Ancestory

The old country

Hotten showed us young English servants leaving for Virginia in the 1600s. A century and more later, the great wave was different: German and Central European, in their millions, and most of it flowed through two North Sea ports — Hamburg (whose data is locked behind a commercial archive) and Bremen. For Bremen there is an open, scholarly reconstruction: a dataset of 735,545 individual emigrant records, 1830–1939, released under an open licence established [bremenMigration] . Unlike Savage and Hotten, this is clean structured data — so we can ask it directly where the old country was.

Where they came from

The German states and provinces the emigrants gave as home:

Bavaria (Bayern) leads, then Hannover, Brandenburg, Württemberg, Saxony, the Rhineland and Baden — the crowded farmlands and villages of the south and west, from which whole families left for land in America.

But not only Germans

Bremen was a funnel for half of Europe. The nationalities recorded reach far beyond Germany:

After the Germans come Hungarians, Austrians, Czechs and Slovaks, Russians, Lithuanians, Romanians, Poles — the great Central and Eastern European emigration of the early 20th century, passing through a German port on its way to America. (The labels are the dataset’s own, so they carry the state names of their day — Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia.)

Where they went

About 80% were bound for the United States established [bremenMigration] — and above all for the German-American heartland:

New York first — the port and the city — then Illinois (Chicago), Pennsylvania, Ohio and Wisconsin: the classic map of German settlement in America. A real minority went the other way entirely, to Argentina and Brazil, a reminder that “the New World” was never only the United States.

A family migration

And the shape of it had changed. Where Hotten’s servants were overwhelmingly young and male, Bremen’s emigrants left as households: 388,806 men and 336,641 women — close to even — with a median age of 29 established [bremenMigration] .

A quarter are children under fifteen — parents carrying families across an ocean, not lone servants working off a passage.

The decades the record forgot

When the surviving lists were written:

This is the most important thing on the page, and the easiest to miss. There is a thin trickle in the 1830s–50s, then almost nothing until 1900, then a flood. The peak decades of German emigration — the 1850s to the 1880s — are largely missing, because those Bremen lists were destroyed established [bremenMigration] . So what survives is a survival pattern, not the true migration curve: an early tail, and then the 20th-century Central-European wave. It is exactly why the nationalities above lean east. Every dataset has a shape like this — the trick is to say so.

What this is, and isn’t

Bremen was one port of several, and these are the lists that happened to last — a fraction of the real traffic, and biased by which registers survived probable [bremenMigration] . Hamburg, which carried a comparable share, sits behind a commercial paywall; the true German and Central-European emigration was far larger than any open dataset can show. Read this as one clear window onto the old country, not the whole view. It closes the westward arc — America, the crossing, and the origin — from the far shore.

Stage 4 of 8 · The transatlantic arc

Sources