The Frederick and Grohndorf Origins in East Brandenburg, Prussia

Arthur Frederick and Edyth Grohndorff were both native-born Americans, as were their parents, mostly. The one exception was Arthur's father, Johann August Friedrich, who was just under two years old when he and his family arrived in New York on December 8, 1858.

The Friedrichs and the Grohndorfs likely didn't know each other before Arthur and Edyth met in Wisconsin, but at the time the families emigrated they were living only about 20 miles apart, along the Warta River just east of where it meets the Oder which defines the border between today's Germany and Poland. In 1858 it was all within the large German kingdom that constituted the State of Prussia . Their villages were in the Neumark region of the province of Brandenburg.

The Friedrichs were living in the district of Konigsberg, in a town made famous by Frederick the Great 100 years earlier with the Battle of Zorndorf, fought during the Seven Years War on August 25, 1758. It wasn't an epic battle in the sense that history turned on it's outcome. But it did force the Russian troops into retreat and may have prevented the fall of Berlin. The war being fought was really the world's first global war, with the UK aligned with Prussia against France, and France aligned with nearly everyone else -- Austria, Russia, Spain, and Sweden, among others. Their respective colonies were naturally at stake, so the war extended onto the Indian subcontinent, into the Caribbean, North and South America and West Africa. In North America, it surfaced as the French and Indian Wars that resulted in the UK taking possession French Canada and Spanish Florida. Perhaps none of this really mattered to our ancestors, but the war did establish Prussia and the German Empire as a dominant power in Europe, a dominance that lasted until 1918.

The term "Prussian" has often been used, especially outside of Germany, to emphasize the aggressive conservatism of the Junker class of landed aristocrats in the East who dominated first Prussia and then the German Empire in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. If family tradition is correct, and the family does have aristocratic connections, then these "Junkers" would likely be our people. On their emigration papers, however, Johann and Martin Friedrich, Arthur's grandfather and great uncle who were presumably the sons of a baron, are listed as common laborers -- "arbeitsmann" and "landmann", or worker and tenant farmer, respectively. The passenger manifest for U.S. Customs on their arrival in New York shows them both as farmers. Typically, the younger sons to a baronial estate would join the military or take civil service positions rather than work the farms of their older brothers. In our case, according to Arthur's oldest sister, Clara Friedrich-Taylor, Johann was the older brother and should have inherited his father's estate but he was pushed out when his mother died and his father remarried. If this is true, we should be thankful that Johann's father preferred his second family to the first, and that Johann preferred emigration to military service or government work. By coming to America, the family avoided serving on the wrong side of two world wars (the Junker class was notorious for its support of Adolf Hitler), and the eventual seizure of the estate by the Soviets. After World War II, whoever had inherited the estate was likely accused of war crimes and sent to an internment camp before the manor house was plundered and their land holdings nationalized during the communist land reforms.

When our great x3 grandfather, Carl Ludwig Grohndorf emigrated, he was living with his 2nd wife and 15 year old son (our great x2 grandfather, Carl Friedrich Grohndorf) in the town of Cocceji-Neudorf, about 20 miles east of Zorndorf. Emigration records show him as a landowner (eigentuemer), but on departure from Hamburg, June 17, 1854, the passenger list has him down as a peasant farmer (landmann). Two months later, when he arrives in New York, U.S. Customs lists him as simply as a farmer. Cocceji, pronounced kok-'tse-yee, was even more rural than Zorndorf. It sits on a bend in the Warta River not far from the Ujście Warty National Park, a stretch of stubborn swampland that was never reclaimed, despite centuries of effort. Between 1767 and 1782, Frederick the Great had granted exemptions from taxes and military service to settlers in the region, and possibly land as well, in exchange for turning the swamp into farmland. Our Grohndorf ancestors may have been among this wave of immigrants hoping to improve their standing. But clearing the land, digging ditches and repairing levees was difficult work. The settlers' occasional applications for permission to emigrate apparently angered the King, and, according to the Park's website, he responded with (roughly translated), "I will give you New America and freedom in the Warta!" Some of the settlements were given ironic names, like "Nowy Jork" and "Pensylwania".

The Grohndorfs' hometown of Cocceji is today the tiny village of Krzyszczyna (k-sheesh-'chee-na). The Friedrichs hometown, Zorndorf, is today the only slightly larger village of Sarbinowo (sar-bee-nah-vah). Both are in northwestern Poland, about 60 miles east of Berlin.

1846 Map showing locations of the ancestral homes the Friedrichs (Zorndorf) and the Grohndorfs (Cocceji) in East Brandenburg, Prussia.