Emma Rose Trachsler, From Switzerland to America
This story begins in the village of Veltheim, Switzerland, the home of various members of the Trachsler family. In 1894, Rudolf Trachsler, his wife Bertha Hunzicker, and their baby daughter Frieda moved to Zurich. Rudolf's widowed mother Barbara Schwengeler Trachsler and her daughter Emma moved with them. Shortly after their move Rudolf and Bertha had their first son Rudolf (Rudy).
Life was good in Zurich until they invested in an apartment house. They had planned for Rudolf to work at his trade (coppersmith), and his wife Bertha was to take care of the apartments. Grandma Barbara would help with the children, cook, and do some ironing to supplement their income.
All went well for a few years when they were told they did not have proper legal title to the apartment house, and they lost their investment. This is what prompted them to leave their families, and beautiful Switzerland, to come to America.
American immigration laws were complicated, strict, and time consuming. A sponsor and the guarantee of a job were just two of the first requirements. There were passports, health examinations, and smallpox vaccinations for all. An agency, H. Meiss, planned their trip from Zurich to Peoria. This agency was similar to a present day travel agent.
After several weeks of finalizing their affairs, legal and banking business, selling what was to be sold, getting the children's school records, and deciding what was to be packed in their trunks, they were ready. Grandma Barbara was to stay in Switzerland and make her home with one of her married daughters, Bertha Trachsler Helm. Emma was to go to America with her brother and his
family. On March 5, 1903 they were on their way to a great adventure and a new way of life.
They took a train to the northern part of Germany. They rode all the next day, and the following night they checked into a hotel in Brenner. The next morning another train took them to Brennerhaven, their port of embarkation. Brennerhaven is a seaport located near the North Sea. On this day the wind was very cold, blowing off of the North Sea. It was now March 7th. Docked
and getting ready was a German ship, a steamer named Grosser Kufhurst (translated The Great Elector).
Rudolf was now 37 years old. He was tall with dark hair and eyes, wearing a Van Dyke beard and a stern and worried expression. Bertha was 36 years old. Her hair was prematurely gray, and was arranged in a circle of braids. The children, Frieda 9, Rudy 6, and Emma 15, were tired, wide-eyed, and scared.
Each had a bag or bundle in his hands. One was a large basket to hold food that was to supplement the ship's food, which proved to be meager and unsavory. Their two trunks had already been taken aboard.
Soon the ship's horn sounded, the gangplank was in place, and slowly the passengers were boarding the ship, many on their way to Immigration Deck III.
Immigration Deck III had to be an unbelievable surprise and shock to all that were ticketed for that Deck. It was a vast open space. All their trunks had been brought there, and everyone was supposed to find their own luggage, and then find a space for the family using their trunks and other luggage as barriers and dividers.
Rudolf's wife Bertha was in despair so he went to the Captain and asked to buy a stateroom. The captain told him the ship was all booked up, but he would try to find something better for them. One of the officers gave up his quarters and moved in with the crew. Now although cramped for space they at least had privacy.
Rudolf and the three children spent a lot of time walking the decks, looking at the ocean, and doing a little exploring. Bertha was sick the whole trip. It might have been from the affect of her vaccinations. They were all troubled with their vaccinations, but Bertha's reactions were the worst.
Vaccinations were different then than they are today. Instead of one inoculation, eight were given, on the premise that at least one should take effect. Of course it proved if one did, they all did! Everyone in the family eventually had eight scars the size of a nickel lined up on their arms.
One day everyone was at the railings as the ship approached the New York Harbor, passing the Statue of Liberty, and then docking at Ellis Island where all of the passengers were to go through customs.
Following are the memories of Rudy concerning their time spent at Ellis Island:
The place was huge, noisy, hot, and smelled of humanity. There were hundreds of people milling around. It was very hot, no air-conditioning of course. They were moved around with the crowd, and were soon channeled into various lines. Bertha and the girls were in one line, and Rudolf and Rudy in another as they waited to have medical examinations. Eventually they were reunited, and Bertha told of their bad experience. During their examination the doctor discovered that both she and Frieda had teardrop shaped eye pupils instead of round ones. There was a consultation as to whether they could pass the admission test. Finally they approved their entrance.
With the directions given to them by their Swiss travel agent and help from the Travelers Aid counters that were available at all train stations, they were on their way to Peoria.
Bertha's three sisters, Louise, Marie and Lydia, were there to greet them, but there was bad news. The plant or foundry where Rudolf was to be given his first employment had burned down, and he didn't have a job. He later found work in a lighting plant.
They soon found a house and made a home for the family. The children went to school, and Emma found work as a live-in maid, or what Americans called a "hired girl."
Bertha's sister Louise had friends who wanted her to meet their brother, John Fankhauser, who had a wheat farm in Oklahoma. It is unknown how they met or whether it was to be a marriage of convenience. He needed a wife, and she was interested in security and a home of her own. Anyway, they got married, and Louise moved to Oklahoma which later proved to be an important link in the family's decision to move west.
Louise was happy in her new home on the farm. Perhaps she was kind of lonesome for her sister Bertha, and she also had concerns for them. She wrote to Bertha and Rudolf urging them to consider a move to the West where she thought there were many more opportunities than in the East. Five years in Peoria had been hard, and sometimes sad too, so in 1908 the family moved to Burlington, Oklahoma.
