More than 5.5 million German speaking people emigrated from Europe to America in the 1800s. At the time there was no single country called Germany. The empire was controlled by different, often waring royal families.  In fact these immigrants would not have considered themselves German but rather Bavarians, Hessians etc.  They came to America in waves, driven by political upheaval, ongoing wars and challenging conditions. In the mid 1850s the majority of emigrants to America came from the western Rheinland Region (Pfalz in German). This area bordering France had been subject to war over many years and was home to some of the poorest people in Europe. The lure of inexpensive land and a fresh start for their families prompted many to hazard the journey to America. The journey took 4-6weeks by sail and for those who could afford it roughly half that time by steamship. Upon arrival to New York or Quebec immigrants traveled by rail or boat to the mid-West of America in places like Wisconsin, Minnesota and Kansas.  Some settled as far south as Texas.

Life in the Rheinpfalz had been hard for generations before emigration became a mass movement. The region had been fought over repeatedly — French troops occupied and devastated it during the wars of Louis XIV in the late 1600s, and again during the Napoleonic Wars a century later, each time leaving farms, vineyards, and towns to rebuild from nothing. A local inheritance custom called Realteilung made things worse: rather than passing a farm whole to one heir, land was divided equally among all children, generation after generation, until many families were left farming plots too small to support them. Add repeated crop failures — including the "year without a summer" in 1816, when a distant volcanic eruption darkened skies and ruined harvests across Europe — and the potato blight of the 1840s, and it's little wonder families began looking across the Atlantic for a way out.

Adding to the region's instability, its borders rarely stayed still. The Rheinpfalz sat directly on the fault line between France and the German states, changing hands repeatedly as wars redrew the map. After the Congress of Vienna in 1815 settled Europe's borders following Napoleon's defeat, the region was handed to the Kingdom of Bavaria — despite the fact that it sat nowhere near Bavaria itself, separated by the states of Baden and Hesse in between. (Shifting borders often stymie those searching for ‘Bavarian’ ancestors only to learn they originated from the Phalz region).  This left the Bavarian Rhenish Palatinate as a genuine exclave, administered from Munich yet geographically isolated from it, a curious political arrangement that lasted until 1918. For a population already unsettled by generations of war and hardship, being governed from a capital hundreds of miles away, across other kingdoms entirely, only reinforced how little control ordinary people had over their own circumstances.

Sources: Library of Congress Research Guides, "Chronology — The Germans in America" and "Palatinate — German Origins in the United States"; RootsWeb, "German Genealogy History"; Peter Winkel, "Emigration from Hesse-Darmstadt in the Mid-Nineteenth Century," Yearbook of German-American Studies.