# Dresden, Sachsen, Germany For the Helbig family, Dresden was the beginning. The capital of the Kingdom of Saxony, set along the Elbe River, it was the city where Robert "Traugott Wilhelm" Helbig was born on 23 May 1852, and the place where he and his young wife started their family before they left Germany behind. ## A Family Begun on the Elbe Robert entered the world in Dresden in the spring of 1852. His parents were Johann Friedrich Traugott Helbig and Caroline Louise Adelheid Bergman. Robert carried his father's names forward, and the family line of Traugott—an old German name meaning "trust God"—passed down through the generations. A little more than a year after Robert's birth, on 8 November 1853, Pauline "Friederike Bertha Auguste" Metzelt was born, the woman who would become his wife. The two grew up in the same Saxon world and married on 23 February 1877. ## The Years of Marriage and First Children The late 1870s were the years the Helbig household took shape in Dresden. On 27 October 1877, not long after their wedding, Robert and Pauline welcomed their first daughter, Johanne Ernestine Helbig. A second daughter, Margarethe Elisabeth Helbig, followed on 25 June 1880. These were the daughters born on German soil—the two little girls who would later cross the Atlantic with their parents and vanish from the record somewhere in America, remembered only in family rumor as having died young, perhaps in Kansas. In Dresden, though, they were simply the newest members of a growing family. The autumn of 1880 brought sorrow. On 7 September 1880, Johann Fredriech Traugott Helbig died. His passing marks one of the last events tying the family to Dresden. ## A City Left Behind By trade Robert was a baker, and it was that skill he carried out of Saxony when he emigrated. Within a year of the events recorded here in Dresden, he and his family were bound for the United States, eventually settling far from the Elbe in the dry country of New Mexico. The remaining Helbig children—Gertrude Marie, Albert Fred, Barbara, Marie Mary Hedwig, and Frances Kathryn—would be born in America, and it was there that the family's long, eventful story would play out. But it all began in Dresden: a baker born in 1852, a bride born in 1853, a marriage in 1877, and two daughters born into a household that would soon set out for a new continent. For the Helbigs, this Saxon capital was home only briefly—the starting point of a journey that would carry the family thousands of miles away.