Ringling, August portrait

August Ringling 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.