At this time he became engaged to my mother whom he had courted for a long time, and got married early in 1856. "So much love I have sewn into this shift,” said my mother some years later to me when she looked at my father's nuptual nightshirt.
In those days the law made it very difficult to make oneself independent. 
My father, as a fully trained miller could become either the master of a mill or of a flour business. For the first it was necessary to buy a mill. There was no opportunity for this nor did they have enough money. A flour business however, could be obtained - like a chemist shop nowadays; through acquiring an already
existing so called ‘goodwill’, or through the grant of a new lease. Meanwhile my father married as manager of the Montag’s mill. 
At the same time he endeavoured to obtain from the government a permit for a new flour business, which was justified by the increase in population of Bamberg. After lengthy efforts this was granted at long last, not to my father but to a dancing teacher, who, among other
trades had once been a miller. It was not possible to find out why the business did not go to my father. The dancing teacher later on went miserably bankrupt, but that was little use to my parents. All they could do now in order to achieve independence was to buy a ‘goodwill’. There was a chance of this after the death of a flour dealer called Urwein. The cost of the business left my parents
with little money. A few years later a law to free the trade was introduced and thus the money spent was wasted.