I drove out into the German countryside today to get a sense of where my grandma’s grandma came from.

The grandma in question is Louise Lehmann Kaufman, the mother of my paternal grandma’s father, Edward Carl Kaufman. My great-grandpa Ed Kaufman is the man on the right in the photo above. His mother Louise is the old woman seated below. And her granddaughter, Barbara Jean Kaufman (standing at left), is my grandma, who is nearly 96 years old now and still going strong.

Grandpa Ed was born on August 9, 1877 in Edgerton, Wisconsin. Both of his parents — Louise Lehmann Kaufman (1844-1941) and Heinrich (“Henry”) Kaufman (1833-1914) — immigrated from Germany. But whereas Grandpa Heinrich arrived as an adult in the 1860s, Grandma Louise came as a girl with her parents in the 1850s.

Grandma Louise’s parents (i.e., my great-grandpa Ed Kaufman’s maternal grandparents) were Maria “Catherine” Runge and Johann “Jacob” Traugott Lehmann, immigrants to Wisconsin from the province of Brandenburg within the Kingdom of Prussia. At the time Catherine and Jacob married in 1831, Prussia was the most powerful member of an alliance of 39 German kingdoms and duchies called the German Confederation, which predated the German Empire established in 1871. In the mid-19^th century, the province of Brandenburg straddled the Oder River, which now separates Germany from Poland.

My best guess is that Catherine Runge and Jacob Lehmann were born in farming towns a few miles north of Frankurt an der Oder (not to be confused with the much larger city of Frankfurt am Main in the west). I am not entirely certain of their towns of origin, but it appears they married in Groß Neuendorf on January 2, 1831.

In the years after Catherine and Jacob married, they leased a farm in a small village once called Zicher in the section of Brandenburg on the east side of the Oder called Neumark. The village later became known as Cychry, Poland after the Soviet army gained control of the area in 1945 and has since been annexed into the administrative region of Dębno. I took a drive over there to check out the area.

Catherine and Jacob Lehmann had seven children in Zicher before emigrating: August (1833), Johann (1836), Carl Frederick (1839), Augusta (1842), our ancestor Louise (1844), Wilhelmine (1846), and Caroline (1849).

In 1856 the Lehmanns journeyed to Hamburg and boarded the Rhein for New York. The voyage took more than six weeks, and we can imagine how stressful it must have been for the family of nine.^[1] My great-great grandma, Louise, was 11 at the time. The family made their way to Watertown, Wisconsin (Jefferson County), and no doubt quickly tapped into the thriving Germany community that had been established there since the late 1840s.

After visiting the lands on both sides of the Oder, it was clear to me that settling in Wisconsin must have felt somewhat like home to the Lehmanns. With its rolling farmlands, these regions in Germany and Poland have much the same feel as Southern Wisconsin.

*** Update and correction based on the information from Teddie Anderson Hill (see her comment below) ***

The exact village the Lehmanns lived in was Neu Zicher, not Zicher, which corresponds to Suchlica, Poland today. I drove through Suchica, and in fact the photo above of “Farmlands in the Neumark” (with squash and wheat) was taken in Suchlica.

Teddie is correct in saying that there is no church in Suchlica. (There’s not much of anything in this tiny village!) There’s a church that dates to the times of our ancestors just south of Suchlica in Sarbinowie (photo is above). And there’s also a Roman Catholic church in Cychry, which was Protestant before the 1950s. The building dates back to the 13th century and the tower dates to 1768. It’s likely that either this church or the one in Sarbinowie was the home church for the Lehmanns before they emigrated.

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^[1] Much of what we know about the Lehmanns is thanks to the genealogical research of Teddie Lynn Anderson Hill and her mother Darlene “Donna” (Lehmann) Eichorst, descendants of Grandma Louise’s brother John T. Lehmann.