By Steve Ehlmann
It’s come to my attention that I might be distantly related to Taylor Swift.
Late last year, as Time Magazine was naming Taylor Swift as their person of the year, her grandmother’s connection to St. Charles was also getting attention. Her grandmother, Marjorie Moehlenkamp (later Marjorie Finlay)—remembered by Taylor in her song “marjorie”—grew up in St. Charles, about five blocks from where I later grew up. She was confirmed at Immanuel Lutheran a few years after my dad, graduated from St. Charles High School, as my wife and I did years later, and graduated from Lindenwood College in the same class as my wife’s aunt.
This information caught the attention of several families in St. Charles, including my own, who remembered seeing the Moehlenkamp name in their family tree. I remembered when I was a kid, my grandmother Martha Ehlmann (nee Esselmann) used to shop at Moehlenkamp’s grocery store at Fifth and Clay (now First Capital), telling me, “We’re related to the Moehlenkamps.”
Thanks to research by some family members, I’ve learned our connection goes back to a German immigrant family in the mid-1800s. My great-great-grandmother, Marie Moehlenkamp, married into the Esselmann family, and her descendent, my grandma Martha, married into the Ehlmann family.
Marie Moehlenkamp’s brother, Johann, was Taylor Swift’s great-great-great-grandfather.
For those of you keeping count, that’s four generations back from me and five back from her. Like I said, “distantly related.” But I think each of our families tell a story of how German immigrants integrated into American culture and communities.
And there are connections through Grandpa Ehlmann’s side, too, which I learned while attending a recent presentation by Dr. Walter Kamphoefner, a university history professor, St. Charles County native, and an authority on German immigration to America. His presentation, “Becoming American: From Johann Hermann Moehlenkamp to Taylor Swift,” can be accessed at Steveehlmann.com.
His research showed that another member of the Moehlenkamp family (not a direct ancestor to Marjorie or Ms. Swift) got remarried to my great-great-grandfather Ehlmann after both of their spouses had died. Both brought previous children to the marriage, including my great-grandfather Ehlmann.
Great-grandpa Ehlmann went to live with his uncle’s family after his father died, but his relationship with the Moehlenkamp family continued. The farm on Jungs Station Road that Marjorie Moehlenkamp’s grandfather grew up on was the same farm that my grandfather Ehlmann later grew up on. The house at 562 Jefferson in St. Charles that Marjorie’s father grew up in was the same house that my father grew up in and that I lived in until I was three.
Small world. Indeed, that was Professor Kamphoefner’s thesis. Unlike most other immigrant groups that were uprooted from familiar customs in their land of birth, German immigrants to our region practiced “chain migration” where, over time, people from the same extended family, the same church or the same town, immigrated to our region. They lived in the New World much as they had in the old, in what Kamphoefner calls an “immigrant cocoon” with limited contact with the non-German Americans.
Families like the Moehlenkamps, Esselmanns and Ehlmanns remained in the immigrant cocoon for the first three generations. Marjorie’s family broke out when her grandfather gave up farming in 1903, moved to St. Charles and went to work in the American Car & Foundry “car shops.”
Marjorie’s father was able to attend high school and then get a white-collar office job, but he really broke out of the cocoon when he moved to Arkansas and married Marjorie’s mother, a non-German Methodist. When Marjorie graduated from college, embarked on a music career and married another non-German, she entered a new world. Her granddaughter has conquered the music world.
My family has been a generation behind, but has gone through the same metamorphosis. Both my grandparents grew up on a farm, but moved to St. Charles after their marriage. My grandpa went to work in the shoe factory, while my grandmother during the week, and both of them on the weekend, retreated back into the cocoon with their two children.
My father served in the Tenth Armored Division in Europe during WWII with other men from every ethnic and racial group in America. He saw the horrors of a Nazi work camp, which his outfit helped liberate, and I never heard him say much about the fact that his grandparents had been born in Germany. He never got the education that Marjorie did, but he wanted his children to have that opportunity, to open up a broader world for his three children and his grandchildren.
I admire Taylor Swift, and am also very proud of the achievements of my immediate family. Taylor Swift represents the epitome of the American Dream. Not every family can make it from farm to fame, but at least we can strive to make the lives of each generation better than the last.
By the way, in case you’re wondering: No, I can’t sing.
For more information about the history discussed above, click the following links:
