BallinStadt - Port of Dreams - Part 3

See Part 1 & 2 for the introduction and tour of building 2.

Building 3 offers a reconstruction of a sleeping hall from 1910.  Once the emigrants arrived in Hamburg, this was where they waited for their ship to arrive.  According to the museum, after the long trip the beds here were rather luxurious.

After walking through this room, you arrive in the gift shop.  For 6 Euro I bought a guide to the museum (they are available in German or English), which has a lot of information and many of the fantastic photographs you see at the museum.  I look forward to adding it to my collection of genealogy books when I get home.  There is also a cafe if the tour has made you hungry or thirsty.  I left the last building and walked over to the Elbe, trying to picture the giant steamships that once passed by.

I want to finish this blog series by giving my sincere thanks to Joan at Roots'n'Leaves.  She has been one of my air chair traveler readers and was the person who told me about this museum.  I am so glad, as the idea that they would have an emigration museum here never crossed my mind.  Thank you Joan, this was the most interesting place I have gone to on my trip this far!  Please check out her fantastic blog!

BallinStadt - Port of Dreams - Part 2

For the the introduction to BallinStadt, please look here.

Upon leaving building 1 with ticket in hand I headed to the main exhibition, located in building 2.  The photographs and documents to look at were numerous.  Many items had English explanations, which was very helpful, and there were "telephones" you listened into to hear an "emigrant" tell their story.

I was most interested in those that were near the years my ancestors left Germany.  Hearing of the trials and tribulations faced and the courage shown was amazing

There were a bunch of advertisements from the eighteen and nineteen hundreds on going to America and New York.  I bought a couple postcards featuring these and there are also posters available in the gift shop.

The "ship of dreams" is the next portion of the building.  Questions are on poles on either side of the ship, with answers written on the ship.  My favorite answer to "What are you taking with you?" is hope.  People left their homelands, family, friends, all they had ever known with the hope of a better life in America.  It was not easy.  Even getting to Hamburg from where ever they were from was an adventure.  They then had to wait in the emigration halls until their ship arrived, take a multiple week boat ride across the Atlantic, pass the examinations in New York City and, possibly, take a train to their final destination further inland in America.  We complained over the 7.5 hour flight with 2 layovers.  I cannot even imagine the fortitude and determination these people had.  Hope would be the only way you could survive.  After walking around the boat you enter building 3, which I will talk about in my next post.

BallinStadt - Port of Dreams

As I walked the two blocks from the Veddel S-Bahn stop to the BallinStadt Emigrant Museum in Hamburg, I stopped in from of the first sign and felt tears welling up in my eyes.  As I stared at the boats and other signs along the past to the entrance of emigrant families, it hit me: this is where, in 1859, John and Dorothea Passel and their 5 children, ages 3 - 19 left for a new life in America and where, in 1884, Maria Strassheim Tross took her 6 children, ages 11 months - 9 years, and 3 pieces of baggage and set off to meet relatives in Buffalo, New York.  I was standing in the place where they last saw their homeland of Germany, filled with hope, but nervous about the strange new land they would soon embark upon.

BallinStadt is a set of three reconstructed buildings, located on the Elbe River's Veddel Island, where the Emigrants Halls once sat.  Although what my ancestors would have seen would have been much different, since these buildings were not build until 1896 - 1907, the exhibit has information from 1850 until the present day.  Building number 1, actually the last building you come upon, is the entrance and also holds a multitude of computers with free access to Ancestry.de.  This allow patrons to search for their ancestors in records which include the Hamburg passenger lists.  Being in German, I could not do any research, but I did get a shot of the passenger list with the John Passel family.

I will post part 2 of this, on the main exhibit building, shortly.

Tombstone Tuesday - Miniatur Wunderland

One of the coolest places I have been in Hamburg is Miniatur Wunderland.  They even have a cemetery, complete with a funeral and a crypt with caskets and ghosts.  

52 Weeks to Better Genealogy - Week #7

Amy Coffin at the We Tree blog is challenging bloggers to become better genealogists, with a new prompt each week through her 52 Weeks to Better Genealogy:


Week 7:  Play with Google Maps. This is a helpful tool for determining the locations of addresses in your family history. Where your ancestral homestead once stood may now be a warehouse, a parking lot or a field. Perhaps the house is still there. When you input addresses in Google Maps, don’t forget to use the Satellite View and Street View options for perspectives that put you were right there where your ancestors once stood. If you’ve used this tool before, take sometime and play with it again. Push all the buttons, click all the links and devise new ways it can help with your personal genealogy research. If you have a genealogy blog, write about your experiences with Google Maps, or suggest similar easy (and free) tools that have helped in your own research.


