Immigration Story

The family I interviewed on their immigration story was a very interesting one, which will be shared in the following. The family ******* has done a lot of genealogy research to learn about their family history. Most people only know vaguely where their ancestors came from.

It was around the 1860’s that the family ******* came to Milwaukee, Wisconsin. They came on a freight sailing vessel. Their mother, apparently, selected the cheapest way to cross the ocean. They were about seven people in the family that immigrated and the mother, the only adult since their father had died when they were little. They only had a few dollars and they used this money to come to America. All of them only spoke Polish and a little German, since they came from a German village. This was another reason for moving to Milwaukee, since there were a lot of German immigrants at that time.

They traveled for over eleven weeks on that boat. After arriving on Ellis Island they had to find jobs first to precede their journey to Milwaukee. First they had to make some money because no one was permitted to leave the island without any funds. The oldest son got many jobs to keep his family alive and to get them off the island. He worked on farms and at the markets. The mother also got a job in a kitchen and she saved some of the food for her children. They would have to face a lot of challenges until they could provide a decent standard of living for their family.

After a couple of months they had enough money saved to travel to Milwaukee, where they knew a couple of Polish people. They built their own house. It was a shack but it was theirs and it cost them a lot of energy to build it and they were very proud of it.

In the first couple of years in Milwaukee they had to struggle with financial problems but soon more and more Polish people began to arrive in large numbers in Milwaukee. Due to the accumulation of Polish immigrants they would soon have their own church and school.

The next generation of that family moved to Eau Claire, Wisconsin in the next decade due to a job offer. Nevertheless some family members stayed in Milwaukee.

Conclusively, Polish is no longer spoken in the family. They seemed quite sad about telling me this because they wished they would have kept up some of their ancestors’ traditions. When asking them about having maintained contact with any relatives in the old country they said it is too long ago to trace their relatives back to Poland (if there still are some relatives who survived). Although they wish that they would have maintained some of their families traditions and also the language, they are very proud of this quite detailed knowledge about their ancestors.

Downtown Eau Claire

Eau Claire City Hall

The first building I chose on my walking tour in Downtown Eau Claire was the City Hall. The Eau Claire City Hall is located on 203 South Farwell Street. The style of the City Hall is typical of civic buildings of the early twentieht century. The two-story structure brick is made of buff Bedford limestone and has four Corinthian columns in the front. The former multipaned windows have been replaced by large plates of glass. In 1978-79 the City Hall was attached to its neighbor, the former public building. The present building was constructed in 1916. Designed by George Awsumb, a former Eau Claire resident. The cost to construct this building was $ 72,000.

Union National Bank (now U.S. Bank)

The Union National Bank (now U.S. Bank) is located on 131 South Barstow Street. The U.S. Bank is the cities only major surviving building of the Art Deco style, designed by Burham Brothers, Inc., of Chicago. The name of the bank was changed to First Wisconsin National Bank of Eau Claire in 1965, to Firstar Bank in 1994 and to U.S. Bank in 2002. It represents the "modern" architecture that highlighted the central business districts of the nation's largest cities in the nineteen-twenties and thirties. The Union National Bank was organized in 1906 through the merger of two local banks, the Bank of Eau Claire (established in the early 1870s) and the Chippewa Valley Bank (founded in 1885). In 1929, First Wisconsin Bankshares were interested in the bank. This additional backing enabled the Union National to survive the Great Depression, the only one of four banks in Eau Claire.

Does culture define institutions or do institutions define culture?

To answer the question whether culture defines institutions or whether institutions define culture I have to go back to my previous post where I gave my definition of culture. I define culture as symbolic communication. Some of its symbols include a group's skills like knowledge, attitudes, values, and motives and many more. To my mind these meanings of the symbols are learned and internalized by a society through its institutions. Of course culture also had and still has a big impact on the institutions, since a culture can also change over time and so do the institutions as a result. Thus, it can be said that the institutions have been established through culture and are influenced by it. But for the following generations it can be assumed that the knowledge is being passed on to them through the institutions. For example schools carry and convey the values of a certain society and teach them so the culture lives on through them. To support my thesis that institutions define culture is that it is mostly the institutions which stand for and represent a certain culture. The following example should make my statement more comprehensible. For instance, in Nazi-German times, culture (the culture the Nazis wished to have) was “partly” conveyed through certain organizations/institutions like the “BDM” Bund Deutscher Mädel (League of German Girls). Every girl from 10 – 18 years was obliged to join the BDM. They learned how to serve their country and how to represent themselves as German females. So this institution was a big part of their life and shaped their characters and defined them as German. Today a good institution, which defines Germany, would be the Goethe-Institut and there are many more institutions which were prompted in the post-war years to account for the past and to create a new and better culture.

Differences and similarities between UWEC students and students from my university

The first thing I noticed when all the American students started moving in the halls and the campus started filling with people that the UWEC students look very young. Not even that but they all look very similar so it's hard to seperate them from each other and remembering faces. Every Freshman has a UWEC or Wisconsin sweater. They all seem to dress the same way. In my University you would see a lot of different people with different styles. So not just the looks is a big difference but also the behavior of the students. The freshman seem to be out of control when they get here. They seem to be very open and wild. In my University people seem to be more mature and reserved. They don't really want to talk to anybody or help each other because you might be some kind of competition to them. In Germany they would form little groups and it's really hard to get in these groups. Every once in a while you would find a couple of nice people in your classes who might help you but this is very rare. Here people seem to be very attentive and cooperative. However, I still couldn't figure out if this "friendliness", which is so typical for Americans, is real. I mean if they really mean what they are saying or if they are just being friendly because it's part of their culture and maybe I interpret this in a wrong way.