Meet Erna Gerbstadt

I was growing frustrated with trying to find Gramma Ada through regular searches. Even running her name through the Jewish resource filter at ancestry turned up nothing. So since I had found that Grampa arrived in the States in '25, and his first child was born in 27 or 28, I reasoned that perhaps he and gramma were married before they left Germany. So when I plugged gramma's first name in with Grampa's surname, I got quite a surprise. I found one female emigre from Hannover... Erna.
Erna,born 1 January 1903, left the port Bremen aboard the "S.S Muenschen" on 12 January 1927 and arrived in New York, New York 23 January 1927 with a final destination listed as Detroit MI. At 24 years old, Erna was listed as single with no occupation and having last lived in Hannover. Her nearest relation in her home country was listed as Armin Gerbstaedt at Concordiastrasse 8, Hannover. This is the same information that Grampa listed on his ships registry. She stated that she was to visit an uncle, Emil in Wayne MI.
Her visa describes her as 5'5", blonde hair with blue eyes and a fair complexion with no birthmarks. Aside from a naturalization tag, no other record of Erna Gerbstadt exists in this database.

I have had a little time since finding her yesterday to ask myself a few questions, which I hope Kevin will answer... attempt to answer. Why would she come to Michigan and not stay with grampa? He was here two years before her and in the same city as their uncle, the same city in which she was to reside. My next question is what happened to her? I found Emil and a wife, Frederika A. in the census record of 1930. No Erna is listed in their household. Where did she go? She arrived in 27, either the same year or just before Anne was born to Alfred and Ada. Had she been coming to help care for a newborn infant? Had she come hoping to find marriage and a family of her own? Did she find that? But now I really want to know, among so many other things... why did I not know about her? And how did she just disappear?