A German partner office asked us in this case to search for any descendants of a German who emigrated to Brazil in 1919, who might have property rights to a plot of land in East Berlin.
With the help of the National Archive in Rio de Janeiro, we were able to view the immigration list and determine that the deceased emigrated in 1919 from Germany to the then prospering Brazilian port city of Santos. He probably left his homeland due to the precarious economic situation after World War I and sought a new beginning in Brazil.
Through the help of our employee Rosskamp on site, who searched through all resident registration data in the relevant period and dug up historical correspondence from the honorary consulate in Santos, we found a telex from the emigrant from 1932 to his sister who remained in Germany, in which he briefly informed her that “the work on the banana plantations is laborious and poorly paid; I also suffer from constant fever and my daughter Maria is concerned about me.”
We now knew that the deceased had a daughter named Maria, and with the help of the local registry office we managed to view all births in Santos and indeed a daughter of the deceased was born in 1925.
We now set about finding the marriage, which we succeeded in relatively quickly, although the joy was only short-lived, as the daughter adopted probably the most common Brazilian name of all after her wedding: Maria Santos.
Since it seemed impossible to find this lady, of whom we didn’t even know whether she was still alive, we came up with the idea of asking the Protestant cemetery located outside the city for any death certificate for the deceased, as we assumed that he did not convert to Catholicism even after his emigration to Brazil.
We actually found the deceased’s death entry with the note that he died penniless in 1947 and the city paid for the burial due to lack of relatives.
Maria Santos had thus disappeared and we saw our last opportunity to start a local appeal in the local media (radio stations, newspapers), which, however, also brought no success.
Eventually we found the director of the local poorhouse, who – at 94 years old – still remembered the deceased, as he lived there until his death.
He described the difficult situation of the family to us and knew that the deceased had a daughter named Maria who worked as a cleaning lady. Fortunately, he could still give us the address of the former employer, so we visited his children, who still knew Maria Santos. They told us that the daughter of the deceased died about 5 years ago, but had 9 children, one of whom works for the city administration.
The search for this grandchild of the deceased went quickly and the grandson told us about an aunt who had also already died, who lived about 300 kilometers away on a banana plantation, barely making ends meet.
Eventually it turned out that the two daughters of the deceased had a total of 17 children. After further research, we came across over 55 heirs, most of whom could not read and write.
One daughter of the deceased had married a genuine Indian, with whom she had 13 children; with these we had to have the signatures certified by fingerprint by a local notary.
Although this case dragged on for three quarters of a year, we eventually succeeded in providing financial help to the many heirs in Brazil; with the money due to them, each of them can buy their own house and a piece of land, as they were previously financially dependent on the large landowner as “modern slaves.”
