#germanystrong

Silly me, posting all about my life when you readers don’t even know who I am. Don’t know why any of you would be interested, but here’s a bit of my background.

As I have mentioned before, I was raised in Berlin, Germany up until I was 10 years of age. I grew up as the only child of Claudia Fitzgerald and Ferdinand Schneider. Things began to stir in the early 1700′s when the people of Germany grew restless with a new wave of struggles. Majority of us were starting to be persecuted for our Protestant religions. Not only that, but our nation’s economy was failing and war was raging all around.

My family was one of the many to flee Germany in 1751. We arrived in the Americas by boat and landed on the shores of Pennsylvania almost 5 months later. (That was the first and last time I’ve ridden a boat. I’m over this sea sickness nonsense.) Anyway, we were a large group who grew to make up about 1/3 of the whole Pennsylvania population. Once we were off the ship, my mother and father directed us to the town of Philadelphia where most of the immigrants settled. We established our first home here. However, disease in the middle colonies was prominent and my parents soon fell victim to diphtheria. I suffered watching the life of my parents leave their bodies. Their deaths actually served as a great reminder to me that death is inevitable and life is short. We had barely even been in our new home as a family for 2 months before I was left alone. Because of these diseases and these wars, many almshouses came to be and I was raised in one until I was 17. That’s when I attended the University of Philadelphia and met the love of my life.