[2] While playing music together at court gatherings, she met Georg Friedrich "Fritz" Holekamp (1812–1862), the son of a wealthy Hannover builder and an educated royal architect and musician.

On September 16, 1844, Fritz Holekamp entered into a contract with the German Immigration Company,[3] and soon thereafter the couple boarded the ship Johann Dethard, arriving at Galveston and then at Indianola in November 1844.

[1][4] Led by Prince Solms, the 228 immigrants from the Johann Dethard proceeded overland from Indianola to the site chosen to be the first German settlement in Texas, New Braunfels.

(It was later discovered that Prince Carl of Solms-Braunfels purposely chose the more remote and difficult route from Indianola, instead of from Galveston, to isolate the colonists from the local Texans.)

When word first broke of Texas being admitted to the Union in 1845, Betty Holekamp gathered pieces of cloth from her home and from her neighbors and used them to sew a 6-by-3-foot (1.83 by 0.91 m) United States flag (with a lone star in the field of blue) that was unfurled and flown in the town square of New Braunfels.

[10] When the American Civil War started, Fritz Holekamp joined the Confederacy at the rank of captain working as a surgeon because he had some medical training in Germany.

[1] Widowed, Betty Holekamp took in boarders and opened a sewing and washing business to provide for her seven children (her son, Ernest, later became the first mayor of Junction, Texas).