Mahlstedt's family background information
My name is Maren and I'm from Germany. I'm searching for descendants of
Henry and George Mahlstedt who came to New York around the 1870's together with their cousin called Laue.
They were grocers (probably in Van Buren Ave., Brooklyn) George and Henry were my great-grandfather Lüder Mahlstedt's
brothers (He was born and lived in the small village of Hinnebeck in Northern Germany (in the late 19th century it was part
of Prussia(Preußen)) near Bremen and was married to Marion Smith who had come from Scotland). George married
Sabina Knierim (I think they married in NY) and had four daugters: Katherine, Henrietta, Louise, Mabel. Henry
and his wife, Marie Catherine Wilhelmine Mahlstedt (maiden name: Kamps), had three sons and one daughter: George (*1886),
Henry (or Hinni) (*1888), William Gustav (or Willi) (*1894) and Maria (or Mariechen) (*31.01.1897).
My grandma (Martha Mahlstedt) kept in
touch with the New Yorker Mahlstedts until the Second World War. My grandmother and my mother used to tell me, that the
Americans didn't want to keep in touch with their German relatives anymore because of their grief caused by the death of their
son - he died in the Second World War in a fight against the Germans. As my grandmother died in 1982 (I was 10 years old at
that time) and as she was the only one who still bore a lot of knowledge concerning the American Mahlstedts, all her knowledge
has gone with her death. There are left four of the American letters. In addition there are still a whole bunch of photographs
taken in Brooklyn, with people on them whose names no member of my family knows.
Very surprisingly, in 1991 Robert Martens, a son of Katherina Mahlstedt, came to Germany in order to search for
his ancestors. My parents got some information from him about the Mahlstedts family in America. My father and Robert wrote
each other some letters, but unfortunately Robert soon died (in 1994). As he was a kind of a loner he didn't have so much
contact to his American family. That's why he was only able to give us quite limited information about his relatives who were
still alive at that time. He didn't know anything about Henry Mahlstedt's family, for example. My mother says, that probably
George and Henry quarreled because of financial problems .... But that's only an assumption based on rudimentary rememberance
of things told by my grandmother.
After our contact with Martens in 1991 his cousin Joanne Weber (her maiden name was Joanne Breininger,
she was Henrietta Mahlstedt's daughter) sent us back an old bible which once belonged to Marion Smith, George
and Henry's mother who once had come from Edinburgh, Scotland, (together with their family) to northern Germany in 1836
at the age of 12 and who married Lüder Dietrich Mahlstedt. Their farm still belongs to my parents. So through a 180
years' time this little bible made its way from Scotland to Germany, then to America and finally back to the little German
village Hinnebeck.
If there is anyone reading this, having any information on the Mahlstedt's family, then please contact me:
Have a look at my old pictures ...