@always
Why did my family move to America?
I would have to break down 4 branches as I grew up hearing the stories from older generations.
My Mother’s father’s grandfather was a cigar maker in southern Germany (Hoc Deutsch) running his own factory. He was made a large offer by an American manufacturer to come to Upstate NY in 1868 and run their cigar factory. They moved the entire family with 2nd class passage, bought them a house in the upstate city and paid him a large salary and 10% ownership in the factory. My grandfather moved to NYC to get a medical degree and stayed.
My Mother’s Mother’s grandparents arrived in NYC from Frankfurt in 1869. The head of the family had been an attorney in Germany handling financial matters and he was brought over by a group of the ‘Our Crowd’ bankers (of the Goldman, Sachs ilk) to handle legal and financial issues concerning transactions and bond issues sold in Germany and Middle Europe. My grandmother was born in 1900 in the Yorkville section of Manhattan, where German was the neighborhood language.
My Litvak Paternal Grandmother’s family started arriving in 1872, some traveling via England with a stay there of months or years. They were clothing or dry goods merchants and sought economic opportunities not available in the pale. Over a period of 10 years, the Great-great-grandparents, 9 children, 9 spouses and about 30 children arrived in Manhattan. By 1886 they were in Brooklyn and small towns throughout the northeast running the general or dry goods store. My Paternal grandmother was born 1896 in a small New England town where her uncle’s family ran the local department store until the 1960s. Her father, having only daughters moved them to Brooklyn about 1915 to find husbands, leaving the store to his brothers and nephews.
My Litvak Paternal father’s family was last to arrive in 1878. Some cousins had moved to Chicago about 10 years earlier and left horse raising for the leather clothing and accessories business (because of the great meat processing business in Chicago, lots of cheap hides were available with great train transportation to ship finished goods). They brought my great Grandparents and their children to NY to set up a clothing manufacturing business, to add cloth items to the family line. My grandfather, was the youngest child and born in Manhattan about 1894. they had been making a fair living in the Pale, but did not like the chances of the sons being forced into the Czar’s army. The cousins in Chicago arranged the US immigration visas and passage by ship from Bremerhaven.
None of the stories told spoke of leaving Europe because of anti-Semitism, and the Litvak side left before the 1880s pogroms hit their village (which is now in Belarus).
To the best of my knowledge all the assorted extended family in these 4 branches had made it to the USA or England before WWI. My paternal Grandfather was a corporal in the US Army in WWI.