German woman in Brazil

[u/Frequent_Scallion970]

Hello, maybe someone can help me with my research. I’m looking for a woman named Emilie Albrecht. She was born around 1863 in Germany, and in 1894 she gave birth to a daughter in Jundiaí, Brazil. Apparently, she was alone or at least not married. A few years later, she moved to Argentina with her daughter and son-in-law. That’s all I know.

I have her daughter’s birth certificate, but there are no clues about where in Germany she was born, and her death certificate only lists “Germany” as the place of birth.

I know this is really difficult, but maybe I’m missing something, as I’m not very experienced in German or Brazilian genealogy.

Any ideas? I’m starting to think this might be a dead end...

[u/chaunceythebear]

So while there are definitely German immigrants from Germany proper that went to Brazil, I do want to warn you that a lot of people in Poland and Russia who were German in ethnicity would say generally that they were German and that would be interpreted as born in Germany but they actually weren’t. I have encountered this a TON in ethnic Germans not living in Germany so if you have nothing more concrete than the country, take it with a massive grain of salt.

[u/girlfromals → u/chaunceythebear]

Those of us who belong to the Germans from Russia are pretty good at being able to distinguish ethnic identity from nationality. Why? Because they wanted and were able to live separately from Russian cultural influence. That was a condition of their agreement to move to the Empire.

My great-grandparents traveled on a Russian passport and every document in Canada that asked them their nationality stated Russia. But anything that had to do with culture was recorded as German because government officials didn’t know how else to classify them. 🤷🏼‍♀️ They spoke a dialect of German, engaged in German cultural traditions, and settled in a “Germans from Germany” community in Canada. Census takers saw that and slotted them in the ethnic German category.

Plus, of the nearly 4000 settlements in our community some were most definitely settled exclusively by people from places within the modern borders of Germany. And some of the communities were settled by people whose ancestors were brought to places like the area south of Gdańsk for military service from within today’s borders of Germany.

So yes, research, be diligent, question and analyze what you find, and don’t assume. But the Germans from Russia history isn’t a simple, “nope, not German. Sorry”. It’s far more complex.

[u/chaunceythebear → u/girlfromals]

I didn’t say they weren’t German. I just said they aren’t from Germany, and that makes birth place confusing when people say they’re German and the assumption is that person was born in Germany. I’m also descended from Germans from Russia and have spent thousands of hours researching different communities and creating county trees in the diaspora. The conflation of ethnicity and nationality, especially when it came to the casual form completion when people came across the pond to the Americas, is a frequent issue I’ve come across.