The Lives of First-Generation German Immigrant Women in Franklin County, Missouri

The area along the Missouri River west of St. Louis, Missouri was a major locus of immigration from Germany between 1850 and 1860, in part due to a publication by Gottfried Duden that received wide attention in Germany. While a fair amount has been written about the lives of immigrants in Missouri, most has focused on the experiences of men. The lives of women are largely restricted to recordings of marriage, births and death. Lacking is context on what occurred between these life events. Using a variety of public and private sources, we describe the lives of five sisters from the first generation of women born in Franklin County, Missouri, bordered on its northern edge by the Missouri River. The process sheds light on the lives of immigrant women from Germany in Franklin County. Our sources allow us to shed light on the sisters’ day-to-day life experiences over time, thus better capturing the challenges that they faced and the grace and strength that they displayed in facing them. Although their childhoods were homogeneous, their adult paths diverged from one another markedly. We conclude with a discussion of the factors that might have been responsible for their divergence of experience.