Bremerhaven

We went on a day trip to Bremerhaven with Silke, Christian and Ole.  Bremerhaven is a port town and back in the day it was the place from where Germans emigrated to foreign lands: Canada, US, Australia seemed to be the main destinations.  We went to visit the Deutsches Auswanderer Haus;  a museum dedicated to the history of emigration. It was very interesting and we spent all day there.  When you first enter you find yourself in a waiting room.  From there you go onto the pier.  They’ve created this lifesize scene of people waiting on a pier with the huge ship docked.  The people are wax figures dressed in costume of 1850s -1950s.  And we could stand with them at the pier and listen to their conversations or thoughts when pushing little buttons that would play recordings.  The sounds of the ship, the dockworkers, the water, the people were very cool and put you back into time.  There were areas that showed you what life was like on the ships and how it changed over the 100 years as technology made ships more efficient.  There was a room where you could read all sorts of stories about specific immigrants.  We had to skip through the part of the museum that was dedicated to people immigrating into Germany because we were running out of time.  And we had already been there so long that we couldn’t take any more in.  I stopped at the research lab where you could search through passenger lists.  Though I know that all of my dad’s Schemeit uncles emigrated to the US in the 1920s, I only found the name of one; August Schemeit. It was cool to see.  The woman in charge of the lab said that they only had data until 1938 and then only 70% as other data got wet or was burned or lost and can no longer be retrieved.

August Schemeit aus Dayton USA (deutsch) ist am 06 Februar 1930 mit dem Schiff “Stuttgart” von Bremen nach New York gefahren.  I believe 1930 is the year some of the Schemeit brothers came back to visit their family.  That was probably not possible for most immigrants.  I wonder how the uncles were able to do it. 

We went to the Fischereihafen and found a nice fish restaurant to have dinner at.  It was a very nice day.