Coming up with a subject for this week’s post was not an easy choice since I come from a family of immigrants. I am myself one, so being out of place is not an uncommon occurrence for us. However, on most cases, people ended going where they intended to go, so I thought telling the story of an unexpected detour would be interesting. I chose a branch I already wrote about, my Schneider folks (the original post is in Portuguese), that along with the Stein family would depart Germany for Brazil in 1846, believing they were headed for the Southern province of Rio Grande do Sul, a place that had been receiving a steady immigration influx from several Germanic States like Rhineland-Palatinate, Hesse, Thuringia, Lower Saxony, and Saarland since earlier in that century. The villages there were full of people who came from the same land, spoke the same language, there were even a few familiar names.
For years, they had seen their friends and relatives leave. Finally, their day to board the Philomela, departing from Dunkirk, France, had arrived. She was one vessel in a convoy carrying families escaping the harsh economy in their homeland, where people were suffering with land seizures, unemployment and crop failure. Agents recruiting laborers to depart for the Americas did not have a hard time finding takers. Most immigrants would opt for a new beginning in the United States, but others would choose Brazil, specially if they already had relatives or old acquaintances there, like my ancestors. But alas, unbeknownst to them, the Schneiders and Steins would participate in an experimental program elsewhere some 1300 miles away up the Brazilian coast.
When one thinks about coffee, Brazil likely comes to mind, and the story of how my ancestors found themselves in the exuberant countryside in a little known province in the eastern seaboard has to do with the Brazilian coffee boom. The first seedlings had been brought from Guiana into the country in 1793, and soon coffee took over vast expanses of farmland along valleys in the interior of Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo and Minas Gerais, transforming villages and towns that had been struggling and where there was still a significant number of enslaved people to work in the fields. At that time, the Atlantic slave trade had ceased, at least officially, but Abolition in Brazil would not happen until 1888.
Espírito Santo was not experiencing this downturn in the same manner because of its own underdevelopment, there were not many farms in the interior parts of the province and most of the land had not been yet explored. This was by design, to serve a purpose that had now expired. Due to its strategic position and topography, it created a natural barrier that inhibited gold and gemstone contraband from the sprawling Minas Gerais province to the West during the gold rush era. Espírito Santo’s interior is noted as forbidden lands in 17th and 18th century maps, and by royal decree it was stipulated that those portions of lands should remain unoccupied by settlers and no roads could be opened crossing the province to connect the mines to the seashore.
To enforce that with some visual aids, maps had illustrations depicting indigenous men with spears, feathered headpieces, and the botoques, more accurately named tametaras or tembetás that they wore on their lower lips, ears and nose. The natives received the generic denomination of Botocudos, even though they comprised very diverse groups of Gê origin, sharing and often warring for territory against Tupiniquim tribes. These indigenous groups bravely resisted occupation of their ancestral lands for over three centuries since the first Europeans arrived in 1500, having endured violence from the Portuguese colonizers, and the deadly diseases they brought. The native people had been pushed away from the coast to accommodate the urban settlers during the colonial era, but they were left somewhat alone in the interior mountains and valleys for the next couple of centuries, acting as an extra measure of discouragement for anyone trying to smuggle mineral riches through Espírito Santo. However, when mining in Minas Gerais dwindled and Brazil turned to other exports, the mountains would no longer offer them seclusion.
In the 1820s the gold and gemstone mines were all but exhausted, Brazil had just become independent from Portugal, and it started to look for new commercial partners. In the coming years, old fields that were once pasture, cassava or sugarcane crops now showed neat rows and terraces where the green bushes grew with its colorful coffee berries. Espírito Santo’s mountains, part of the Atlantic Forest biodome, offered the perfect weather and soil conditions, and the province’s president decided it was time to develop the countryside by bringing immigrants as part of an incentivized program. They would receive a plot of land and seeds. Their transportation expenses since the origin, as well as food and other necessities, were to be repaid to the Brazilian government within four years. He requested that some of the incoming German immigrants headed to Rio Grande do Sul would instead be redirected to the mouth of the Jucu River, where they would be transferred to the capital city of Vitória until their paperwork and provisions were ready. Hence, my ancestors were moved to two other boats, the Eolo and the Urania, smaller and better for sailing closer to the coast. I do not know how much my ancestors understood of what was happening. Their fellow countrymen would proceed on their journey to Rio Grande do Sul, they stayed behind. This process took a couple of months longer than expected, but finally, in March 1847, still during the hottest season of the year, the group of 167 people divided among 39 families was on their way up the slopes.
