great-grandfather,
“Grandpa”
William A. Wildman, dod 4/28/46. Aged 78 yrs
born
ca, 1868
buried
in St. John’s Cemetery, Queens, NY on 5/1/46
grave
#15, Section 24, range D
Grandpa Wildman was born somewhere in Wurtenburg,
Germany, shortly after the
Prussians ‘unified’ Germany, but I don't know just where (why is another story).
Wurtenburg is in Southwest Germany, near the French provinces of Alsace
and Lorraine. The only story I
remember Grandpa telling about his boyhood in Wurtenburg was about delivering
milk on Christmas, and getting schnapps at every stop and coming home tipsy.
Maybe Grandpa’s family might have been dairy folk, maybe it was just a job. We’ll never know for sure. Grandpa had an older brother who was
drafted into the new German/Prussian Army and crippled in maneuvers. Great-Grandmother Wildman vowed that
she would never give another son to the Kaiser, so Grandpa was sent to the
United States to live with an Uncle (his Mother’s brother) shortly
after his thirteenth
birthday. That would make
it some where about 1881, or 1882.
We Americans think of
the act of emigrating from
Europe to the good old’ US of A as going to the promised land. But you need to think a moment from the perspective of
the emigrant and the emigrant’s family;
a thirteen year old boy, leaving home, alone, to travel thousands of
miles to a new and strange place;
a Mother that will never see her son again. In Ireland they held what was called an Emigrant’s Wake the
night before the leaving. Grandpa
said that he walked to Marsailles,
France, to get a ship to New York, with gold coins sewed into his clothing by
his Mother.
Grandpa arrived in New York City before Ellis Island was
used as the arrival point. The
Ellis Island we know wasn’t opened until January 1, 1892. Grandpa came through the Emigrant
Landing Depot at what had been Castle Clinton, an old fort guarding the
entrance to the Lower Manhattan harbor.
The City of New York bought the old fort in 1824 and renamed it Castle
Garden. It served as the city’s
largest theater and celebration location.
The Marquis de LaFayette was honored here, when he toured the United
States in 1824. In 1833, President
Jackson landed here. The old fort
was connected to the land by a long wooden cauaseway. Jackson’s party crossed the wooden bridge, and just after
Jackson reached solid land the bridge collapsed and dumped people into the
water, which was only a couple of feet deep. Jenny Lind sang there, on September 11, 1850, when she began her celebrated tour of the United
States. It is located at the foot
of Manhattan, and is sometimes called the Aquarium. It is now the Castle Clinton National Monument, at Battery
Park. Grandpa apprenticed as a baker with
his Uncle.
The 1880s and the 1890s were tough times for the ’little
guy’ in America. For sure, Grandpa was a little
guy; an immigrant, a journeyman baker
with little or no education, speaking English with a heavy, heavy accent. Somewhere between going to live with his Uncle and the mid
1890s Grandpa lost his job in the Uncle’s bakery. There had been an economic downturn, and the Uncle gave
Grandpa’s job to one of his sons.
Grandpa vowed that he would have nothing to do with the Germans ever
again! I guess that that was two
votes against the Germans, so the fact that the family becomes “Irish,” and not
“German,” is an act of will, not an accident, and is yet another story.