Emma and Frieda stayed in Peoria waiting for them to establish a home. They worked asmaids or baby sitters and came to Burlington not long after the family moved there. Then they both worked as hired girls, mostly for farmer's wives who had large families with lots of cooking, washing, and children watching to do.
Soon Emma met and married Henry Bergman, a young man from Alsace-Lorraine France. When he came to America he went west and participated in the Cherokee Strip Homestead Act. His homesteaded farm was about fifty miles south of Burlington. There he and Emma made their home. Six daughters were born there and after 100 years the farm is still in the family. (It is now owned by Wally Sproul, one of Henry's grandsons.)
Veltheim, Switzerland
(Paula and Wally’s Account of Their Visit to Veltheim, Switzerland)
Have you ever had a series of events almost beyond coincidence lead you toward your goal? That is what happened to Wally and me in our search for Grandma Bergman’s childhood home in Switzerland.
After securing a room for two nights in Zurich’s preserved city center, Wally and I returned to the train station to buy roundtrip tickets to Veltheim, Grandma Bergman’s childhood home. Veltheim did not show up on the computer, and the lady at the ticket booth told us there was no such town in Switzerland. What a coincidence that the man working at the adjacent computer said that he had once lived there! Veltheim did not show on the computer because it was no longer serviced by train. He advised us to take a train to Winterthur and then catch a bus to Veltheim.
A forty-five minute train ride took us to Winterthur, located northwest of Zurich. Wally’s sister Kay had given us the information that Grandma’s father had worked at either an electrical or gas plant in Winterthur. (This information turned out to be valuable because we learned that actually there are two Veltheims in Switzerland—one near Bern and one near Winterthur.) The old center of Veltheim is within possible walking distance (or perhaps horse and wagon or train?) to the old part of Winterthur so living in Veltheim and working in Winterthur was possible in the 1800s.
After arriving at the train station in Winterthur, we discovered that a bus going to Rosenburg passed through Veltheim. We caught the bus and got off at Veltheim. During our ride, we never really got out of town because Winterthur had grown all around Veltheim, making Veltheim a suburb of Winterthur. We wondered how we
would ever be able to distinguish any part of Veltheim that existed during Grandma’s lifetime; however, another lucky coincidence came our way.
After getting off the bus, we walked into a small deli to grab a sandwich. An older lady, who reminded me so very much of Freda, overheard our speaking English. After learning why we were in Veltheim, she insisted on buying our lunch and taking us to the old part of Veltheim where buildings are in use today that existed during
Grandma’s time. A couple of them had horse watering troughs with dates in the early 1800s carved on them.
The woman also took us to her apartment and showed us a book with pictures taken of Veltheim around the time Grandma lived in the village. During Grandma’s time, Veltheim was not any larger than Homestead—one church, a few buildings lining a few dirt streets, and a few simple homes. Even today, one of the main
streets in Veltheim is Feldstrasse (Field Street). This street ran along the edge of the village and bordered the farmers’ fields. The village is on flat land, but the Alps are visible on a clear day. There was only one church (built in the 1400s) in the pictures, and that church is still in use today. A Protestant church, this is
the only one Grandma could have possibly attended.
Although a suburb of Winterthur, the old center of Veltheim today has a small-Swiss-village ambience. It is very quiet, peaceful, neat, and unbelievably clean. Few cars pass on the streets because most people ride bicycles, walk, or take the bus. The majority of people live in apartments, most of which have a small yard or
flower decked porch. With a clothes line and family members’ bicycles parked in a row; flower studded yards are small and immaculately groomed.
According to family history, Grandma worked in Zurich for a while. The old part is preserved—no new structures allowed—and looks very much as it did in the 1800s. We found dates in the 1700s on some of the churches. The city center is now a pedestrian zone; street cars are the only modern transport allowed. If Grandma walked the streets of Zurich today, she would certainly recognize the city.
Thanks to the good fortune of meeting the young man at the train station and the lady in Veltheim; Wally stood in the shadow of Grandma’s childhood church, strolled past stone troughs that possibly watered her family’s horse, and gazed at the same Alpine horizon seen by Grandma so many years ago.
Paula's Notes About Zurich, Switzerland, May 2007
Unlike in the United States where buildings are periodically torn down to make way for the new, the buildings in Europe are preserved on the outside even though the insides have been gutted and modernized. (For instance, our hotel in Salzburg was 600 years old.) Many of the old city centers in Europe look as they did hundreds of years ago. Zurich is no exception. Most of the structures along the river
were standing during Grandma’s day just as they are now.
Paula
Jan's maternal grandmother, Emma Rose (Trachsler) Bergman was born and lived much of her youth in Veltheim, Switzerland before moving with her family to Zurich Switzerland. In 1903, she and several members of her family immigrated to the United States of America. Recently Jan's cousins, Paula and Wally Sproul traveled to Switzerland and visited our grandmother's birthplace and surroundings.
The Emma Rose Trachsler, From Switzerland to America link below is her story about her immigration to America. The following two links tell of Paula and Wally's experiences from their trip in May 2007.
The photos from their trip can be found by clicking on the appropriate link below.
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