This history is organized into four groups based on the married couples born around the turn of the 20th century: Charles Henry Wamhoff (1888-1972) and Edith Nicolai (1896-1964); Leonard Paul Brenner (1912-2007) and Ethel Berens (1916-1992); Arnold Rae Loomis (1897-1980) and Genevieve Bunline (1904-1982); Ernest Brockman (1892-1970) and Lillie Bertha Harp (1894-1984). You can follow the links below to images and biographies:
Click here to learn about the Wamhoff and Nicolai families
Click here to learn about the Brenner and Berens families
Click here to learn about the Loomis and Bunline families
Click Here to learn about the Brockman and Harp families
Click here to view my Ancestry.com family tree. Use the tree search function at the top of the Ancestry page to go directly to your ancestor. If you don’t have an account this link will take you to instructions for establishing a free Ancestry account. There is a five generation pedigree chart on each of the family pages, but the Ancestry.com tree includes many more Wamhoff ancestors. In some cases the genealogy goes back more than ten generations to the 1500s.
We know most of the Wamhoff immigrants to America by name and date of arrival, and over 90% of them are German. There are a few English and French ancestors on the Berens side of the family. The Loomis side are about 65% English, 25% German, and 10% Irish. In the decade from 1845 to 1855, more than a million Germans fled to the United States to escape economic hardship. They also sought to escape the political unrest caused by riots, rebellion and eventually a revolution in 1848. Other German ancestors are Pennsylvania “Dutch” who arrived from Germany in the mid-1700s before the Revolutionary War and settled in Eastern Pennsylvania. The Loomis English ancestors are some of the 17th century Puritan founders of New England whose descendants joined the migration to the Midwest after the Revolutionary War in pursuit of the plentiful land that was opened for settlement. In the 19th century, most Americans made their living by farming. By the end of the 1700s the original 13 colonies were out of arable land and the next generations were forced to brave the frontier life in search of enough agricultural land to support their families. By the end of the 1800s, the Wamhoff and Loomis families completed this migration from Europe and from the Eastern United States to settle in central Michigan.
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