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.