Chapter 1 — The German roots: August Almeroth of Hesse

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

In 1867, about thirty years old, August crossed the Atlantic in the broad wave of Germans leaving Hesse and the neighboring states for land and work in America. The next year, 1868, he married Johanna "Hanna" Schmidt — born 19 March 1843 in Cassel (Kassel), the same corner of Hesse he came from. They had reached America the same year, 1867; whether they knew each other in the old country or met among fellow immigrants, the marriage kept the family rooted, one more generation, in the people of Hesse.

They settled in Laughery Township, Ripley County, Indiana — a heavily German, Catholic-and-Lutheran farming county in the southeast of the state — and by the 1880 census had a full house of seven children, 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).

Somewhere in America the double-L quietly fell away and Allmeroth became Almeroth — the small Americanization so many immigrant names went through. By 1900 the family had left the Ripley County farmland for the city: August and Johanna appear that year in Indianapolis (Marion County), and there they stayed. August died in 1917 in Indianapolis, eighty years old; Johanna outlived him to 1926, dying at eighty-three. The two of them lie together at Crown Hill Cemetery in Indianapolis — a Hessian couple at rest in the middle of Indiana.

Sources: every name, date, and place is drawn from the family dataset and the August Almeroth research dossier. The exact Hessian town of August's birth is still unknown — and now we know why it's stubborn: the community family tree simply stops at August, listing no parents, so the next step isn't more tree-climbing but an off-tree record — his 1867 ship manifest, a U.S. naturalization, or a Kassel-area parish baptism (a documented Allmeroth family in Elmshagen, near Kassel, is the leading lead).

Chapter 2 — The Irish roots: the Dwyers of Tipperary and Galway

The Irish side reaches me through my great-grandmother, Elizabeth Frances Dwyer — and behind her stand two people who carried the family out of Ireland.

My great-great-great-grandparents were Patrick Dwyer, born 20 December 1831 in County Tipperary — the O'Dwyer country of Munster — and Catherine Madden, born in 1837 in County Galway, in the Madden heartland of Connacht. Two corners of Ireland, two old Gaelic names — Ó Duibhir and Ó Madáin — joined in one marriage.

For a long time the tree had this generation wrong: it carried a "Cornelius Dwyer and Mary Bogan" who supposedly never left Ireland. The records corrected both the names and the story. Patrick and Catherine were not the old country left behind — they crossed too. Catherine was already in Chicago by 1870, and Patrick lived out his days there, dying after 1900; Catherine died in Chicago on 25 November 1909. The whole Dwyer family had pulled up and gone to America together in the post-Famine decades.

Which means their son John Joseph Dwyer — born 25 November 1855 in Ireland — most likely made the crossing as a child, not as a lone young immigrant. He grew up around Chicago, married Anna O'Malley (born 1856 in Ireland), and on 12 November 1884 their daughter Elizabeth Frances Dwyer was born in Illinois — the first of this line born American.

The family settled into the booming Midwest the way Irish-Catholic families did. Anna died in Chicago in 1907; John lived until 1923, dying in Gary, Indiana — the steel town at the bottom of Lake Michigan. Elizabeth would carry the Irish line into the German one in 1904 (the next chapter), and was buried, a devout Catholic, at All Saints Catholic Cemetery in Des Plaines.

Sources: drawn from the family dataset and the Irish-line research dossier. The two counties — Tipperary for the Dwyers, Galway for the Maddens — are now confirmed on Patrick's and Catherine's own records; the exact parishes are the next thing to chase (Irish civil registration runs from 1864, and the parish registers go back further). Patrick's and Catherine's own parents are still unknown — the oldest names this Irish line can yet reach.

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 1884 in Illinois, daughter of John Joseph Dwyer and Anna O'Malley — both Irish-born. Where Pete's people had come from Hesse, hers had come from County Tipperary and County Galway; her grandparents Patrick Dwyer and Catherine Madden had already brought the whole family across to Chicago a generation before, so the Irish side was waiting in the city when the German side arrived.

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, buried at All Saints Catholic Cemetery in Des Plaines; Elizabeth had died in 1941, and rests there too. 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 — Betty's people: the German roots of Wisconsin

My grandmother Elizabeth Lorraine "Betty" Hartmann — Bob's wife — carries the deepest roots in the whole family. Where the Almeroths reach back to one corner of Hesse, Betty's ancestry runs through three German regions and all the way to the 1760s. She was born December 18, 1913, in Fort Atkinson, Wisconsin, into the German-Catholic farm country of Dodge and Jefferson Counties — not Chicago, as I'd once assumed, but a Wisconsin world a generation older than the Chicago one.

