John Groh’s poignant recount of his family’s global journey, how the descendants’ reconnected, and the resulting reunion seventy years later was presented at the March, 2010 meeting. The Groh family was among the first settlers in the village of Grimm, along the Wiesenseite (meadow side) of the Volga River region in 1767 – just four years after the invitation to settle the area by Czarina Catherine the Great.  The family stayed in Grimm as farmers until six Groh siblings gathered up their families and immigrated to the US between 1906 and 1912, first settling in the May-wood area (a suburb of Chicago), and later moving west to the Mason City, Iowa, area where they worked the sugar beet cycle. Over the next decades some stayed in Iowa, some returned to Chicago, but no one knew what happened to those left behind.

The family that stayed in Russia met a fate that took them – over several generations - from Grimm to Siberia. Later a branch moved from Siberia to Ukraine and, for some, a return to Germany, two hundred years after the original migration.

John Groh is retired after a long career with Drake University. With his wife, Sue, he lives in Johnston, IA. They are life members of AHSGR and charter members of the Wild Rose Chapter of IA and the North Star Chapter of MN.  Groh has served on both the AHSGR Board of Directors and Foundation Board. He enjoys studying genealogy and recently published a 300-page family history.