The Frau Erica Project
Muellers in America:
The first 159 years





 
 
       

The Mueller Farm, on Kammerer Road east of Kendallville, Indiana, photographed in rain June 4, 2007, by Mark Nickel

Ah. We’re sorry you’re having trouble with that page

Family tree pages are viewable only by Mueller descendants. If you have a place on the Mueller family tree — as direct descendant, as spouse, or as a kindred spirit — your username and password should let you move around the site freely and read whatever you like. Those credentials are easily and quickly available to Mueller descendants.


You already have a username and password?

Go to www.frauerica.org and sign in.

You need to register or have forgotten your username or password?

Email the archivist and be sure your message includes:

  • Your full name.
  • Your date of birth.
  • A brief description of your spot on the Mueller family tree — how you plug in and where.

You will receive your username and password, usually within 24 hours. When you have them, go to www.frauerica.org and enter them in the spaces provided. As long as you allow your browser to set and keep a cookie, the web will recognize your place on the Mueller family tree and you will not need to log in again.

FrauErica.org is built around a graphical representation of the family tree, beginning with Georg and Gertrude Mueller in Napoleanic times. Lots of other families plug in as direct descendants — Kniefs, Oltroges, Schumms, Nickels, Marquardts, Gramses, Feiertags, Rehwinkels — a Who’s Who of old Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod names. (C.F.W. Walther himself even has a small walk-on part.) All are welcome.

Policy: cookies and privacy

Less than a year after their arrival in America, the Muellers were swindled out of almost everything they owned by a dishonest land agent and a co-conspiritor who may been a Lutheran minister. As American life and commerce moved online, so did the digital counterparts of the land agent who bilked Fritz Mueller.

FrauErica.org tries to take reasonable precautions. Our first line of defense is not to include personal contact information or anything of material value online. We do not sell anything, and we do not ask for money. We print names and relationships, but we do not print addresses, phone numbers, e-mail addresses or any contact information — and we will never give anyone’s information to a third party. There is, however, very little in these pages that cannot be gotten elsewhere with a few clicks of the mouse.

We set cookies only to identify you as a Mueller descendant and to help you find your way around on the family tree. Explore to your heart’s content — we will not track your movements or gather any data on your usage, and absolutely nothing we have will be given or sold to anyone.

How much security is enough? You would probably want something a little more robust for your online banking, but FrauErica.org’s precautions should be enough to keep hobby hackers and automated web crawlers at bay. Our Family Tree pages are password-protected and are open only to people who have a place somewhere on the Mueller family tree. Many of our text pages are open to the public, though they do not contain much that is of value beyond the Mueller family.

Our site security is in your hands. Please do not share your username and password. If you know other Mueller friends and relations who need access to the site, we will happily provide a username and password to anyone on the Family Tree no matter how distant the branch. Please ask them to contact the Archivist as above.

Fixing errors, adjusting content

The idea was to construct a dependable family history as a series of web pages, allowing users to click backward and forward through the generations, following different family lines. The data points for such a project quickly mounted into the tens of thousands — variant spellings, differing dates for births or deaths, Anglicized German names, and the whole matter of German translation — but at least there is data for the family tree pages.

The text files are a bit more delicate, since subjective elements inevitably creep in. If you encounter something with which you disagree or something you know is not quite right, please Contact the Archivist.