My great-grandfather, David Barbaras, embarked from Havre on the ship Thorwaldsen and arrived in New York on March 10, 1873 in the fourth and final emigration from Ostheim, France to the United States. The next record of him in the U.S. is the 1874 city directory of Milwaukee. He mysteriously never revealed any of this or his origins, never once mentioned the existence of other Barbarases from Ostheim in the United States, and did not discourage his descendants from assuming that they were alone here. We did not know otherwise until the early 1990s when the French researcher, Guy Barbaras, located my brother in San Francisco and provided my family with its first historical data and the contacts of other Barbarases in the United States.