Fred's Gift

In January 2014, Fred Engel bound twenty years of research into a spiral-bound report and gave it to his parents — dedicated to his father Bob on his 87th birthday. Census clippings, city directories, gravestone rubbings, photographs, and the family story traced from a Berlin merchant's Atlantic crossing in 1849 to the backyards of Glen Burnie: a family's history, researched with care and given as a gift.

Fred has since passed, and his gift has become something more — the inspiration and foundation for this entire site. Every chapter of the story began as his words, and the living story the family writes today grows from the ground he prepared. His report is preserved here untouched — it will never be edited, regenerated, or revised.

“For my father, Robert Earl Engel, on his 87th birthday — January 19, 2014.”

Here it is, exactly as it was bound — every scanned page, unchanged. Prefer paper? Download the PDF.