They hesitated as they crossed the gangplank, knowing that it was their only remaining connection to land. Once it was removed, there would be no turning back. They were leaving family, friends and neighbors. Weddings, funerals, births and christenings would take place without them. But most of all, they knew that they would leave a big part of themselves behind - a part that only they would be able to remember. It was at this point that uncertainty slipped its way into the exhilaration that had brought them thus far. Even though they were apprehensive, it didn't matter because they moved with their future in mind. They were leaving their homelands because America was perceived as a land of great opportunity. They had heard of the homestead acts that gave applicants ownership of land at little or no cost. Even without the acts, they knew that the land was plentiful and thus cheap. They had heard that employment was readily available and they had heard, although they didn't believe it, that the streets were lined with gold. They didn't speak English. The destination they listed as they left their homeland was one that they had heard others mention. They didn't know anything else about it. The trip, not easy from the inception, was made even more difficult because the families frequently traveled with little children. In the case of the families in this book, the children were young and the trip must have been tedious. However, each of the families made it safely across the ocean, and once on land, they found their way to the center of the United States to begin their lives in America. Nicholas and Odelia Post left their family home in Luxembourg in the late 1850s. The boys, having been born in 1853 and 1855, were little more than toddlers. The family was destined to end up in Stearns County in central Minnesota. Mathias and Maria Boor left Germany with four children, one six months old. They and their children first settled in Wisconsin. Later the children moved to Iowa, and eventually one of them moved to Henning, Minnesota. Ole and Ingeborg Gregerson Fosse's children had almost reached adulthood when they made the trip. The youngest of the six children was nine and the eldest was twenty-one. They spent a few years in Fillmore County, Minnesota, before moving to Albert Lea, Minnesota. Olaus and Maren Hanson had three children, six, three and a newborn, when they left Kristiania, Norway, in search of a new home. Their listed destination was Isinours, Minnesota, which was a town few had heard of and would later cease to exist. They eventually settled on a small farm in Preston, Minnesota. Each of the families has its own unique stories, although its stories are probably similar to all of the other stories of immigrants who settled in the central part of the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Their lives provide the framework for the stories in this book appropriately entitled, Destination Amerika.
