Category: Archived (NFS)

These paintings illustrate Amalia’s Story, the tale of Diane’s grandmother who immigrated to America at age six from a small German colony along the Volga River in Russia and did not die on the Titanic, though Diane grew up believing this was a disaster just narrowly avoided. Amalia’s father was a fortune seeker who took his family first to Siberia when Mollie was an infant and her older sister a toddler. In 1912, as a family of two adults and five children, they crossed the Atlantic on a steamship of the Allan Line, arrived in Michigan through Canada, then spent nearly a year on the prairie as migrant workers in sugar beet fields. While her father’s ambition had been to settle in California, they returned to Michigan at her mother’s insistence, eventually purchasing a farm in Baroda, near Lake Michigan.

The original paintings are archived in a portfolio and not for sale.