New digital catalog of German-American organization records provides insight into 155 years of social history
LAWRENCE — The Ledgers of the New York Turn Verein, a social and athletic club for German immigrants founded in 1850, are now available in an online catalog 16 years after they arrived at the University of Kansas Max Kade Center for German-American Studies.
The ledgers offer a comprehensive view into the social life of German immigrants in the United States. They comprise records kept by the New York Turn Verein (NYTV) from 1850 to 2005 and include meeting minutes, accounting, membership lists, event invitations and menus. The continuous recordkeeping across 155 years reveals changes in social mores and practices through both peaceful and turbulent times, such as the Civil War — in which many Turn Verein members fought — and both world wars, when German immigrants in the U.S. faced suspicion. Insights provided by the ledgers’ records range from the notes changing from German to English in the 1940s, the discontinuance of the serving of beer at meetings in 1954 and an Irish band crashing the Christmas Party of 1958.
“The NYTV ledgers offer invaluable insight into the history of the Turner Movement in the U.S. and the history of German-speaking migration to the U.S.,” said Marike Janzen, director of the Max Kade Center and associate professor in the Department of Slavic, German & Eurasian Studies. “We are grateful for the support of the NYTV 1850 Foundation that allowed us to digitize the Turn Verein ledgers and to make this resource much more accessible to people across the world.”
The 203 ledgers arrived in Lawrence in September 2008 as a gift of the New York Turn Verein 1850 Foundation to the Max Kade Center for German-American Studies through to the efforts of professor emeritus and prior director Frank Baron. They were stored in the basement of the Max Kade Center until 2012, when the NYTV 1850 Foundation and Max Kade Foundation gave the funds to renovate the historic Sudler Annex into a new home for the ledgers. In 2022, the ledgers were professionally scanned with the intention to make them easily available online. During the summer of 2024, Hazlett Henderson, a graduate student in geography & atmospheric science, lent her expertise in digital librarianship to the project to create the new digital catalog so that researchers can access these items remotely and effectively search their contents for material of interest.
The NYTV was one of the largest and oldest Turnvereins in the country. These organizations were founded by German immigrants, particularly those who fled Germany after the failed revolution of 1848, to create places for their families and communities to bond through civic engagement and sport. Inspired by the athletic philosophy of Friedrich Ludwig Jahn, known as the “Turnvater” (Father of Gymnastics), these groups held gymnastics and athletic activities as a central tenet of their charters.
Turnvereins were established across the United States where German-Americans settled, including in Lawrence. The Lawrence Turnhalle, a purpose-built building, still stands at 902 Rhode Island St., and items from the Lawrence turnverein now reside in the collections of the Max Kade Center, Kenneth Spencer Research Library and Watkins Museum of History.
This project is part of an initiative of the KU’s Max Kade Center to make their collections and programming more widely accessible. Starting this fall, the center, located at 1134 W. 11th St., will be open for visiting 1-3 p.m. Tuesday-Thursday. Public programming at the center for this semester includes a talk on “Globalizing German-Speaking Valdivia, Chile” at 4 p.m. Sept. 25, another talk on Turner history titled "German-Americans in the Revolutionary Midwest” on Oct. 10 and a Herbstfest (Fall Festival) on Oct. 22 with food and games.