AEMI

104 AEMI JOURNAL 2015
Fig 7 Peter Paysen Petersen (1825-1889), a sailor
from Tondern, left his ship in 1853 and went into the
California goldfields.
Source: North-Frisian Emigrant Archive, Nordfriisk
Instituut
fee party. But money for a new plough
or something like that, she always liked
to lend. The Second World War brought
trouble to her because the heritage was
held back. But in the 1950s she was able
again to lend the village the money to
finance a transformer station, and so it
is told that Aunt Guste brought electric
light to Wester-Ohrstedt.
Simon Detlef Bahnsen returned
to Schleswig-Holstein in 1840, some
ten years before the first of the three
great emigration waves started overseas.
Before the 1890s millions of
German emigrants, hundred thousands
from Schleswig-Holstein and ten
thousands from what today is the district
North-Frisia left for a destination
mostly in North-America. (Pauseback,
Übersee-Auswanderer, 47-66) There are
statistics available for Schleswig-Holstein
only from the year 1871 onwards
(Statistisches Landesamt, 39-40). But
only during the ten years between 1880
and 1893 which mark the last and heaviest
tide of emigration at least 90,000
men women and children migrated
overseas, i.e. nearly 10 per cent of the
population of Schleswig-Holstein at that
time. The west coast with North-Frisia
was among the hotspots. So around
1900 there existed a tightly-knit network
that connected people from practically
every part of our country and
especially our region with some relatives
or friends mostly in the United States
but also in Argentina, Brasilia, Australia
and South-Africa. This brought back a
steady and thick stream of letters, parcels,
money, newspapers and visitors.
After a hundred years and two world
wars only remnants still exists today, e.g.
on the islands Föhr and Amrum, where
emigration reamained a tradition until
the 1950s.
Nearly all emigrants wrote home and
received letters in return, and surely
most of them would have loved to visit
home, if only it had been possible, as
Peter Paysen Petersen, a Frisian from
Tondern wrote home in 1859:
I would gladly give up everything I possess
here – except jacket and trousers –
if in return I could spend my time for
at least a month between Hamburg and
Tondern. 8
He held the position of second mate
when in 1853 he left his ship and went
to the goldfields in northern California.
The captain’s offer to make him
first mate could not change his mind.
But what he found only secured his liv-