One of the biggest steps our immigrant ancestors could take in their newly adopted county — America — would be to disavow allegiance to their former country’s government and to indicate they wished to become U.S. citizens.
Documentation of this step in the story of our German immigrant, Friedrich Hermann “Hermann” Schütze, was elusive. None of the popular genealogy sites had digital images, or even indices, indicating that Hermann had obtained citizenship.
However, a couple of years back I ran across a Detroit Genealogical Society magazine index[1] that pointed the way to his documents. And last week, with the kind assistance of Mark Bowden, the Special Collections Coordinator of the Burton Historical Collection of the Detroit Public Library, we finally obtained a digital copy of these milestone documents. (Click here to see the 73 megabyte pdf file.)
We addressed Hermann’s German origins in an earlier post. By way of recap, he was born in the small town of Zauckerode, southwest of Dresden, in 1851, the son of a coal miner. Hermann moved to Hamburg to pursue his goal of becoming a journeyman butcher in the early 1870s, married there in 1879, and emigrated to Detroit in 1880.
Naturalization was a two-step process, requiring an immigrant’s Declaration of Intention, followed by a Naturalization Oath a minimum of two years later. At that time any “court of record” could grant U.S. citizenship. Hermann went to the local Detroit Recorder’s Court to begin the process in March of 1884.
In his Declaration, Hermann swore it was his intention to become a citizen of the United States, and renounced all allegiance to the emperor of Germany, of whom he’d been a subject. He affixed his signature to the document, spelling his surname with an extra “e” to Anglicize the German “ü.”
Almost three years later, on January 10th of 1887, he returned to the court to swear his Naturalization Oath. In this document he used his full name, Friedrich Hermann Schuetze, again signing at the bottom. By extension, when Hermann became a U.S. citizen, his wife and children also became citizens … as would his descendants.
Americans celebrate the birth of our country on July 4th — Independence Day — with hot dogs and a bottle or two of Budweiser. As members of the Schütze/Schuetze/Schutze family I propose we also celebrate our “Citizenship Day” on every January 10th with brätwurst and a bottle of Löwenbräu — or good ol’ hot dogs and Bud, if that’s more your thing — which is particularly apt considering Hermann was a sausage maker by trade.
Are you in? Mark your calendar for January and we can clink glasses to celebrate this turning point in our Americanized family’s history.
Zum Wohl ! (Cheers, y’all ! )
Footnote:
[1] The Detroit Society for Genealogical Research Magazine, Fall 2003, Volume 67, No. 1, p19.