Erasmus Straub was the brother of Walt’s 4th great grandfather. He was born in June of 1870 in Bieringen, Baden-Württemburg, Germany to Josephus Carl and Anna Maria Truffner Straub. We don’t know a lot of his story in Germany, but we do know he married Maria Sauter on the 25th of November, 1807 in Bieringen. They had 9 children, two of whom died in infancy. Maria died in 1824. Erasmus and his children immigrated to the United States in the 1840’s.
Georgina was not the only family member to work on family history. She had a lot of information from her second cousin, Leonard Brune. Georgina was also contacted by a 4th cousin, Leon Straub. He was able to fill in a fair amount of information on Georgina’s great-grandmother’s family. We kept in touch with Leon until his death 2019, exchanging additional information on the family. He provided us with the information about Erasmus family’s immigration to the United States.
Immigration to the United States
Erasmus and several of his children left Germany and came to America in 1943. We know a bit about this journey from the ship’s manifest. They traveled on the Ship Albany, captained by one James Watson. The ship left Harve, France and arrived in New York on the 4th of August, 1943.
Ship’s passenger lists are a great resource for gathering more information about families. It will often give you information about a person’s place of origin and their occupation. You can also look at the names of the people close to them on the list and may find parents, siblings and children.
Erasmus is listed as a farmer and his sons Georg, Ulrich, and Kasper are listed below him. The last column on the page is a place to note if a passenger died on the voyage. Georg is listed as having died on the 7th of July.
If we look at the next page of the manifest, we see some more of Erasmus family. His son Melchoir and daughter Catharina are listed at the top of the page.
What is interesting about this page is if you look at the next few names on the list. The next name is Ludwig Knaisch, followed by a Josepha and three small children. Josepha Knaisch is Erasmus’ eldest daughter.
The family settled in Ohio, where Markus Straub was already living. He had come over in 1832 (I haven’t yet located his ship information). At some point between 1839 and 1844, Erasmus eldest son Dominikus Straub also immigrated to America and also settled in Ohio.
Erasmus died on the 15th of August, 1848.
Digging Deeper – ships records
There are a lot of ships records available online these days. Like all other records, spellings can vary. I talk more about that in this post, and you can find more by searching for the tag genealogy research on our blog.
There is an excellent resource for ship’s passenger lists for the port of New York on Family Search’s website here. They have several of the U.S. National Archives microfilm rolls available to peruse. That is where I got the images for this post.
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