My chosen object is a photograph of my great-grandfather, Otto Durchholz, on board the ship he sailed over to the United States on from Europe. He is positioned almost in the exact center and is marked by the black x. As is seen at the bottom of the photograph in white lettering, the ship arrived in the U.S. in 1926, my great-grandfather was 18 at the time. He hailed from an area of Germany called Wiesthal. He had three brothers and a sister. He moved to the St. Louis area and worked for a number of businesses while simultaneously attending night school where he learned bookkeeping. He married his wife, Rosalia (from Lohr, Germany), in 1930. He moved out to Washington, Missouri in 1934. He had a son, Eric, in 1935, and then a daughter, Marian (my grandmother), in 1942. He was able to gain U.S. citizenship in 1937 at age 29. My best memories of him are going to the nursing home he was living in in the late 1990s and him giving me Lorna Doone cookies. I believe I came around to bringing him some of those cookies too, so it was a reciprocal arrangement we had going. When my family went to his funeral wake in the summer of 2001, I laid an unopened batch of Lorna Doones in his coffin. He lived to be 93 years old. This photograph is special because it captures him right before every experience he will ever have in the United States.
 

– Joshua Zoeller

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