that left are etched into the cobbles outside.

It’s 1926 and this chap is explaining to Christine why he’s leaving. *Trouble is he doesn’t realise she can’t understand German*

With the audio help and all these drawers of files , you get a vivid picture of emigration and how it effected so many.

Because her family left in 1878 from German held Prussia ( part of Poland) they would have needed from their masters a release from ‘subjecthood’

We’ve now climbed the gangway onto the ship. The first section was on board a sailing vessel ‘Bremer’ then the next section on board an early steamer of the 1900s

Someone’s listening to them tell their story

So sad . It was a relief to get out and around the vintage sailing boats

Unfortunately we are no wiser to which port they left from. A young computer geek spent some time in the research department with us but nothing!. He said that because there were so many departing ships, over the years they would throw a lot of the old records out to make room for more current stuff. Most un-German like he admitted.

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Published by Wallis Don