Mystery solved?

Does it bother you that one of the central facts of our family history, the name of the ship that brought our forebears to the U.S., dutifully recorded in the Buller Family Record, is apparently wrong? It seems indisputable that Peter D, Sarah, and family made the journey on the S.S. Switzerland, not on the S.S. Vaderland. How could the family oral history get such a basic fact so very wrong? In fact, there may be a perfectly reasonable and simple explanation.

While exploring background on Margaretha Epp Buller (wife of Peter P) in the GRANDMA database I encountered the screen pictured below. Notice anything interesting?

Maria and Sara report in the Buller Family Record that their father Peter P came to the U.S. on the S.S. Vaderland, but it was actually their mother Margaretha who came on that ship.

Notice several other similarities: even though Margaretha arrived in 1877 and Peter P in 1879, they both arrived in Philadelphia in late June (the 24th for Peter P, the 29th for Margaretha); further, they both sailed on a ship of the Red Star Line based in Antwerp, Belgium. It is not surprising that some of the details became mushed together—especially when one recalls that Peter was only ten when he came to the U.S., Margaretha seven.

It is easy to imagine how the names of the two ships were switched or conflated in Maria and Sara’s or their parents’s memories. But however it happened—whether Maria and Sara were told the wrong ship or they were told the right ship and made a mistake in assigning it to their father rather than their mother—it seems likely that this particular mystery is solved: Peter P did journey to the U.S. on the Switzerland, his future wife Margaretha on the Vaderland.

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As hinted at earlier, twenty-one-year old Jacob Epp, grandfather of Malinda Franz (Grandma), and his family were on the same voyage as seven-year-old Margaretha Epp and her family. The families were not related, to my knowledge, merely passengers on the same voyage.