Emilia+Irarrazabal

Some immigrants in Chile

Bernardo Philippi

Bernardo Philippi was my great-great-great-great-grandfather. He was born in 1811 in Germany.   His mother taught him to read and write and after some years an adventurous spirit woke up in him and he decided to travel to America. In 1831, Bernardo arrived to Chile, where he dedicated his time in archaeological excavations. There he related with the authorities and started promoting the idea of the foreign settling. He went back to Europe and sold to the museums the vegetables and minerals things form Chile. The next year he went to Chile again and he explored the South of Chile and made maps.  In 1848, he was appointed by the Chilean government to lead a campaign of German immigrants to settle in the South part of Chile. He was the first german to be appointed to do this job.  So Bernardo went to Europe and took more than 200 settlers to the South of Chile, including his family. Under his charge, in October of that same year, Philippi wanted to pay a visit to a fuegino cacique and left with 7 men and an indigenous translator around Punta Arenas, a city in the very South of Chile. There the natives decapitate him in 1852 and his head was never found.

Rudolfo Philippi

 Rudolfo Philippi, Bernardo Philippi's brother, was born in 1808 in Germany. He emigrated to Chile in 1851 with his brother to settle in there, carrying out extensive scientific work. He was a naturalist, specialist in botany and zoology, enriching the Museum of Natural History of Chile's collections with his 26 scientific explorations to different points of the country. They were recorded in over 446 articles. He also was a professor and wrote a book. He died in Santiago in 1904.

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 * My dad

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