Non Lutherans Had to Leave

               Alma Hansen's mother, another Alma emigrated from Meerane, Saxony, Germany, in 1871 at the age of seven. Meerane was a hub of cloth production and associated industries like dye works and tanneries, which employed the family of Christina Brautigan, little Alma Hildegard’s mutter. When still in the Old Country, her father Zacharias Pohle described himself as a “printer”. It’s unclear whether he printed designs on fabric or words on paper.

The location of Meerane in Germany

              

              This was the period of German unification, when the hyper-aggressive kingdom of Prussia forcibly melded all the other Teutonic principalities and kingdoms into a big and powerful empire. The goal was to forge a unified people with one philosophy and one religion. That religion was Lutheran, which the Pohle family was not. Their situation became unpleasant.

               So Zacharias led his wife, daughter, and infant son Johannes onto the immigrant ship Herschel. Sometimes this vessel carried the wretched refuse of Germany’s shores to the ends of the earth (well, to Australia) but fortunately on this voyage it docked at Buffalo, New York on September 13, 1871.

               Once there, Zacharias classified himself as a “laborer." He and Christina produced two more children in Buffalo, a son Theodore and a daughter Lydia. At one point Christina bore a fifth child who died young.