HOME IN TAZEWELL COUNTY

Three years ago, I made a trip to Tazewell County, Illinois. My goal was to visit William Ritterhouse's grave. He's buried in the Miars Cemetery which is about five miles outside the small town of Pekin. We were lucky to have some of the members of the Tazewell County Genealogical Society assist us. They had already prepared some information for us and had it waiting at their wonderful library. This included a couple of maps of the county which showed not only where Miars Cemetery was located, but also where William's farm was located. One of the members even drove us to the cemetery. She even stopped by the Pekin Cemetery to show us the grave of Pekin's most famous son -- Senator Everett Dirksen.


The Miars Cemetery is a very small country cemetery located in the Elm Grove Township. Our local guide had arranged for the caretaker of the cemetery, Keith Keller, to meet us out there. Actually, Mr. Keller arranged to be plowing right by the cemetery and parked his tractor and walked over to the cemetery when he saw us. Unfortunately, our ancestor's grave is not marked. There is a record of his grave in row 4, grave number 28. Mr. Keller unfortunately did not know where row 4, grave 28 was located. We did locate approximately where he was buried. (Note: We may try to raise funds to buy a marker for William's grave. If you happen to read this blog and would be interested in contributing to such an effort, let me know in a comment. I'm sure Mr. Keller would help us accomplish that if we decided to do it.)

While we were at the cemetery, Mr. Keller showed us where William's farm was located. You can see it from the cemetery. His farm bordered the Miars' property which holds the cemetery. It is due west of the cemetery, maybe a quarter of a mile.

After we were finished at the cemetery, our wonderful guide took us to the farm where we met the current owner, Wilda Keller. (Wilda is Keith's mother.) She grew up on the old Ritterhouse farm, in the house she believes was built by William. The house is a two-story frame house in the salt box style.. Wilda told us that when she was little, in the early thirties, an older gentleman, whom she believes was one of the Ritterhouse boys, visited the farm and said he was born in the house. She described the farm and some of the changes that had taken place there -- like when the various barns and out buildings had been added. Wilda even sent me pictures of the farm from 1919 after I got home. We were not able to enter the house because of the condition it was in, but Wilda has plans to restore the home and Keith may be moving into it eventually.

It is difficult to describe the thrill of walking around the old farm knowing that the American roots of our Ritterhouse clan began there. I felt a connection to the site and to our history.

TWO VICTORIAN GENTLEMEN

Recently I found a photograph online of Fred Ritterhouse that reminded me of a picture I had of his brother, Charles. They're a little older than in the tintypes discussed previously, but are still fairly young men. I'd judge they are in their twenties when these two photos were taken. My guess is that they were taken between 1890 and 1895, probably after they moved to northern Kansas from Illinois, which was around 1890.


Both young men are dressed in fairly typical late Victorian clothing. In this era, three-piece suits ("ditto suits") consisting of a sack coat with matching waistcoat/vest and trousers were worn, as were matching coat and waistcoat with contrasting trousers. The centerpiece of men's dress at that time was the waistcoat or vest. According to one source I read, it was typical for men to own several vests to change the look of their main suit. These vests usually had collars or lapels and were single-breasted, which is the style worn by both Charles and Fred. Also according to the above-mentioned online source: "In the Victorian era, daily dress was much more formal than it is today. Unless they were a workman or laborer, every gentleman was expected to wear a coat, vest, and hat. To walk around in shirtsleeves without vest or coat would be the modern-day equivalent of traipsing about in one’s underwear. Very unseemly, and most ungentlemanly!" In these two pictures, Fred is looking particularly dapper!

Both men are also wearing the most basic accessory for every Victorian gentleman which was the cravat. Charles' ensemble also includes the nearly universal pocket watch and fob, which were prominently displayed hanging from the front vest pockets. Their shoes are probably the square-toed style of the turn of the century. Both men sport the short hair cuts of the times and the ubiquitous moustache.

I would guess these pictures were taken several years apart since the brothers look to be a similar age. Charles was eight years older than Fred, so his picture was most likely taken earlier in the decade, probably before his marriage in 1893. Fred's may have been taken in the latter half of the decade, sometime before his marriage in 1898.

The stylin' brothers look very similar and one can certainly tell they are related.

JOHN WILLIAM'S VOYAGE TO AMERICA

We may not know WHY our ancestor, Johann Wilhelm Rittershaus, left his home in Germany and journeyed to America, but we do know WHEN and HOW he came. According to the ship record, William left the northern port city of Bremen, Germany May 2, 1848 aboard the George Washington. I've tried to imagine what that trip was like for the 28-year-old who was leaving the ancestral homeland of his family who had deep, deep roots in the Barmen, Germany area. William would have paid about $16 for his steerage passage from Bremen to America. The voyage could not have been a lot of fun. It lasted six weeks. He surely knew many of his fellow passengers since they mostly came from the same area of Germany that he did. But the quarters were close and uncomfortable. There was not a lot to do. And six weeks is a long time.

When I was in Germany last fall, I visited a museum in the port city of Bremerhaven, which is about 50 miles (via the Weser River) north of Bremen. The Washington would have traveled through Bremerhaven on its way to New York. The museum showed what the German immigrants would have looked like as they stood on the dock with their belongings piled around them. Dressed in simple, peasant clothing, with their faces a mixture of eagerness and anxiety, these ghosts of our ancestors convey the hopefulness they were feeling about their new life. This museum also had reconstructions of the boats the immigrants traveled in. The one most similar to the Washington showed just how cramped the space was. The shared bunks housed 20 or so people, many of them coughing, crying and vomiting (which the museum highlighted via a soundtrack of the varied noises passengers would have been making). For William's voyage, there were 186 passengers most of whom were crammed into steerage for the six week voyage.

Notes included with the displays at the Bremerhaven museum explained that for hundreds of passengers, the cramped quarters in steerage were dining hall, dormitory and lounge in one. When the weather was good, the steerage passengers could spend time up on deck with music and dancing provided a welcome change. But, when storms rose at sea, the passengers had to leave the decks. For steerage passengers that could mean days without fresh air or daylight. Close quarters and poor sanitary facilities were conducive to disease. Spoiled food and bad drinking water only made matters worse. There was no doctor on board. It was not unusual for passengers to die on the voyage across the Atlantic.

What was the George Washington like? According to the "Palmer List of Merchant Vessels", the George Washington was built in 1822, probably in Killingsworth, Connecticut. According to Bremen records, it weighed in at 450 tons. From 1839 to 1849, it was owned by the Bremen firm of C.L. Brauer & Sohn. William's 1848 voyage was captained by Mathias Probst. Another source, "The Ships List" website, describes the George Washington as a 2,000 ton steamship. This ship was described as "the first American Atlantic liner and also one of the ugliest ships ever put afloat" (in Mail and Passenger Steamships of the Nineteenth Century). In June 1847, a review of the Washington's trip to Quebec claimed that she turned out to be slow and "rolled rather than steamed along." A letter in 1832 described the voyage across the Atlantic to New York on the George Washington as "a most delightful passage." The Washington was a paddle steamship. