Walterscheid Letter from Germany, 1895

WALTERSCHEID

Posted By: David Reineke (email)
Date: 4/29/2007 at 15:38:10

I translated the following article from Der Carroll Demokrat, a German-language newspaper published in Carroll, Iowa, between about 1874 and 1920. It was originally published on Friday, 13 September 1895. Any information in brackets or notes at the end are my own explanations. It reads as follows:

An Interesting Letter from Germany.

Mr. Chas. Walterscheid of Halbur was good enough to send us the following letter, which we publish with his kind permission.

Hessler near Schalke in Westphalia, 26 August 1895.

Dear cousin Charles!
A few days ago by chance, an edition of the Carroll Demokrat fell into my hands. To my very great joy, in an article about Halbur I found that your father, my dear uncle “Papa Walterscheid,” had celebrated his Saint’s Day [could also mean birthday] in the circle of his sons, daughters, grandchildren, friends and neighbors. Although you have been out of my sight, you all have not been out of my thoughts. You have been there 22 years, and 14 years have flown since your last letter, dated 4 Feb. 1881 from Carroll, just enough time to make a child into a man, and a man into an old man. I have read the above article so many times that I can recite it by heart. I am heartily grateful to the editor of the Carroll Demokrat for this report. He gets it right when he aims to describe one’s fellow-countrymen through the activities of their friends and to refresh the pleasant memories of their loved ones. In our old fatherland, one must be a ruling prince with so and so many titles, or as my blessed father put it, “a big shot,” to be considered worthy of a mention in the press.

I don’t have to ask how it is going with you all, because where such a fine get-together takes place, it must certainly go well. I also now cannot complain about how things are going with me. To be sure, I have had all sorts of bad luck, but a real Walterscheid is never beaten and never loses his humor. So it was a great misfortune that, after six years of happy marriage blessed with two small girls and a still-little boy, my Maria passed away in 1889. I thought such a thing should not happen again, and so I have remained a widower. Earlier, from 1878 to 1883, I was a business traveler, and it probably would have been better, even today, if the honest Germans had more money and not only ordered their goods but also paid their bills. And so then I made a clean break, shook the dust of my feet, and started with the railroad in the area near Essen. At first with pick and shovel, then as a signalman, switchman, gradually climbing higher (like when one wants to climb Broeler Mountain), and for two years I have been at a newly constructed stop, or as the farmers say, a “station,” which happens to be called Hessler, and where eight passenger trains a day stop. There is not a lot to do, so I can comfortably handle the sale of tickets, the dispatch of the trains, and the little record keeping. I will probably not advance further, because I am not the right color—the “Blues” [meaning the Prussians] have preference, and also I do not understand how to submissively and obediently put my cap under my arm, or to bow and scrape with a servile face before powerful authorities, but I just do my damn job and go straight on.

When you, as a busy tradesman, find time to answer my letter, I would like that very much, and I ask you to give my heartiest greetings to your father and mother, brother Wilhelm, and to your wife and children whom I do not know, and not forgetting your sisters and other family.
Your cousin,
Johann Walterscheid

It was with pleasure that we read that the Carroll Demokrat was the indirect cause that these relatives, who for 14 years had not heard from each other, did not know where each other were living, or even whether they were dead, to come into contact again through a letter. The Carroll Demokrat has several subscribers in Westphalia, and so it happened that the gentleman by chance found a newspaper, with the further chance that it contained a good article about his dear relatives in America. Indeed, it was a remarkable occurrence.