What They Did: Trades and Professions of Dillman Families

2026-06-14
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Data drawn from Dillman Family Association Family Group Fact Sheets and published historical sources. This article covers the first 94 documented groups; a follow-up will incorporate findings from the remaining groups.

A German tailor and button-maker at work, early 19th century lithograph.
Group 90 (George Dillmann of Obertiefenbach, Nassau) arrived in Chicago in 1881 and established himself as a cabinet maker — a trade recorded in his burial record at St. Boniface Cemetery when he died in 1920. Group 45 had Albert August Dielmann, born in New York in 1877 to a Bavarian immigrant father, who became a piano maker in an industry his fellow German-Americans had built. Group 61 (George Dillmann, settled in Manhattan in the 1880s) is documented as a piano maker on his 1892 death certificate — one of thousands of German-American craftsmen whose names appear only in city directories and death records, but whose hands helped build the instruments that filled American parlors in the Gilded Age.[7]

Cabinet Makers, Piano Makers, and Woodworking

Woodworking trades appear with particular frequency among the Dillman groups. German immigrants nationally constituted 55 percent of piano factory workers and over three-fifths of musical instrument makers. During the 1850s, some 800,000 German-speaking immigrants passed through New York City, many of them skilled craftspeople. Among them was Heinrich Engelhard Steinweg — later Henry E. Steinway — a master cabinet maker from the Harz Mountains who arrived in 1850 and founded Steinway and Sons in 1853. By the 1860s, his factory employed 350 men, mostly German immigrants whose official workplace language was German.[6] The Dillman piano makers and cabinet makers of the same era were part of this same industrial world.

Bird's-eye view of Steinway and Sons pianoforte factory and lumber yard, occupying the entire block on Fourth Avenue between 52nd and 53rd Streets, New York City, 1864. The New York Public Library Digital Collections.

Bird’s-eye view of Steinway & Sons’ pianoforte factory, Fourth Avenue between 52nd and 53rd Streets, New York (1864). The New York Public Library Digital Collections, Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations. Public domain.

Group 90 (George Dillmann of Obertiefenbach, Nassau) arrived in Chicago in 1881 and established himself as a cabinet maker — a trade recorded in his burial record at St. Boniface Cemetery when he died in 1920. Group 45 had Albert August Dielmann, born in New York in 1877 to a Bavarian immigrant father, who became a piano maker in an industry his fellow German-Americans had built. Group 61 (George Dillmann, settled in Manhattan in the 1880s) is documented as a piano maker on his 1892 death certificate — one of thousands of German-American craftsmen whose names appear only in city directories and death records, but whose hands helped build the instruments that filled American parlors in the Gilded Age.[7]

Stonemasons, Architects, and the Built Environment

Sacred Heart Conventual Chapel at Our Lady of the Lake University, San Antonio, Texas, designed by architect Leo M. J. Dielmann, completed 1923.

Sacred Heart Conventual Chapel, Our Lady of the Lake University, San Antonio — designed by Leo M. J. Dielmann (1923). Photo: Larry D. Moore, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

The most architecturally significant Dillman family connection in the documented groups is the Dielmann dynasty of San Antonio, Texas — a two-generation story of German immigrant craftsmanship that left a permanent mark on the built environment of an entire state.

John Charles Dielmann (1849–1923) of Group 23 was born in Hellenhahn, Nassau, Germany, and arrived in Texas in 1872. A stonemason by training, he became a partner in the San Antonio construction and building supplies firm Pauly and Dielmann, later forming his own company, J. C. Dielmann Co., involved in numerous building projects in San Antonio and across Texas. He was also a civic leader — the first president of the Katholischer Staatsverband von Texas, the Catholic State League of Texas.[8]

His son Leo Maria Joseph Dielmann (1881–1969) carried the family’s involvement with the built environment to another level entirely. He studied architecture and engineering in Germany, returned to San Antonio, and over five decades designed over 100 churches across Texas — several of which are now on the U.S. National Register of Historic Places. His notable works include the Fort Sam Houston Post Chapel; the Conventual Chapel at Our Lady of the Lake University, whose 193-foot spire is visible for miles; and the 12-story Frost Bank Building erected in 1922. He was especially known for his Texas painted churches — ecclesiastical buildings combining English and German Gothic traditions whose distinctive decorated interiors have become recognized as a unique expression of German-American religious culture in the American Southwest.[9] He died in San Antonio in 1969 at the age of 88.

Publishers, Professionals, and Commerce

Cover of McGuffey's Eclectic Third Reader, published by the American Book Company.

Cover of McGuffey’s Eclectic Third Reader. Published by the American Book Company; 120 million copies sold 1836–1960. Library of Congress, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

Group 7 — the Dillman/Dagga family, whose ancestor Jacob Daegen arrived in Philadelphia in 1740 — produced Louis Milton Dillman, documented in the Family Group Fact Sheet as President of the American Book Company (ABC). The ABC was formed in 1890 by the consolidation of four major publishers and became one of the largest educational publishers in the United States. It is best known for publishing the McGuffey Readers, the most widely used schoolbooks of the 19th century, which sold 120 million copies between 1836 and 1960.[10] Leading such an institution placed Louis Milton Dillman at the center of American educational publishing during one of the most consequential periods in the development of American public schooling.

