Nanke Albers who immigrated to the United States in 1869 is probably my oldest immigrant ancestor. Sometimes it can be easy to think that all immigrants were children or young-to-middle aged adults. That’s not necessarily the case.
The native of Wiesens, Ostfriesland, Germany, likely immigrated when the last of her grown children sailed to the United States. By 1869 her husband was dead and staying would have meant all her children were on one side of the Atlantic and she was on the other.
Early in my research I tended to focus on immigrants as in their mid-fifties or younger. I had not thought of the older generating as not immigrating. That’s was not necessarily the case, especially if all their children immigrated. It always pays to search the manifest for an older adult who might have been a grandparent “hiding” under a different last name. That’s what Nanke is doing. All the Bruns children listed above her are her grandchildren. Her grown son (their father) also appears on this manifest several entries before his children.
Which makes another good point: families or people travelling together may not be listed together on a manifest. Their names may be spread out.
Who is your oldest immigrant ancestor? Mine appears to have been 70.
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My husband’s 3x great-grandmother came from Sweden in 1866 (though we can’t find her on the ship’s list) and in 1870 she was 78 years old. That would make her 74 when she arrived with her two sons. She died at age 84 in 1876.