The Late, Late Show
I’ve been working on my family history tonight and I think I’ve made a discovery about my maternal 2nd great grandfather, Nicholas Wilhelm REITER. I want to share it with you and get your thoughts. It concerns the draft during the Civil War.
I’ve written about Nicholas before and you can find those posts here:
- Occupation: Cabinetmaker (The most recent of 4 posts on the old blog at LiveJournal.)
- Lost and Found, Part 1 and Part 2 (They’re long. Sorry.)
- Reiter and Davis Marriage (This is very much my OLD style of writing- more oriented toward research than telling the stories of my ancestors. Still, it’s worth a look I think.)
Nicholas has been hard to research. He immigrated from Germany with his parents when he was very young according to my granny BATES, but I have not been able to locate immigration records that I’m certain are his. I don’t know who his parents or brothers were and have been unable to locate him in records prior to his marriage to my maternal second great grandmother, Sarah DAVIS REITER. In addition, there are so many ways to spell his last name (and even multiple ways to spell his first name!) that it becomes overwhelming very quickly. (And let me tell you, I get tired of OCR programs hitting on the word ‘typewriter’ and passing that off as a search result for ‘Nicholas Reiter’!) So, I was pretty excited when I found the following article as I’m fairly certain this is him. The first article I found was in German and I’ll post a shortened version of it below. After I’d gone to the trouble of translating it, I found an article in English that was basically the same information. I wish I could say I translated it using my own skills but alas, I used Google translate. I used to be fluent in German after taking 4 years of it in high school but that’s been a very long time ago. German was, however, my favorite foreign language to learn. But I digress…
First, the article in German from the Minnesota Staats-Zeitung out of St. Paul, Minnesota dated 4 June 1864, found at newspapers.com:
Here is an article out of the St. Cloud Democrat with basically the same information. I included the whole article here because it only lists Stearns and Morrison Counties as opposed to numerous counties like the article in German. The print is tiny. Sorry about that! If you’re looking for Nicholas’ name, go to the town of Wakefield (right before Morrison County). He’s in the second column right above the glitch or paper crease mark.
I know this doesn’t seem like much, but it’s the first new information about Nicholas that I’ve found in a very long time so I was really excited to find these. Hopefully this new information will lead me to more information about him. I would love to get one more generation back on this family line. Feel free to beat me to that research if you want. Just don’t be surprised if I ask you to write a blog post about it!!
Until next time,
Lisa @ Days of Our Lives blog