The men went first, opening the path through the creeks and the tangle of woods and vines of the still pristine forest. They were accompanied by local guides from the provincial military, dealing with the terrain, mosquitoes and the justified outrage from the increasingly displaced native people. Adapting to the diet was another issue. Europeans were not used to eating cassava flour, the starchy staple from a root vegetable that grows in South America. The women and children joined them once the trails were passable.
The Schneider immigrants in my family were Peter Joseph, my 4th great-grandfather, a twice-widowed laborer born in Neunkirchen, Saarland. He arrived in Brazil aged 65 and lived in his new home for another twenty years. He left one married daughter in Germany, traveling with the single children: Nikolaus (26), Joseph (22), Christine (28) and Barbara (33).
My other branch was the Stein family. Thomas Stein was born in Hundheim, Rhineland-Palatinate, and was married to Margaretha Anton from the same town. They immigrated with their children Nikolaus (15), Marie Anne (12), and Jakob (9). Marie Anne Stein and Nikolaus Schneider were neighbors in the new colony, and married in the Santa Isabel Parish on January 16, 1851. They had a brood of 13 children, among them my second great-grandfather Bernardo Schneider, born in 1859. One of Nikolaus and Marie Anne’s daughters married a man from Rio Grande do Sul, where the majority of the German immigrants had settled, likely the son of a family they knew from their old home.
The Catholics, among them both of my family branches, found support in the nearby village of Viana, where a number of Azorean families had settled a couple of decades before. The Lutheran reverend arrived later to tend to his flock. Looking at Santa Isabel church books, I took note of the numerous marriages among the families including a few interfaith unions, others venturing out and taking Brazilian spouses as the years went by. Census and records illustrate how my two families were faring five years after their arrival.
More than twenty years would pass until another wave of Germanic immigrants arrived in Espírito Santo, however not from the same region. The newcomers came from the Prussian Province of Pomerania, most of it situated in modern-day Poland facing the Baltic Sea. They settled in the Santa Leopoldina Parish area, some 50 miles North. Santa Isabel would, however, receive a large influx of Italian immigrants later in the century.
The elders in my family were not able to vote, as a matter of fact they passed away before a time when they would be allowed to, by law. I did not find naturalization records for any of them, except for one of Marie Anne Stein’s brothers, who was involved in local politics. My 97-year-old grandmother remembers her grandfather Bernardo Schneider, who spoke with a slight German accent despite being Brazilian-born. He moved away from Santa Isabel and was a successful entrepreneur in Vitória, the owner of a general goods store. He married my 2nd great-grandmother Maria Luiza Furtado de Oliveira in 1889. Her roots in Espírito Santo stretch back to the late 1600s. The house where they lived in my hometown of Vila Velha, across a narrow bay from Vitória, still stands, the street now named for Bernardo. The high school across from the old home is named for their son Godofredo, my paternal grandmother’s father who died a few months shy of my birth, in 1971. My grandmother still lives down the alley that starts at the high school gate. Apart for a few years spent out of town due to my grandfather’s employment, she has lived there her whole life.
That place is my family’s, my own. I am the immigrant now, though I cannot say I feel out of place where I am. Rather, I am forever divided, as I am sure the Schneiders, Steins and many others probably felt. I am glad they took the risk. I hope they thought their journey was worthwhile, and that they were where they were supposed to be.
