German Emigrants to Iowa and the Midwest
From Taben-Rodt to America, 1850–1899 — researched and originally written in German by Bernd Heinz; I translated it into English.
About the book
In the mid-1800s, poverty, failed harvests, and fear of war drove more than a hundred residents — nearly a fifth of the population — out of the small German town of Taben-Rodt, on the Saar River near the French and Luxembourg borders. This book traces where they went, family by family: the emigrants who rebuilt their lives in Iowa and across the American Midwest between 1850 and 1899.
Author Bernd Heinz spent decades piecing their stories back together from passenger lists, U.S. census records, wills, gravestones, historical maps, and correspondence with descendants across the United States and Canada — reconstructing ocean crossings, land purchases, family trees, and the everyday lives these emigrants built an ocean away from home. The book was covered in Germany’s Trierischer Volksfreund and Saarbrücker Zeitung, and this third edition — translated into English in 2024 — makes it available to English-speaking descendants for the first time.
I translated it because of my wife, Meghan Jane Leineweber, a great-great-granddaughter of emigrants Michael Leinenweber and Catharina Gansemer, two of the very people this book documents. Researching that connection with the author is what led me to translate the whole book.
Families covered
Klein, Herber, Naumann, Neuses/Neises, Faha, Gansemer, Dühr, Felten, Loch, Kettenhofen, Weiter, Massem, Rörsch, and related families.
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