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.