Peeling the Fruit; Preserving the Core:
Becoming German-American
The Lives and Legacy of Peter Holz and Katharina Greif of Prussia, Chicago, and Dubuque

I grew up in Dubuque, Iowa, the first white settlement west of the Mississippi River. More than half the population can trace their origins to German-speaking countries. The family names, holidays, saints’ feast days, traditions, stories, and foods are German. It was only after I left my hometown that I realized the unique advantage of my German identity and upbringing. It caused me to count all the ways it meant to be German and to be the first born of the fifth generation of German-Americans.            

click to enlarge Dubuque, Iowa in 1858

click to enlarge This is the cover of Traugott Bromme's "Hand und Reisebuch for Auswanderer nach Nord-, Mittel-, und Sud- Amerika" (Handbook and Travleogue for Emigrants to North, Middle, and South America". published in 1866. Bromme, who traveled with his brother in the 1820s in North America, later published travel guides in Germany. He was one of the most prolific German travel writers and issued a number of persuasive guides between 1835 and 1866 aimed at Germans interested in immigrating to Midwestern America.

 I am proud of my German heritage. That pride and years of small discoveries led me to Niederlosheim, Germany in the Spring of 2007…to the place where my emigrant ancestor, Peter Holz, was born, grew up, and apprenticed as a blacksmith. I was struck by how very much like Iowa, how familiar was this unfamiliar place.

Although Peter Holz and Katharina Greif were born and raised less than forty miles apart in a corner of Prussia near the Luxembourg border, they didn’t meet and marry until after they emigrated to Chicago in the 1840s, when the city was only ten years old. There, they welcomed their first two children before moving further west in 1852 to Dubuque, where they and their additional six children grew and prospered.

In Dubuque, Peter opened a grocery and purchased urban and rural property. His sons later owned and worked in small businesses. The three oldest children eventually migrated West. But Dubuque had a strong hold on Peter and Katharina’s five younger children, including my great-grandfather, for they and their descendants remained in place for the next 150 years.

Some of the Holz and Greif descendants can still be found in Germany and at each stop in Peter and Katharina’s journey west from Prussia. Their stories shed light on the lives and culture of Germany and of German emigrants in young Chicago, Dubuque, and further West. Maps, photographs, personal documents, and references of other German settlers will illustrate their journeys…the routes taken, the means of travel, the landscapes seen, the culture carried, the culture lost or preserved along the way.

Contact: Barbara Holz Sullivan, barbara-jerry@msn.com