Chapter 1 — The German roots: August Almeroth of Hesse

My great-great-grandfather August Almeroth was born in May 1837 in Hesse, one of the German states two generations before there was a single Germany. He was born under a longer spelling of our name — Allmeroth, with two L's — the form still found today in its old heartland around Kassel, in northern Hesse.

In 1867, at about thirty years old, August crossed the Atlantic. He was part of a broad wave of Germans who left Hesse and the surrounding states in those decades for land and work in America. The next year, 1868, he married Johanna "Hanna" Schmidt, who had been born in 1843 in Cassel (Kassel) — the same corner of Hesse he came from. Whether they knew each other in the old country or found each other among fellow immigrants, the marriage kept the family rooted, for one more generation, in the people of Hesse.

They settled in Laughery Township, Ripley County, Indiana — a heavily German, heavily Catholic and Lutheran farming county in the southeast of the state. By the 1880 census August and Johanna were established there with a full house of children. Seven in all, born between about 1868 and 1880:

• George (1868), Leonhard (1869), Peter James "Pete" (1872, Napoleon, Indiana) — my great-grandfather — John (1874), Anna (1875), Elizabeth (1876), and Martha (1880).

Sometime in America the double-L fell away and Allmeroth became Almeroth — the small, quiet Americanization that so many immigrant names went through.

By 1900 the family had moved from the Ripley County farmland to the city: August appears that year in Indianapolis (Marion County). He died in 1917, in Indiana, eighty years old, having crossed an ocean and raised an American family from a Hessian beginning.

Sources: every name, date, and place here is drawn from the family dataset and the August Almeroth research dossier. The specific Hessian town of his birth — likely in the Kassel area — is not yet confirmed; the dossier lists the records to chase next.

Chapter 2 — The Irish roots: the Dwyers

The Irish side reaches me through my great-grandmother, Elizabeth Frances Dwyer — and back through it lie the oldest people I can name in the whole family.

My great-great-great-grandparents Cornelius Dwyer (born 1830) and Mary Bogan (born 1832) were born in Ireland in the years just before the Great Famine. They lived their whole lives there and died there, both in 1899. They never came to America; they are the old country itself.

The three Irish surnames in this branch each point to a different corner of Ireland: Dwyer to the O'Dwyer country of County Tipperary in Munster; Bogan to the Ó Bogáin of County Donegal in the northwest; and, a generation on, O'Malley to the seafaring clan of County Mayo in the west. Three provinces — the sign of a family that came together not in one Irish parish but in America.

It was Cornelius and Mary's son, John J. Dwyer — born in 1855, a child of the Famine years — who made the crossing. He left Ireland in the great post-Famine exodus and settled in Illinois. There he married Anna O'Malley (born 1860, also in Ireland), and on November 12, 1883, their daughter Elizabeth Frances Dwyer was born in Illinois — the first of this line to be born American.

The family scattered across the booming Midwest the way Irish families did: Anna died in Chicago in 1907; John lived on until 1923, dying in Gary, Indiana — the steel town just around the bottom of Lake Michigan.

Sources: drawn from the family dataset and the Irish-line research dossier. Irish records before 1900 are famously thin — most 19th-century census records were destroyed in 1922 — so the exact home parishes of Cornelius, Mary, and Anna are still open questions; the dossier maps the way in (it runs through John's American records first).

Chapter 3 — Two worlds meet: Chicago, 1904

On December 21, 1904, in Chicago, the two streams of this story finally ran together. Peter James "Pete" Almeroth married Elizabeth Frances Dwyer.

Pete was the German side made American: born in 1872 in Napoleon, Indiana, the third of August and Johanna's seven children — a Hessian farmer's son who had come north off the Ripley County land to the city.

Elizabeth was the Irish side made American: born in 1883 in Illinois, daughter of John J. Dwyer of Ireland and Anna O'Malley. Where Pete's people had come from Hesse, hers had come from Tipperary, Donegal, and Mayo.

In that one marriage the German Almeroths of Hesse-and-Indiana joined the Irish Dwyers of Chicago — and from that day forward this is a Chicago family. Pete and Elizabeth raised four children in the city:

• Ann (1907), Peter James "Jim" (1909), Robert Henry "Bob" (1911), and Charles Jerome "Chick" (1916).

The second son, Bob — my grandfather — was born in Chicago in 1911, the first Almeroth of my direct line to be a Chicagoan from birth, German and Irish both.

Pete lived until 1947 and was buried at All Saints Cemetery in Des Plaines; Elizabeth had died in 1941. Everything that comes after — Bob, my father, me, my children — grows from this Chicago marriage of two immigrant families.

Sources: the marriage date and place, the children, and the burial all come from the family dataset (the 1904 marriage and the 1930 census are sourced to Ancestry records). This chapter is the hinge between the German roots and the Irish roots.

Chapter 4 — Bob & Betty, and the road to Florida

My grandfather, Robert Henry "Bob" Almeroth, was born on August 27, 1911, in Chicago, the second son of Pete and Elizabeth — the first child of my direct line to be a Chicagoan from his first breath, German and Irish both.

He had a Chicago boyhood with at least one extraordinary chapter in it: in 1927, at fifteen, Bob crossed the Atlantic on a class trip to France and Paris — sailing over on the R.M.S. Majestic and home again on the Minnekahda. A Depression was coming, but a Chicago teenager had already seen Paris. In 1935 he graduated from Loyola University in Chicago, where he was a member of the Alpha Delta Gamma fraternity.

Around 1938 he married Elizabeth L. "Betty" Hartmann, born December 18, 1913 — the beginning of a marriage that would last sixty years. Together they raised five children:

• Robert Henry "Tim" Jr. (1938–2012), my father Peter Jerome (1940), Richard "Ric" (1941), James Andrew (1950), and Deborah "Debbie" (1954).

Sometime around 1948, Bob and Betty did what so many midcentury families did — they left the cold for the sun, moving the family from Chicago to South Florida. Bob made his career in Miami, working as an alcohol technician and as a court clerk for the City of Miami. He was a devout Catholic — a member of St. Elizabeth Catholic Church and the St. Vincent de Paul Society — and a joiner besides, in the Kiwanis Club of Cutler Ridge.

He died on December 6, 1998, in Pompano Beach, at eighty-seven. And here is the part of the story that says everything about the marriage: Betty died three days later, on December 9, 1998 — after sixty years together, neither of them long for the world without the other. Bob left behind eleven grandchildren and six great-grandchildren.

Sources: built from the family dataset and Bob's December 1998 Sun-Sentinel obituary (birth, the Miami career, parishes, survivors), with his 1927 Europe trip and 1935 Loyola graduation from the records. The man himself — the grandfather you remember — is yours to add.