In 1886, Johann Heinrich Neman, his wife Sophie Maria, and their two sons Fred and John emigrated from Germany to the United States. Johann and Sophie were each 48 years old, Fred was 13 and John was 9. They sailed aboard the Hamburg-American liner S.S. Rugia.
Upon reaching the U.S., they rode a train to Falls City, Nebraska, presumably because both Johann and Sophie had relatives already living in the area. Sophie’s maiden name was Huebner, and the Huebner family still lives around Falls City. They arrived November 14, 1886, and spent their first night in Nebraska in the home of the Gast family, and Mrs. Gast was a Neman. This same house was later owned for many years by Minnie and Clarence Koepke; Minnie was Fred Neman’s daughter.
I don’t know much about the Gast family. They moved to North Dakota.
There is no consistent spelling of Neman during those years. It was alternately spelled Niemann, Nieman, and Neman. I suspect this is due to the fact that the
German language uses a different alphabet than the English language, so any translation would be phonetic. Fred Neman's family line ends pretty quickly. He had two children. The first died as an infant. The second, Minnie, married and lived a long life, but had no children herself. John Neman sort of made up for him, though. Of his 7 children, one unnamed infant died soon after birth and another, Millicent, never married and had no children. The other 5 had families of
their own. Click here to see historic Neman photos from the 1920's through the early 1990's.