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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]My great-grandfather stowed away on a boat in 1889 to avoid mandatory conscription in Germany. He and his friend (cousin?) were discovered and made to work aboard, then told that they would need to jump ship in NY Harbor in order to avoid US immigration. So he arrived here as a draft-dodging illegal immigrant stowaway. He made his way to the Lower East Side and found a German speaking policeman who helped him. Soon after he took a train to Nebraska with the promise of land to farm and he married there (another German immigrant who had come as a child) and they had 14 children, my grandfather was their eldest son. 
I never knew my great-grandfather but my dad and grandfather had many stories about him. The family moved to SW Kansas to a community full of German families and settled there. Most people didn’t speak any English. When WW1 started everyone suddenly stopped speaking German and started learning English, mostly from their children who attended school. My dad was born in 1924 and lived through the Great Depression and the Dustbowl on a small Kansas farm. By the time he can remember his family only spoke English except for his grandparents who slipped back to their mother tongue as they aged. 
The family had zero contact with their German relatives from about 1917 to 1984 when my dad took our family to the town he knew they had come from and we found them using church records. It was pretty amazing to see my dad meeting German cousins who looked so much like him. Apparently their grandfather, my dad’s grandfather’s brother, had to serve 2 extra years in the army because of his brother’s draft dodging. 
Our Catholic German family actually aided a Jewish family during WW2 and none of the men were forced to serve in the army which makes our connection with them feel easier, especially for me as my husband is the son of a Holocaust survivor. [/quote]

What a great story! Thanks for sharing.[/quote]

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