My great-grandmother, Friederika Christina Utz, came to the US with her family in 1881, shortly after she gave birth to a child out of wedlock, a daughter Emelia. I don’t know if that was the reason the family chose to emigrate, but they settled in New York where they had many other family members who had made the same trek from Abstatt to the US. Her family eventually settled on a farm in Hempstead, New York, out on Long Island. Their city cousins from Brooklyn and Queens would visit on Sundays, a circumstance that greatly irked Friederika’s younger sister, Pauline, who resented living on a smelly farm and envied the fine clothes of her cousins.
