back to Family Stories, Fall 2021
by Jack Bartuch
The Pralle Family originates from a town in Lower Saxony Germany called Nendorf. I was able to find this information out from my grandmother who knew an anecdote that her grandfather immigrated to the US with his two brothers in about 1885 and settled in a town called Hampton, Iowa, the same town which most of the family still resides in today. At the time I was amazed at how detailed of a story this was, and this became my furthest reaching line in my family tree.
It was not until I began to dig on the matter myself when I came across a piece of documentation that revealed how much information exists in this family. In a page of notebook, a picture surfaced of Carl Pralle, my grandmother’s grandfather, with his six other siblings. The group seems to be in later age which suggests they were all living in the United States at the time. As pictured below, the family is on a farm. This is the same occupation and same town the Pralles find themselves in today.
I was then came across more information about the Pralle family line beginning with these ancestors’ (above) father, Wilhelm Pralle. With this single piece of documentation, I was able to trace back the family’s history back to 1590 when my 10th Great Grandfather was born in Nendorf, Germany.
Since discovering this documentation of the Pralle family on Ancestry, I have asked several members of immediate/extended family and no knows of anyone who recorded this information. It leads me to believe that this record must be very old. If you notice at the top of the document, it reads, “History of the Pralle family from information received from relatives in Germany. All history relates to the town of Nendorf.”
When I began my family tree, I remember being very doubtful with discovering any information of my German family outside of their arrival to the United States. I have heard many stories of how it can be very difficult to find documents in the small towns of Germany. However, with a document such as this, it is very reassuring that the information can still be discovered with just addition effort. My guess is that one of my collateral relatives traveled to Nendorf, Germany and collected this information from distant Pralle relatives. This is a reminder that Traditional Geneological Research comes in many forms.