Short biography of Anton Eilers’ father:

ERNST JULIUS ADOLPH FRIEDRICH EILERS (1779 – 1851)

Called Fritz, he was born at Wernigerode in the Hartz Mountains, then Kingdom of Hannover, Dec. 22, 1779. (Hand written addition, Braunschweig).

This Fritz Eilers, continued to live at Wernigerode with his wife Elizabeth of 1838 when he felt he would like to move to a farm Hof Roedel at Mensfelden, Hessen, Nassau. Mensfelden is in the valley north of Frankfurt. At Mensfelden a few months later, was born, my father, Friederich Anton Eilers.

Grandfather Fritz Eilers had married twice. By his first wife he had four sons, all either foresters or ministers of the Lutheran Religion; and (left blank) daughters. One in particular Luise married one J. Friedrich Brandes (see discussion of his name) in charge of Iron works at Ilsenburg, close by. By his second wife, this Fritz had two children, a son, my father, and a younger daughter, Emma Franziska. When this Fritz Eilers, died at Mensfelden on June 7th, 1851 he had left with Anton Eilers the thought that Anton should become a minister and Anton took up his studied (sic) towards that end. He did not like that thought however, and inasmuch as to Friederich Herman Brandes had been left the particular thought of caring for Anton this question was brought up. Brandes then advised Anton that his father had wished that if Anton did not care to enter the ministry he should study mining. This pleased him greatly and he immediately began his studies in mining at Clausthal in the Hartz Mountains and at the University of Göttingen only a few miles away. When he received his degree, Anton with his mother and his sister Emma, in 1859 ( the last portion of this sentence and document is hand written and faint – seems to say that they sailed to New York where they had ‘relatives in the person of my maternal grandfather, Jakob Emrich’ – This suggests it was written by Karl or Else)

Original documents 

Ernst “Fritz” Eilers, painted in 1820 by Freidrich Kallmeyer: