My great grandfather

Anton T. Ehrmantraut was my great-grandfather. His life belonged to that age in which empires summoned men with promises, used them, and then, having changed their interests, cast those promises aside. He was born on August 26, 1878, in Landau, in the Kherson Governorate of the Russian Empire. Yet neither he nor his people were Russian in origin. They were Germans: Catholic settlers from the southwest, from that borderland world of the Rhineland Palatinate, Baden, and Alsace, where frontiers shifted more readily than memory, and men learned early that a ruler’s map and a family’s identity were not the same thing.

His forebears had not gone east by accident. They had been invited. Russia, having won broad lands in the south, wanted farmers to people them and make them useful. So the Empire offered terms that prudent men could not ignore: land, liberty of worship, the use of their own tongue, local custom, exemption from military service. Under such conditions, German colonists founded villages in what was then called South Russia, though it lies in present-day Ukraine. One of those villages was Landau. There Anton was born, not into the old German homeland, but into a transplanted one: German in speech and faith, Russian in political allegiance only because a distant throne claimed the soil beneath his feet.

But states are constant in nothing except appetite. The very privileges by which these settlers had been enticed were, in time, withdrawn or diminished. By the later nineteenth century the old settlement had begun to fray. Language, schools, local self-government, exemption from conscription—one by one the securities of an earlier age were weakened. What had been offered as a stable order proved to be merely a temporary convenience. Families who had crossed Europe to preserve their faith and way of life now faced the familiar lesson that governments remember promises only so long as it profits them to do so. There were other pressures as well: growing households, finite land, narrowing prospects. But it is usually the breach of trust, more than poverty itself, that teaches men it is time to go.

So Anton, like many of his people, went west. I do not yet know the exact date of his arrival in America, nor the precise port at which he entered, but by 1900 he was in Richardton, in Stark County, North Dakota, where he married Margaretha Sattler. By 1913 his son, my grandfather John Frank Ehrmantraut, was born in Gladstone, also in Stark County. Thus the broad outline is plain even where some particulars remain to be recovered: Anton left the Russian Empire in the last years of the nineteenth century and joined that larger migration by which the Germans from Russia remade a piece of the northern plains in their own image.

North Dakota was no random refuge. It drew such people because it offered what they sought and what they had once been promised elsewhere: land, parish, kinship, continuity. There they could build again among those who spoke as they spoke, worshiped as they worshiped, remembered what they remembered. The move was not simply from one country to another. It was from one fragile settlement to another, from one negotiated belonging to the next. In that sense Anton’s life was neither wholly German nor Russian nor merely American. It was something more characteristic of the modern age: a life shaped by empire, migration, and the stubborn effort of families to remain themselves while the states above them altered names, borders, and terms.

So that is how I understand him. His people came from the southwest German Catholic world. They were planted in Landau, in the Kherson Governorate of the Russian Empire, because empire required settlers. They left when empire ceased to honor the conditions under which they had come. And Anton, by establishing himself in western North Dakota, carried that line forward into America. It is an old story, and not an uncommon one: men moved by power, tested by distance, betrayed by policy, and preserved only by family memory.

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Our family histories are fascinating. DH's fathers side came from that region where Germany and Poland meet. Once called Pomerania. Landed near Galveston and settled in South Texas areas when Comanches still roamed the area. My father's side came from Norway and followed the Minnesota to Plains to Colorado trail that so many others did. Our mother's families are more Heinz 57 but mostly Scots-Irish. I am indeed a mutt.

This is my great grandfather Alfred. I have been reviewing photos lately and just colorized it. I'm thinking maybe 1890. I have fairly detailed family histories, but none so adventurous or renowned. Most came from Europe in the mid 1800's, settled in small farming communities in the mid-west, and then came west to seek fortune and life improvements. I've done the DNA analysis with Ancestory. They provide a map showing maternal and paternal migrations back a few generations and it's amazing accurate based on what is known in the family records.
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My family ancestry is pretty boring! Scottish as far back as I have been able to trace. My father’s family were farmers, first in Argyll, then Inverness area, until my Dad’s generation. Each generation had males in Highland Regiments, including my Dad and his eldest brother.

Mum’s side were from Sutherland and were Lawyers, Dominies (teachers) and Doctors and later (turn of 20th C) surgeons in Edinburgh.

Both sides had emigrants over the past 200 or so years, mostly to Canada and Australia.

Not even an Irish ancestor and, believe me, for a lowland Scot, that’s quite unusual!

So interesting! Thanks for sharing, everyone.

My mother's side of the family were early settlers--following behind the Mayflower by a few years from England and settling in the Groton area of Massachusetts. They spread out a little to the south, and many of my ancestors settled into the southern CT areas, one of them being a founder of Milford. Nearly of my ancestors on my mother's side can be found in the towns of Groton, MA and Nichols, CT.

My most interesting relative was on my father's side (the Irish Catholic side)--my great-granduncle, who wound up raising my grandfather when his brother (my great-granfather) was committed to a New York State asylum. William Henry Moffitt was a successful businessman who had a place on Madison Avenue, but most notably developed land in Islip, Long Island. There, in addition to housing, he bought parks and a racetrack. I think of him as the family Gatsby in a way... he was from that area, and that era.

By 1914, he was worth over $2 million and had bought and sold over $20 million in property, and was well-respected until....the real estate industry began to decline and he found himself deep in debt. He was forced to sell off his home and a factory he owned in Bay Shore and other assets to make ends meet.

Unable to pay back creditors, he fled to California and became a fugitive. He had been indicted back in New York with a grand larceny charge as a result of real estate deals totaling $4 million and chose to not appear. Eventually, he returned to NY to answer the charge and pay back his creditors. He lived the rest of his life in California, where he established another real estate business. All that is left of his business legacy in Long Island is a street running through Bay Shore--Moffitt Boulevard. There is actually a plaque in his name as well, describing his "contribution" to real estate in the area.

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okay-----that all sounds similar to the case of the Mennonites(ethnic Germans), who also moved to you kidses' favorite country(Ukrainia), and farmed successfully for about a century. But then---the Crown(Czar) changed the terms of the deal, plus other things, soooo those Mennonites emigrated to Canada. Winnipeg, MB., area, to be 'zact. (see Steinbach, Mb.). Since then, a group of Mennonites has again emigrated to Northern Mexico, and then to other places. Maybe when we annex Greenland, we can invite those wandering industrious Mennonites to populate the island---there's plenty of room. Even set up a self-governing German Mennonite Homeland, and arm it with nukes. How do you like that? So anyway---one o' my Great-fathers moved ta North Dakota, as well, and farmed. One of his sons fought in the 1936 war in Spain. Not sure which side. Hopes that helps you some.