Lizzie Beine, the Forgotten Mother

In 1889, two young German immigrants met each other in St. Louis, Missouri. She was Catholic and nineteen. He was Lutheran and ten years older than her. They never married. She became pregnant and died in childbirth. He disappeared. Using records from archives and libraries, I found some buried details of their lives and wrote this story.

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Lizzie Beine, the Forgotten Mother

The door of the church in Essen-Stoppenberg, Germany where Lizzie was baptized.

A Child's View of a Journey from Germany to America in 1887

In 1884 my great grandfather, Johann (John) Nelke, came to America when he was 17 with his uncle's family. They settled in St. Louis, Missouri. John saved money to help pay for the passage of the rest of his family—his parents, Johann and Amelia, and his three younger sisters, Adeline, Hedwig (Hattie), and Bertha. They left from Rotterdam on a ship called the S.S. Rotterdam, arriving in New York on Thursday, May 26, 1887. The youngest Nelke passenger on the ship, Bertha, was twelve. After she grew up, one of her children, Melba Heyderich, wrote down what Bertha told her about life in Germany and the trip to St. Louis. So here is a secondhand account of a child's journey from Germany to America in 1887. As later told to her daughter...

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Christina Beine, the Girl They Left Behind

When my Beine German immigrant family went to America in 1880, they left their oldest daughter Christina behind. She was eleven years old. Here is her story...

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Updated on 4 June 2022.