Henry and Lydia — the Wisconsin Hartmanns

Betty's parents were Henry J. Hartmann (1875–1964) and Lydia Pieritz (1878–1941), married in Dodge County in 1901. Henry was a Fort Atkinson businessman — by his obituary, a builder who "built part of the present Montgomery-Ward store." He died in Florida but was brought home and buried at St. Joseph Catholic Cemetery, Fort Atkinson, the family ground. Through Henry and Lydia, Betty's line splits into two long German rivers.

Henry's side — Baden, then Westphalia

Henry's parents were the Hartmann immigrants: Andrew Joseph Hartmann, born November 1826 in Baden, and Barbara Mechenich, born 1841, also in Baden. They settled at Theresa, in Dodge County — a German Catholic colony — raised eight children, and lie buried together there. Two Badeners who became Wisconsin farmers.

Barbara's own parents reach a different German region. Her father, Phillip Mechenich (1812–1885), brought the family to Wisconsin in 1845 and naturalized as a citizen in 1855. But her mother, Anna Marie Schmidt, was born in 1816 in Referinghausen, in the Sauerland of Westphalia — and her parents, Johann Matthias Schmidt (1771–1848) and Anna Maria Oberreuther (1770–1856), married in that Westphalian parish in 1799. So on this thread the family is Westphalian, not Badener — a quiet move within Germany before the ocean crossing.

Lydia's side — Pomerania, and the oldest names of all

Lydia's line is the deepest in the entire tree, and it runs to the Baltic coast of Pomerania. Her father was Frederik Martin "Fred" Pieritz, born 1831 in Kolzow (Usedom-Wollin, Pomerania, then Prussia) — an immigrant who naturalized in 1873. Behind him: his father Martin Friederich Pieritz (1796, Rehberg/Kachlin), who also emigrated; and behind him, staying in Pomerania, Christian Friedrich Pyritz and Anne Sophia Louisa Köpken, both born about 1765 near Kolzow and Tonnin.

Christian and Anne are my 5×-great-grandparents — the oldest people the family can yet name, born a quarter-millennium ago on the Baltic, when the name was still spelled Pyritz. Everything since — three German regions, an ocean, Wisconsin, Chicago, Florida, and me — descends from that 18th-century Pomeranian couple.

With the Almeroths' Hesse, Betty's side brings the family's German map to four regions — Baden, Westphalia, Pomerania, and Hesse. Sources: the family dataset and the Hartmann research dossier. The Wisconsin generations are well documented; the 1700s Pomeranian and Westphalian couples come from community trees — strong leads, but older and thinner than the records closer to home.

Chapter 5 — 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 Lorraine "Betty" Hartmann, born December 18, 1913, in Fort Atkinson, Wisconsin — into a Wisconsin-German Catholic family, the Hartmanns, whose roots run the deepest in the whole tree (Baden, Westphalia, and Pomerania, back to the 1760s — that's Chapter 4). It was the beginning of a marriage that would last sixty years. Together they raised five children through the 1940s and '50s; my own line runs through one of them, my father. (Out of respect for living family, this public page names only those who have passed — the full family is in the private view.)

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.

Chapter 6 — The Brennan Irish of Springfield and Chicago

My mother's side begins, on her father's line, with a family that was entirely Irish. My maternal grandfather, Edward Thomas Brennan, was born August 11, 1906, in Illinois — a Chicago salesman, and a Catholic: he was buried in Holy Sepulchre Cemetery, Alsip, the great Catholic cemetery on the city's south side. I met him only once, as a small boy around 1970, the year before he died in 1971.

Behind Edward stand four Irish grandparents — every one of them from Ireland — and a family that built its first American life not in Chicago but downstate, in Springfield, Illinois.

Edward's parents — Brennan and Maloney

Edward's father was Thomas A. Brennan (1876–1945); his mother, Margaret J. Maloney (1882–1983), who lived to about 101. Both names are Irish, and both rest at Holy Sepulchre. Margaret's long life nearly spanned the whole story of this book — born when the family was still finding its feet in Illinois, she lived to see her grandchildren's generation grown.

