Christian (Meijer) Meyer was born in 1887 in the Netherlands. He came to America in 1912 with a man named Jurien Kuiper, whom he know quite well. They boarded an ocean liner in the Netherlands, which stopped first in Boulogne, France before arriving in Hoboken, New Jersey on February 8. After clearing customs, they pushed westward, settling in Grand Rapids, Michigan. They first settled at 335 Grand St. with an elderly lady, but were subsequently forced to move to 323 Goodrich St. when she fell ill during the early spring.

Their first year in Michigan was a rough one as the two tried to acclimate to conditions in the new area. They were intiailly surprised at how cold the weather was during the winter months and how rainy the spring was. Soon after their move to Goodrich St., the two parted ways following a dispute over how the rent was being shared. It is unclear whether Kuiper moved back to the Netherlands or stayed around the Grand Rapids area. The two of them had no further contact (Kuiper treats the situation calmly not harboring a brudge, while Meyer seems better over the situation, repeatedly stating how happy he is without Kuiper around).

During the summer months of 1912, Meyer took a long vacation to Chicago with the landlord and his wife. He sent many postcards depicting famous sights of the city back to the the Netherlands. When he returned home Meyer took a job at a paper factory in Kalamazoo, Michigan and was apparently laid off in the fall. In September of that year, he took a new job at a hearse factory back in Grand Rapids that his immigration sponsor got him, which he enjoyed very much. He attended an animal exhibition with his landlady, who raised chickens and dovers in the backyard on Goodrich, in the fall of 1912.

He stops sending postcards home to the Netherlands in January of 1913 and disappears from the record until 1915. That year Polk's Grand Rapids City Directory lists him as boarding at the Goodrich St. address and being employed as a painter. The next year he was employed as a painter for the Great Northern Ice Company. From 1917-1920 he lived at the same address and worked as a painter with H.E. Barkley Co. He disappears from the record again from 1912-1922, reappearing in 1923 as the owner of the Goodrich St. house and working as an auto painter. He married his wife Frances in 1926 and the two of them stayed in that house until 1927 when they moved to 915 Fairmount near the Heritage Hill neighborhood. Meyer changed jobs in 1913, moving to O.J. Arnold and Sons. The last clear record of him shows him as being single, still living at the Fairmount address. It is likely he died somewhere in Michigan in 1963.

Meyer's and Kuiper's postcards are an excellent record of immigrant's impressions of Grand Rapids and what their lives were like. The postcards chronicle their journey to America and the things they encountered here for the first year. They show lives that changed while living in American and a friendship that was torn apart under the pressure of assimilating to a new culture.