The handful of letters in the Dorothea Handel Schuhmacher collection provide a glimpse of a number of difficulties nineteenth-century immigrants and their families experienced, including the dangers of pregnancy, marital stress, and the challenge of caring for aging relatives.
Dorothea Handel Schuhmacher (seated, right) with her husband Peter and their daughter Minnie (standing), June 1881. Photograph courtesy of Linda Stauf. |
Dorothea Handel was born December 30, 1830 in Bretten, Baden-Württemburg, Germany to Johann Gottfried Handel and Ernestine Faber. She was an only child. She immigrated to the United States in 1854 with her husband, Peter Schuhmacher, leaving Le Havre on March 16 and arriving at Castle Garden in New York City, the city’s main reception point for foreign immigrants, on April 10, 1854.
In the first letter of the collection, jointly written in June 1854 by Dorothea and Peter to her parents, Dorothea refers to experiencing considerable illness on the trip over. The Schuhmachers' first son, Johann (or John) Gottfried was born January 26, 1855, suggesting Dorothea was pregnant while on the voyage.
Dorothea and Peter moved to Western New York not long after arriving to be closer to Peter’s brother, Johann (John). Within a few years the Schuhmachers settled in Rome, New York, where they stayed the remainder of their lives. Dorothea and Peter had a total of seven children, five boys and two girls, all of whom lived to adulthood except their second-youngest daughter, Maria Louisa Emilia Schuhmacher, who died in 1881 at the age of 16.
Letters sent from Bretten to Dorothea Schuhmacher indicate her father encountered some difficulties related to property he had inherited and income he was supposed to receive, particularly after the death of her mother Ernestina in January 1868. A man named Konrad Walz was appointed to watch over Gottfried Handel's finances, and wrote to her about his efforts to comply with his responsibilities.
"In all my decisions," Walz wrote in February 1868, "I am considering the duties and needs of all sides involved. I will contact you again when your father’s affairs have been brought in order."
Dorothea, meanwhile, experienced difficulties of her own. In a letter to her father written on January 15, 1870, she describes a health crisis that was likely a miscarriage, and laments that the previous fall most of her farm's crops had been destroyed due to her husband's indifference:
"The cattle got through the fences and hedges, and ruined the crops. I could not leave the sick children to go out and fix the fences, and Mister Peter Schuhmacher did not care to stay home and do it himself; so it went, and we just [had to] let it go."
She closed the letter by declaring "The devil shall not trick you into thinking I had a good life."
Dorothea gave birth to her last child, Wilhelmina (Mina, or Minnie) in October 1871. In a letter to her father written in May 1872, she notes that Konrad Walz had recently died. Evidently, in the aftermath of Walz's death, she came to feel that though "I had trust in Konrad to take care of you as a brother," in fact he had not lived up to his responsibilities. Walz had repeatedly counseled her not to try to bring her father to the United States, and told her that her father did not want to leave Germany, and she had trusted his advice.
"You perhaps thought that we could not support you," Dorothea wrote. She reflected that "We had it tough in the early years... We have had to work hard... [but] our work was well paid."
She added that "We will have no peace until one of us is with you" and promised that either she or her husband would travel to Germany and bring him to the United States.
True to her word, Dorothea traveled to Germany with her baby Minnie in 1872. Dorothea's departure, and her apparent decision not to send updates of her trip back to Rome, New York, angered Peter, who dashed off a letter to his father-in-law in August 1872 declaring it was Gottfried's "sacred obligation" to "rebuke" Dorothea for leaving her other children behind. Evidently anticipating that Dorothea would also read the letter, Peter added that he was ready to sell off his property and place the children in a boardinghouse while he made the trip to Germany to bring his wife and daughter back. It is unclear whether Dorothea's return was prompted by this letter, but on August 28, 1872, Dorothea, Gottfried, and Minnie departed for the United States from Hamburg on the HAPAG ship Westphalia.
Gottfried Handel died while living with his daughter's family in 1879 and was buried in Rome, New York. Peter died in 1885 in Rome, New York, but his burial location is unknown. Dorothea died July 27, 1892 and was buried in Utica, New York. While the 1881 photograph of the Schuhmachers shows a placid couple, the family's correspondence reveals a variety of stormy moments that shed light on the stresses many families experienced in the course of migration and adaptation to a new community and society.
Our thanks to Linda Stauf for sharing her family's original letters, research into her family's history, and the photograph of the Schuhmacher family; and to Ute Brandenburg and Philip Stressel who created translations of the letters in the Dorothea Schuhmacher Handel collection.