Schuetz Family Travel Agency Agreement

This is everything that remained of what is most possibly a travel agreement Gottlieb and Anna Schuetz made to arrange the moving of their family from the district of Burgdorf in Switzerland to Humboldt, Nebraska in the spring of 1870. They traveled by post ship that went from Hamburg to Australia and stopped in Southhampton, Canada, New York, and South America. Jacob, the fifth child in the family was born in July of 1870, the year they moved.

Gottlieb Schuetz and Anna Parli were the second maternal great-grandparents of Bill Dean and his family who shared the documents at the History Harvest. Maria (Mary) Schuetz, born in 1867 in Switzerland started the Dean family line marrying German-born Dirk Sutorius in 1889. Their daughter Emma, born in 1890 married a recent emigrant from Germany (1908) Edo F. Harms in 1914. All three generations lived in Humboldt in close proximity with various relatives (Emma Sutorius's uncle John Schuetz lived right next door to her family according to the 1930 census).

First settled in 1855, Humboldt, Nebraska is very close to the Nebraska borders with the three states: Missouri, Iowa, and Kansas. The town was a home to a vibrant immigrant community uniting people from Germany, Switzerland, Bohemia, and later Czechoslovakia, England, and various other places in the United States and beyond. The German-speaking community organized around the German Methodist mission that established a church in Humboldt in 1879.

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