Saturday Night Genealogy Fun - The Time Machine

From Randy over at Genea-Musings:

it's Saturday Night - 

time for more Genealogy Fun!!!

Your mission, should you decide to accept it, is to:

(1) Determine which event in your ancestral history that you would love to be a witness to via a Time Machine.  Assume that you could observe the event, but not participate in it.

(2) Tell us all about it in your own blog post, in a comment to this blog post, or in a post on Facebook.

Here's mine:

When I saw this mission today, several things went through my mind.  I could choose the birth of ancestor that I do not know who their parents were to help me fill in some blanks.  Or even the birth of my great-grandmother, who was adopted - hopefully, to find out information about her birth parents.  Or I could pick a historical event like the Civil War, World War II, or the Great Depression.  All of those events sounded too traumatizing to me.  

But then I finally hit on it!   I would like to go back to the 1850's when my great-grandfather George W Schwalls came to this country from Germany.  Allegedly illegally.  Now I think stowaway on ships stories are like Indian princesses... completely made up.  However, in George's case, there is NO record of him on any ship from Europe during the time he supposedly arrived in this country; there's no record of him ever becoming an American citizen, though he did fight in the Civil War; and there is no record of him until he just appeared in Johnson County, Georgia in the late 1850's.  He seemed to be very closed mouthed about his origins, also.  Nothing passed down through the family, no records indicating exactly where he was born, nothing.  Nada.  Zip.   

There are rumors.  That he and two others from his family (The story is that two of them were brothers and the third was cousin.) got into some trouble and had to flee to America.  That they stowed away on a ship out of La Havre, France.  That after arriving in the United States, they got jobs working on the Great Lakes.  That two of them migrated down to Georgia and the third went to California.  I do know that there was a George Michael Schwall who was older than my George who lived in Jefferson County, Georgia, next door to Johnson County where my George lived.  (The story also goes that one of the men added an S on the end of his name  to be differentiated from the others.)

So I would like to go back to listen and observe and perhaps find out the town my great-grandfather was from, why he migrated to the States, and who his parents were.  That would be a dream come true!