I learned about the miracle of Google Maps for genealogy, particularly for timelines, while at the Genealogy Reference Desk Institute.  I have been meaning to play with them ever since and this weeks challenge gave me the perfect opportunity.  I recommend looking at the help articles, as they are very clear and concise and helped my greatly.



View German Ancestral Villages in a larger map


This is my map on my German (with a couple in the Alsace Region of France) ancestral towns.  I will be living in Hamburg - way up at the top if you scroll the map up - and hope to visit these places over the next five months.  If you click on the map, I listed each ancestral line who lived in each town so that I remembered who was where.  This is also one of my GeneaBloggers Games entries.

Surname Saturday: Fink/Finck

Each Saturday this year I am posting one of my surnames, going in alphabetical order.  This weeks surname is Fink/Finck.  The names in red are my direct line ancestors.

1-John FINCK
b: , , , Germany
+Barbara KILLSTER
b: , , , Germany
. . . . 2-Gottlieb FINK
        b: 1 October 1838, Bretton, Baden-Württemberg, Germany
        d: 7 April 1910, Buffalo, Erie, New York, USA
. . . . +Barbara FLEEMAN
        b: 13 February 1846, Buffalo, Erie, New York, USA
        d: 1 January 1929, Buffalo, Erie, New York, USA
. . . . . . . . 3-George FINK
                b: 26 May 1865, Buffalo, Erie, New York, USA
. . . . . . . . 3-Elizabeth L. FINK
                b: 6 July 1867, Buffalo, Erie, New York, USA
                d: 24 April 1957, Buffalo, Erie, New York, USA
. . . . . . . . +Jacob J. GRESS
                b: 26 January 1869, Buffalo, Erie, New York, USA
                m: Buffalo, Erie, New York, USA
                d: 11 August 1932, Buffalo, Erie, New York, USA
. . . . . . . . . . . . 4-Chester E. GRESS
                        b: June 1888
. . . . . . . . . . . . 4-May GRESS
                        b: 19 September 1890
                        d: 11 June 1970, Buffalo, Erie, New York, USA
. . . . . . . . . . . . 4-Walter L. GRESS
                        b: 6 December 1891, Buffalo, Erie, New York, USA
. . . . . . . . . . . . 4-Elsie GRESS
                        b: 13 May 1894
. . . . . . . . . . . . 4-Howard J. GRESS
                        b: 18 March 1896, Buffalo, Erie, New York, USA
. . . . . . . . . . . . 4-Beulah GRESS
                        b: 27 January 1898, Buffalo, Erie, New York, USA
                        d: 7 May 1968, Buffalo, Erie, New York, USA
. . . . . . . . . . . . 4-Vera Julia GRESS
                        b: 11 January 1900, Buffalo, Erie, New York, USA
                        d: 2 February 1976, Cheektowaga, Erie, New York, USA
. . . . . . . . 3-Ella FINK
                b: 18 September 1869, Buffalo, Erie, New York, USA
. . . . . . . . 3-Edward FINK
                b: 23 December 1871, Buffalo, Erie, New York, USA
. . . . . . . . 3-Ida FINK
                b: 16 August 1873, Buffalo, Erie, New York, USA
. . . . . . . . 3-Emma FINK
                b: 9 June 1875, Buffalo, Erie, New York, USA
. . . . . . . . 3-Lydia FINK
                b: 3 May 1877, Buffalo, Erie, New York, USA
. . . . . . . . 3-Louis A. FINK
                b: 16 July 1879, Buffalo, Erie, New York, USA
. . . . . . . . 3-Frank FINK
                b: 16 October 1882, Buffalo, Erie, New York, USA
. . . . . . . . 3-Edna FINK
                b: October 1884, Buffalo, Erie, New York, USA
. . . . . . . . 3-Walter T. FINK
                b: April 1887, Buffalo, Erie, New York, USA

Goals for the New Year

In 2010, I hope to accomplish the following:

• Interview my grandmothers, parents and great aunts, uncles and cousins on video ASAP!
• Goal is to do this by the end of February for my grandmothers
• Update each of my lines sideways and forward.
• I usually do well with my information about my ancestors siblings, but I have not done so well finding cousins in more recent generations.
• Focus my search for my German lines so that I can visit their hometowns while I am in Germany for 4 1/2 months
• I will therefore focus on the Eichhorn, Gresz, Fink, Weiss and Tross lines for the next two months
• Stay in touch with my relatives searching my fathers side of the family.
• I research my mothers side as I have great aunts and uncles who research my fathers.  I will be helping my Aunt Dottie with her search in Poland for the Karpinski's (my great-grandmother's line)
• Complete Dear Myrtle's finally get organization checklist from 2009
• Start researching my fiancé's line (at the very least, get the information he knows into my file)
• Blog: Participate in Surname Saturday each week in order to get my surnames out there and find new cousins!  I plan on going alphabetically though all my surnames.