My grandmother, Sarah Schwartz Ebinger, grew up in Graybill/Leo, Indiana. She wrote a book for her grandchildren of her stories of her childhood on the farm. Her mother also told her stories of her grandparents, Mathias Strahm I and wife, Anna Marie Rothlisberger sailing on a ship to the US from Switzerland in 1853 with 21 other Apostolic Christian families. They left Switzerland for religious freedom and settled in Indiana starting a church. Their son, Ulrich was my gg grandfather This book led me to my path of genealogical research on both sides of my family, as well as my husband's family. We traveled to Indiana a few years back and visited an Apostolic Christian church which was the congregation my grandmother would have attended. There I met two older Schwartz relatives. It has given me a sense of the struggles that they endured for religious freedom and how important it was to them that they would leave their homeland and some of their family members, never to see them again, in order to obtain this freedom. Since that book, my own mother and her sister both wrote a book of their own stories growning up and passed them down. It highlights the need for women to tell their own stories to their children and relatives, in order to fully understand the context and time in which they passed through and to learn their "her-stories."

– Maureen Culbert

Relationship:  Great-grandchild of im/migrant or more Great-grandchild of im/migrant or more