This blog is for histories and stories that I found about my ancestors. My paternal grandparent’s surnames were KLAMM and BRENNER and were German origin. My maternal grandparent’s surnames were ANDERSON and KIMSEY. They came to northern Missouri from Virginia, so I’m calling them the southerners. Most people coming to these pages will be related to only some of the people I write about, but I hope you enjoy the stories nonetheless.
My German ancestors came from near Mannheim on the Rhine (the left blue line in the Germany image). My southern ancestors came to Virginia and moved west, finally to Missouri.
The Germans immigrated to America in the 1840s and most of them settled right away in Platte County near the Missouri River where most of them stayed for over a hundred years.
The southerners came from colonial Virginia. They soon started pushing westward through the Appalachian Mountains into what is now Kentucky. Always looking new land, they continued to move to new territory. My ancestors came to Missouri via Virginia, Kentucky, North Carolina, Georgia. Often we don’t know where people were born or where they lived, we only have little snippets of information about them. There was little record-keeping on the frontier. Some of the information is from descendants who wrote about their family history and travelers who kept journals of their travels which were later published. We can also get an idea of what our ancestor’s lives were like by reading about the lives of other people in similar circumstances.
“In the late 1700’s most of the population in the United States was found east of the Appalachian Mountains. Early pioneers and settlers travelled along the historic Wilderness Road west into the wilderness of Kentucky through Cumberland Gap. By the early 1820’s it is estimated that several hundred thousand people travelled this historic route westward. Today, an estimated 47 million people in the United States are descendants of these early travelers!”
https://www.nps.gov/cuga/learn/historyculture/early-american-frontier.htm
“After a brief period of Spanish rule, the United States acquired Missouri as part of the Louisiana Purchase in 1803. Americans from the Upland South, including enslaved African Americans, rushed into the new Missouri Territory. Missouri was admitted as a slave state as part of the Missouri Compromise of 1820. Many from Virginia, Kentucky and Tennessee settled in the Boonslick area of Mid-Missouri. Soon after, heavy German immigration formed the Missouri Rhineland. “
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missouri