Letters from emigrants

Scope, content and history of the collection

The Gotha Research Library preserves an immense cultural and historical treasure with its collection of around 11,130 emigrant letters, both originals and copies. The emigrants' letters are not only the largest collection of written testimonies of “ordinary people”. In fact, the Gotha collection is now one of the largest of its kind in the world.

Alongside a few surviving diaries, chronicles and travelogues, they are the only contemporary and socio-historical first-person documents of the processes involved in the decision to emigrate as well as orientation and integration in the host country. The letters in the Gotha collection were written by German North American emigrants to their families and friends back home between 1820 and 1990. 

The collection also includes transcriptions of around 10,000 of these letters and around 2,000 copies of printed emigration letters as well as over 4,000 copies of other printed letters. For around 454 series of letters - a series comprises three or more letters from one writer - detailed biographical data and information material on the emigrants' hometown and American place of residence are available. In addition, around 25,000 pages of contextual material from archives and private collections as well as material on other aspects of German emigration to America are available in the Gotha Research Library. 

The collection was established at the Ruhr University of Bochum in the 1980s with generous financial support from the Volkswagenwerk Foundation and has been expanded ever since. Further information on the history of the collection can be found here.

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