52 Ancestors 2026 Week 2: A Record That Adds Color

 

Week 2 2026: A Record That Adds Color

This is going to be a little bit of a bummer, but this record gave me such pause during my research. It made me stop and forced me to imagine, to try to understand, and gave me about a thousand other things I wanted to look into, each of which would add more color to these lives.

This is the story about my 3x great-grandparents, Charles “Carl” and Christiana Dihle and their son, Carl Jr.

My 3x great-grandparents were immigrants from Germany (then Prussia) who settled in Detroit and were, by all measures, an American success story, eventually owning their own business. 

But this is about their journey to the United States.

When I was researching them, I knew they had immigrated to the U.S. in 1856 and based on various birth records, they arrived with two children, then had several more after their arrival here.

Upon looking for records of their arrival, I came across this ship’s manifest of their ship arriving in New York on November 16, 1856 (I’ve highlighted the Dihle family).  And it stopped me.

The record above indicated that Charles and Christiana left Prussia with three children and arrived with two. Their middle child, Charles Jr, died on the passage.

I… I wanted to know more. I found an article in the New York Times archive about the arrival of their ship in New York from Hamburg:

This record is just over three lines, less than 1 column inch.

But it said so much and brought to life for me what the ships were like, what the passage across the Atlantic was like, for immigrants. I remember, of course, learning about it a little in high school as we studied that part of American history but this made it more real for me.

36 days. And they lost 22 passengers – about 10% (!!) of all of the passengers making the voyage. And one of them was my 4x great uncle, Charles “Carl” Dihle, Jr, aged 3.

From this I have a list of other research I want to do – I want to know more about their life in Prussia and what made them decide to up and move their family to America. I want to find photos of this ship, the T. J. Rogers. I want to see if this was a one-off or if they frequently lost this many passengers. I would love to find other ancestors of other people who had been on that ship and see if there are any written descriptions of the journey. I would love to know if there was a burial at sea. I wonder if Charles and Christiana told their other kids about little Carl.  Especially the first child they had here in the New World, Ida, who was born in Detroit in 1859, three years after Charles’ and Christiana’s arrival, and who is my 2x great grandmother.