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 NY 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 Germany 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 (I don't know his wife's name.) had at least two sons: probably named Henry and George and two other children. 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. I wasn't able to find any of the American letters. But 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 ...

Henry's oldest son