Group 67 (Antoine Gerard Dulman, from the Netherlands, settled in Brooklyn in 1843) is documented as a banker. Group 91 documents Louis Casson Dillman of Kentucky, an American writer who traveled the world and later served as president of the Alaska United Copper Exploration Company and the Alaska Westover Copper Company — a mining and corporate executive whose career traced the expansive commercial ambitions of the Gilded Age American West.

Maritime Trades and Unusual Occupations

Two members of Group 28 — Eugene Roland Dillmann (1912–1988) and Elbert J. Dillmann (1915–1982) — became crewmembers of cargo ships, originally working for the United Fruit Company. Their Mississippi-based family had roots in Franz Dillmann, who arrived in New Orleans in 1858 and died of yellow fever in 1870; his descendants found their way to the sea lanes of the Gulf of Mexico and Caribbean two generations later.[11]

The most remarkable occupational biography in the entire dataset belongs to Group 24 — Edmund Dillmann, a librarian working in Moscow at the outbreak of World War II. Drafted into the Soviet Army, he was sent to the Western Front, captured by the Germans, transferred to a prisoner of war camp (Lager) in Freiburg, and set to work as a translator. At the war’s end he remarried and emigrated to Australia, where he took up the trade of toymaking in Sydney. From librarian to soldier to prisoner to translator to toymaker across three continents — a single life spanning the full breadth of 20th-century catastrophe and reinvention, ending in a craft made for children.[12]

What the Trades Tell Us

The occupations documented across the 94 Dillman family groups confirm what historians of German-American immigration have long established: that German immigrants arrived not as unskilled laborers but as craftsmen, tradespeople, and professionals who brought established skills and strong work identities to their new country. Many of the jobs they labored in were small specialized trades — furriers and brewers, tailors and shoemakers. Others occupied the upper reaches of American commerce and culture.

What the Family Group Fact Sheets add to this historical picture is human specificity that statistics alone cannot provide: the tailor who kept the same shop in New York for nearly four decades; the barber who may have cut a president’s hair; the stonemason from Nassau whose son designed a hundred Texas churches; the candy innovator whose estate tied up the Louisiana courts; the piano maker whose hands built the instruments of the Gilded Age parlor; the librarian who became a toymaker in Australia. These are not abstract data points but individual lives, each shaped by the intersection of the skills their families carried and the worlds those skills encountered.

The remaining Dillman family groups will undoubtedly add further trades and professions to this picture. A follow-up article will examine the occupational patterns that emerge from the complete dataset of 163 groups.

The Dillman Family Association’s Family Group Fact Sheets are available to members at dillmanfamilyassociation.org. Researchers with additional information about occupations or trades in their Dillman family lines are encouraged to contact the DFA to contribute to future updates.

Sources

  1. German Historical Institute, “The German Component to American Industrialization,” Immigrant Entrepreneurship, immigrantentrepreneurship.org (accessed June 2026).
  2. FamilySearch, “Understanding Occupations in German Research,” familysearch.org (accessed June 2026).
  3. Dillman Family Association, Family Group Fact Sheet, Group 77 — August Dillmann of Nassau (2021), dillmanfamilyassociation.org.
  4. Dillman Family Association, Family Group Fact Sheet, Group 3 — The Erich Dihlmann Group (2021), dillmanfamilyassociation.org.
  5. Dillman Family Association, Family Group Fact Sheet, Group 92 — Georg Phillip Dielmann of Louisiana (2021). See also DFA Newsletter, Descendants and Ancestors, Vol. 14, Issue 1.
  6. Wikipedia, “Steinway and Sons,” en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steinway_%26_Sons (accessed June 2026); City Lore, “Steinway Piano Factory,” citylore.org (accessed June 2026).
  7. Dillman Family Association, Family Group Fact Sheets, Group 90 — George Dillmann of Chicago (2021); Group 45 — Johann Carl Dielmann of Zweibrücken (2021); Group 61 — George Dillmann of New York (2021), dillmanfamilyassociation.org.
  8. University of Texas at San Antonio, “Dielmann (Leo M. J.) Papers, Drawings, and Photographs,” Texas A&M University–San Antonio, digitalcommons.tamusa.edu (accessed June 2026).
  9. Texas State Historical Association, “Dielmann, Leo Maria Joseph,” Handbook of Texas Online, tshaonline.org (accessed June 2026).
  10. Syracuse University Library, “American Book Company Records,” Special Collections Research Center, library.syracuse.edu (accessed June 2026); Wikipedia, “American Book Company (1890),” en.wikipedia.org (accessed June 2026).
  11. Dillman Family Association, Family Group Fact Sheet, Group 28 — Bernhard Diehlmann of Klingenmünster (2021), dillmanfamilyassociation.org.
  12. Dillman Family Association, Family Group Fact Sheet, Group 24 — Prischib, Ukraine Dillmanns (2021), dillmanfamilyassociation.org.

AI Disclosure: This article was researched and written with the assistance of Claude, an AI assistant developed by Anthropic. Historical facts about specific individuals have been verified against primary sources and published references. Information about DFA Family Groups is drawn from the Dillman Family Association’s Family Group Fact Sheets.

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