Gwenda Blair and North America

North America: Friedrich Trump had been in North America a few years when he set out for the Yukon, says an author who just completed a new edition of her multi-generational family biography, according to Hamilton Spectator. That Canadian chapter proved pivotal for the entrepreneurial German immigrant, says Gwenda Blair, author of "The Trumps: Three Generations That Built An Empire." "It allowed him to get together the nest egg he'd come to the United States for," the author and Columbia University journalism professor said in an interview. "Whether he could've accumulated that much money somewhere else, in that short a period of time, as a young man with no connections, and initially not even English, is certainly ... unlikely." He'd left Europe in 1885 at age 16, a barber apprentice whose father died young. Trump grandfather started the family fortune in an adventure that involved the Klondike gold rush, the Mounties, prostitution and twists of fate that pushed him to New York City. Trump wanted a life outside the barber shop, far from the family-owned vineyards his ancestors had been working since they'd settled in Germany Kallstadt region in the 1600s carrying the soon-altered surname Drumpf. Within five years he'd anglicized his name to Frederick; moved to the young timber town of Seattle; and amassed enough cash to buy tables and chairs for a restaurant. He sailed in steerage to join his sister in New York. (www.immigrantscanada.com). As reported in the news.