Ringling, August portrait

Born in 1826 in Dankelshausen in the Kingdom of Hanover, August Ringling, the father of the famous Ringling Bros., immigrated to the United States around 1847. A harness maker by trade, he first settled in Milwaukee, where he met and married Marie Salomé Juliar (b. 1833), a young woman of French-German ancestry who had immigrated with her parents and siblings in 1845. During their married life, the Ringlings lived in McGregor, Iowa, and Baraboo, Wisconsin, and a number of other towns in the Upper Mississippi River Valley. They had eight surviving children, seven boys and one girl. From: Alfred Ringling, Life Story of the Ringling Brothers. Chicago, IL: R.R. Donnelley & Sons, Co., 1900, p. 67.