The energetic immigrant, who later Americanized his name to Frederick Trump, was the grandfather of the current President of the United States. He emigrated to North America at the age of 16 in 1885, probably to avoid the compulsory military service in his home country, the then German Empire.
After working as a barber in New York, Frederick Trump continued west to Seattle, where he started his first restaurants and hotels – with "rooms for ladies", a contemporary euphemism for prostitutes to base themselves.
But the big money was to be found in the north. It is said to have been the newspaper headline "Gold! Gold! Gold!" that in the late 1890s lured the then 30-year-old Trump to move to the Klondike gold rush, as far west as you can get in the harsh and mountainous northern Canada.
Dead horses
In the gold mining community of Bennett, he opened The Arctic, a hotel with the business concept "food, liquor and sex", wrote the news agency Bloomberg in a report from the area in 2016.
The first time, Trump is rumored to have served, among other things, "roadkill", horse meat from pack animals that did not survive the long and hard journey to Klondike. And he offered "private lodges for ladies with company" – equipped with a gold scale so that newly rich prospectors could pay for "services".
"Made a big profit"
Such descriptions have Donald Trump, according to the media in the US, dismissed as "completely and utterly false". On the other hand, the grandson himself has come up with strange claims about his background, for example, that Friedrich was actually from Sweden.
Anyway, a newly drawn railway through Yukon meant that Bennett was transformed into a ghost town, which prompted Grandfather Trump to move the business north to Whitehorse. It was there that he then "really made a big profit", writes the Canadian politician Tom Mulcair, in an article where he apologizes for his family's role in paving the way for the phenomenon Donald Trump.
"Damn background"
It was namely Mulcair's own ancestor, Paul-Émile Mercier, who was behind the railway construction that made Trump's business flourish in Whitehorse.
"Call it perhaps the Canadian butterfly effect, but my own family history is thus intertwined in that a subsequently very rich Frederick Trump eventually returned to the US, and led to the world getting Donald", Mulcair writes. "And for this, I really apologize".
Donald Trump has a damn background, says author Pat Ellis to Canadian CTV.
People from the US made a big profit here and then went back to the states with their money.
Met grandmother
And, by the way, Trump is now talking about Canada joining the US, she adds with a laugh:
Now he's fantasizing about taking over Canada – is that showing gratitude, or?
After Whitehorse, however, the Trump family's American adventure almost came to an end for good. As early as 1901, the hotel manager returned to Germany, where he met Donald's future grandmother, Elisabeth Christ. She wanted to start a family in Europe, and it seems that Frederick Trump agreed. It was not until the German authorities revoked his citizenship, due to his evasion of military service much earlier, that the couple – apparently highly reluctantly – moved to New York permanently.
Victim of the pandemic
The money Trump had left from the "food, liquor and sex" business in Yukon corresponded to around five million kronor in today's monetary value. With that, the family got a good start, and owned several properties when Frederick Trump suddenly passed away in the spring of 1918, an early victim of what would become known as the global pandemic Spanish flu.
A few years later, his widow, together with the middle son Fred, founded the real estate company E Trump & Son. It was this company that could then – according to a pattern that is recognized from the board game Monopoly – grow into The Trump Organization, a global conglomerate owned by the current President of the United States.
Donald Trump has come up with different information about his background, and among other things, said he has Swedish roots. But it is clear that the Trump family has been based in the current state of Rhineland-Palatinate in western Germany at least since the late 17th century.
Friedrich Trumpf, or Frederick Trump, was born on March 14, 1869, in Kallstadt, a small village that has also become known as the origin of the "ketchup family" Heinz.
With his wife Elisabeth Christ, later Elizabeth Trump, he had the children Elizabeth, Fred, and the youngest John.
The middle son Fred married Mary Anne MacLeod in 1936, who came from the Outer Hebrides in Scotland. They had five children: Maryanne, Fred, Elizabeth, Donald, and Robert.
The real estate empire that Fred the Elder had built up was expected to be inherited by the eldest son, but when Fred the Younger went against his father and became a pilot, Donald instead inherited the company.
The patriarch Frederick Trump died in the Spanish flu pandemic in the spring of 1918, just 49 years old. Donald Trump, who was born in 1946, therefore never got to meet his grandfather.
