My great-grandmother was the granddaughter of Johann Carl Ferdinand Osswald from Baden-Wuerttemberg, Germany. When Osswald immigrated to the United States, he either changed his name to Charles Greenwood or went by it. After first settling in Chicago, he later moved to Arkansas (Pine Bluff area) and met his wife. They settled there and started a family. Their daughter was born in November of 1878 and then she married in 1896, and my great-grandmother Bertha Lilian Gilreath was born that year. Lilian then married Victor Herbert Fitzpatrick around 1917. They decided to start a jewelry business. Although my family is not directly involved in the jewelry business, it is still in our extended family. My maternal grandparents were jewelers, and both my mother and older sister worked in their jewelry store in Memphis, Tennessee, for a time. My great-grandmother passed away in 1975 before I was born, but her ring that she got at the beginning of her jewelry business has been passed down generation after generation. I wear it every day and think of the struggles and hard work my family put in to building a jewelry business from scratch in Arkansas (and later moved to Tennessee). 

– Melanie Winstead Morton

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