Once We Were Strangers

“Local history of the best kind: an engaging story of a well-documented immigrant family, always told keeping one eye on the big picture and asking big questions in small places.”—Walter D. Kamphoefner, author of Germans in America: A Concise History

“Once We Were Strangers is an enthralling family history that recreates the hardships and uncertainties that surrounded nineteenth-century German immigration to Kansas. In a narrative that perceptively weaves together dozens of family letters and documents, along with impressive historical research, Roberta Reb Allen breathes life into the names associated with them. Her family’s stories are poignant, inspiring, and unforgettable!”—Ginette Aley, coeditor of Union Heartland: The Midwestern Home Front during the Civil War

“No ethnic group was larger or more influential in the American Midwest during the nineteenth century than the immigrant Germans, but they have been lost to history. We are blessed to have a major new treatment of the German experience in the Midwest by historian Roberta Reb Allen. She is in the vanguard of the new midwestern history, taking the field in critical and much-needed directions by telling the stories of German families who became Kansas pioneers. Allen’s work deserves the highest praise.”—Jon Lauck, author of The Good Country and editor in chief of Middle West Review

“Roberta Reb Allen reconstructs the experiences of the Lodholz family and their migration to the United States in exceptional detail, constructing a vivid portrait of their lives and communities in the nineteenth century. Being able to follow one family across so many years in such detail is a rarity, and helps illuminate the human stories behind migration statistics.”—Kristen Anderson, author of Abolitionizing Missouri: German Immigrants and Racial Ideology in Nineteenth-Century America