The immigrants — two Irish couples, all in Springfield

Go back one more step and you reach the people who actually crossed the Atlantic — and they all landed in the same Sangamon County town:

• Thomas Brennan (born 1840 in Ireland) and Ellen (born 1841 in Ireland) — Edward's Brennan grandparents, a Springfield family. Ellen lived to 1921 and was buried at Calvary Catholic Cemetery, Springfield, having outlived Thomas by decades.
• Michael J. Maloney (born 1857 in Ireland, immigrated 1875) and Margaret Stanton (born 1858 in Ireland) — Edward's Maloney grandparents, also of Springfield.

So all four of my grandfather Edward's grandparents came from Ireland, settled together in Springfield, and only later did the family move up to Chicago. It's the second great Irish strand of the family — separate from the Dwyers of my father's side, but cut from the same cloth: post-Famine, Catholic, Midwestern.

Sources: the family dataset and the Brennan research dossier. The FamilySearch records reach the Irish-born generation and stop there — none of these four immigrants has parents on the tree, and only "Ireland" is given, not a county. The specific Irish parishes are the open frontier here, reachable only through off-tree records (passenger lists, Springfield parish baptisms, naturalizations).

Chapter 7 — The Bergunder and Zaleski: a German-and-Polish Chicago

If the Brennans are my mother's Irish half, her mother's people bring the family its German-and-Polish strand — and its only Polish root anywhere in seven generations. My maternal grandmother, Bernice Bergunder, was born September 14, 1905, in Illinois, into an immigrant household barely a year off the boat.

Mary Zaleski — the family's one Polish line

Bernice's mother was Mary Zaleski, born in 1873 in Poland and an immigrant of 1904 — she reached Illinois just before Bernice was born in 1905. Hers is the single Polish thread in the whole tree: every other root runs to Germany or Ireland, but the Zaleskis were Poles. Mary lived in Harvey, south of Chicago, and later in the city itself, and was widowed young.

The Bergunders — German, and out of the Partitions

Bernice's father was a Bergunder — a German surname — though his first name has so far eluded even his FamilySearch record (it survives only as a name attached to his daughter's death index). What the records do show is telling: Bernice's older brother, Wilbur Stanley Bergunder, was born in 1897 in "Russia" — which, in those years, means the Russian Partition of Poland, the part of a then-stateless Poland ruled from Moscow. The family's homeland was that Russian-ruled Polish borderland; they emigrated in 1904, and Bernice was the first of them born American, in 1905.

Chicago, then Ohio

Bernice lived the family's long migration in one lifetime: Harvey and Chicago in her early years, then Evanston — where, a generation on, my brother and I would be born — and finally Cleveland, Ohio, where she died in 1996. That Chicago-to-Ohio move, which she made late in life, ran a generation ahead of my own — I'd end up in the Cleveland area too.

Sources: the family dataset and the Brennan research dossier (which holds this Bergunder/Zaleski branch). This line dead-ends quickly on FamilySearch — Mary Zaleski has no parents on the tree and the Bergunder father is only a surname — so Poland itself, and the Bergunder first name, wait on off-tree records: Mary's 1904 passenger manifest and the early-1900s Illinois census.

Chapter 8 — Edward and Bernice, and the road to Ohio

The two strands of my mother's side — the Irish Brennans and the German-and-Polish Bergunders — met the way my father's German and Irish lines had, in the city. On February 22, 1936, in Cook County, Edward Thomas Brennan married Bernice Bergunder. He was the Springfield-Irish salesman's son; she was the daughter of a Polish mother and a German father, born the year after they reached America. Their marriage is the maternal mirror of Bob and Betty's — two immigrant inheritances joined in one Chicago household.

They had children through the 1940s; my own line runs through one of them, my mother.

Edward, by then, was a hard man to hold onto. He worked as a salesman, moved with the work (a 1940 draft card even places him briefly across the state line in Gary, Indiana), and in time grew estranged from the family. I met him exactly once, as a boy in Chicago around 1970 — I remember a smoker, and little else — and within a year, in 1971, he was gone, buried at Holy Sepulchre.

Bernice carried the family forward, and eastward. From Chicago she moved to Evanston — the town where, a generation on, my brother and I would be born — and finally to the Cleveland, Ohio area, where she died in 1996. That Chicago-to-Ohio migration, begun by my grandmother, is the same road my own life would later follow.

From Edward and Bernice comes my mother — and with her, the maternal half of the story meets the paternal half in the next generation.

Sources: the family dataset and the Brennan research dossier; the 1936 marriage, the 1940 census household, and Bernice's 1996 Ohio death are sourced records, while Edward's estrangement and the one meeting are family memory — mine to keep.