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| Ships like these carried many of our forebears to the new world. |
Reading about month-long northward journeys of refugees fleeing violence in places like Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras reminded me of the youthful flight of one of my own maternal ancestors.
We don't know the exact date of his birth, nor the names or history of his parents, but my great great grandfather Christian Nisly (or Nüsli, meaning a small nut tree;-) came to the port of Philadelphia in 1804 from Switzerland at only 16 or 17.
We know few details about his voyage, or whether he was accompanied by any relatives, but in migrating here he was completely separated from the rest of his family, never to see them again.
What would have motivated someone so young to leave all behind for an uncertain future in the new world? Most likely he and his Anabaptist family made this difficult choice to avoid his being drafted into the Swiss army, which regularly supplied mercenary troops to fight frequent wars in neighboring lands. As followers of Jesus opposed to killing people for any reason, this may have seemed like least awful option.
On the perilous month-long journey, young Christian and his fellow voyagers endured the hardship of a severe storm that damaged their vessel as well as experiencing the terror of being detained on the way by a hostile pirate ship of some sort, although we only have his sketchy notes to base this on.
Young Christian worked for an unrelated Zug family in Philadelphia for several years to pay for his journey, then moved to frontier Somerset County in western Pennsylvania, where he met and married Sarah Miller. There he was ordained to the ministry, and later moved to Holmes County, Ohio, where they raised a family of 14 children. He died there at age 73 in 1848.
Their youngest son Abraham and family moved to Indiana and from there to a new Amish community near Hutchinson, Kansas, a pioneer town then only 12 years old, in 1883, after his second wife Dinah died. Just two years later he himself passed away at age 61. He and Dinah's oldest son Eli, my maternal grandfather, was left to look after the remaining members of his family.
At 19 Eli and another young male friend had traveled by freight train to Hutchinson, accompanying five train car loads of horses, farm implements and household furnishings belonging to their respective families. Over the first winter on the prairie, the two families lived in a single makeshift shack and used twisted bundles of grass and cow chips for cooking and keep themselves warm over winter.
At age 23, and soon after his father died, Eli married my grandmother Fannie Troyer, then only 19. Fannie, whose mother had died when she was only 13, had responded to a call to go to Kansas to do housework for second-time widower Abraham Nisly while only a teen. After marrying Eli, Fannie bore 13 children, the ninth of whom was my mother Mary.
As I reflect on these parts of my family story I wonder about the impact of all the traumas the Nisly clan experienced through multiple premature deaths and many migrations. And I’m sure many of your immigrant family stories contain the same elements of both great hardship and great blessing.
Here are links to more family stories:
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