Lizzie, Henry and Katrine's first born, led her sibling's exodus from Badbergen, Niedersachsen (Lower Saxony), Germany to the U.S. September 10, 1874, at age 16, Lizzie arrived in America where she settled in Chester, Illinois. This was just nine years after the end of the American Civil War and a year following the economic downturn of 1873. The German exodus to the United States had slowed by this time.

Chester, Illinois, is just south of the area of the first permanent American settlement in the Illinois Territory. Less than 30 years before Lizzie's arrival, the German Forty-Eighters came up the Mississippi River through the port of New Orleans from Germany and had spread by the thousands into the surrounding areas of Missouri and Illinois. The Forty-Eighters were the German democratic revolutionaries that had tried to unify the German states. As they failed and became extremely unpopular with the ruling class as well as disenchanted with living in Germany, they emigrated in masses to the U.S. Even today, there are small communities in this area that celebrate their German heritage with special activities designed to attract tourists.
 

In 1878, four years after arriving in the U.S., Lizzie, age 20, married Charles Lange.

Charles and Lizzie had one son, Arthur, shown here at age 26.

Lizzie visits Art at college in 1910.

Charles and Lizzie celebrate an anniversary

August 22, 1895, Lizzie, age 37, returned to Germany for a visit. A month later she returned to the US with her sister, Hannah, who visited in the US for a year.