On June 15, 1904, the awful General Slocum steamboat disaster in New York City decimated the German-American community of Kleindeutschland: over a thousand women and children perished. At Geneanet, we honor the victims and survivors of the tragedy by documenting the lives of every known passenger. It’s a free and collaborative project, open to all.
We have written previously about this entirely preventable disaster in New York’s East River which occurred due to a combination of circumstances: greed and indifference to safety on the part of the ship’s owners; an experienced captain a year from retirement who somehow never organized a single fire drill, tolerated unusable safety equipment, and didn’t know or care that flammable materials were stored in a cabin; incompetence or corruption on the part of the federal inspectors who certified the boat as safe; a wooden boat, painted with flammable paint, tinder dry in the summer; a green crew, recruited from the docks three weeks prior; a majority of passengers women and children dressed in their finest clothes, who didn’t know how to swim; the fire discovered just as the ship advanced into a headwind through the treacherous Hell Gate channel, pushed by a flood tide; the captain’s decision to beach in deep water at North Brother Island instead of the shallower Bronx shoreline, for fear of spreading the fire to land. Over a thousand passengers died from drowning or fire in the disaster.
Kleindeutschland
From the 1840s on, Germans came in great numbers to New York City; most settled in the adjacent 17th, 11th, 13th, and 10th Wards which came to be known as Kleindeutschland, Little Germany (or “Dutchtown” to other New Yorkers). The spiritual heart of Kleindeutschland was St Marks Evangelical Lutheran Church on East 6th St; pastor George C.F. Haas had married hundreds of German-American couples in previous years.
Every year for the previous 16 years, the Sunday school of St Marks Church — where classes were conducted in German — organized an annual picnic excursion to Long Island. The General Slocum was the natural choice as it was the largest paddle steamer in New York’s waters along with its sister ship, the Grand Republic.
June 15th was a Wednesday, a workday, so very few working men joined the excursion; most dropped off their families at the pier that morning. Many would never see their families again. In the years following the disaster, several bereaved fathers, inconsolable, took their lives.
Condolences for Pastor Haas of St Marks Evangelical Lutheran Church
The disaster was reported worldwide. Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany was in the Taunus mountain range north of Frankfurt as the guest of honor at the fifth annual Gordon Bennett Cup road race sponsored by the millionaire owner of the New York Herald. The Kaiser learned of the full scale of the disaster on the day of the race, June 17, and the next day wrote a telegram to his ambassador in Washington, Baron Speck von Sternburg, to be forwarded to Pastor Haas:
Auf das tiefste erschuerttert durch die Kunde von dem unbeschreiblich entsetzlichen unglueck welches die deutsche lutherische gemeinde getroffen beauftrage ich sie bei Ihr der dolmetsch meines inningsten mitgefeuhls zu sein.
Deeply shocked by the news of the indescribably horrible catastrophe that has befallen the German Lutheran community, I ask you to convey my deepest sympathy to them.
Kaiser Wilhelm’s wife the Kaiserin Auguste Victoria, deeply moved, also sent condolences through the ambassador:
Ire majetaet die kaiserin und koenigin hat mich beauftragt allerhoechstihre herzlichst teilnahme zum ausdruck zu bringen zu dem namenlosen ungluect das so schweres leid ueber hunderte von deutschen familien gebracht hat euer hochwuerden bitte ich auch dieses zur kenntnis der beteiligten bringen zu wollen.
Der Kaiserliche BotschafterHer Majesty the Empress and Queen has commissioned me to express her deepest sympathy from her heart following the indescribable calamity which has brought such heavy suffering to hundreds of German families, and to bring this to the attention of those involved.
The Imperial Ambassador
Later, the Kaiserin awarded medals to the nurses at the North Brother Island hospital who had rescued and cared for passengers.
In New York, recently elected Mayor George B. McClellan Jr., a former journalist and lawyer born in Dresden to American parents, was deeply affected by the Slocum disaster. He quickly visited North Brother Island and the temporary morgue, and organized a fundraising committee for relief of the victims’ families. Sadly, the disbursement of these funds in the months following the disaster led to a rift between the survivors’ association, who felt that all funds available should go to the families, and Pastor Haas, who felt that the remaining funds should be used to finance the church whose congregation had been decimated.
President Theodore Roosevelt sent Pastor Haas a telegram from the White House: “Accept my profound sympathy for yourself and the congregation in the terrible calamity that has befallen you. Am inexpressibly shocked and grieved.”
The General Slocum Families Trees project has added over a thousand BMD certificates
Nearly two years have passed since we started our collaborative tree project and today there are:
- 1000 New York City birth, marriage, and death (BMD) certificates from the NYC Municipal Archives
- 4000 people in the tree, including many German ancestors
- 100 photos of victims and survivors, sourced from contemporary newspapers and from the families
No accurate count of passengers was made during boarding the morning of June 15, 1904, so every passenger list differs in numbers. We have accounted for 1,373 passengers at this writing and project volunteers continue to add passengers and their families regularly.
The opening of New York City’s historical vital records a year ago has transformed NYC genealogy and simplified our research into the Slocum families. In many cases, German family names were mangled by careless municipal registrars; painstaking research by Geneanet volunteers has resulted in isolated names on the victim lists being reunited with their extended families.
We have written about some of the Slocum families, such as the Zieglers, whose daughter Emily perished, to the great distress of her suitor John Flammang Schrank, later the would-be assassin of Theodore Roosevelt; and Walter Bernard Miller, born in New York City to German immigrant parents, who died in aerial combat during World War I.
This is a collaborative project and anyone who wishes to work on the family trees of the Slocum passengers is welcome to join! Please send us a message if you have any questions.
6/15/23
My grandmother, Meta Delventhal, who was then about 7 years old, was scheduled to be aboard The General Slocum the day it burned. That morning, however, her sister woke up with a fever and my great grandmother, my grandmother and siblings were terribly disappointed to have to cancel joining in on the outing. It saved their lives.. Kleindeutschland never fully recovered. For years my grandmother clipped articles about anniversary remembrances until they they were no longer held.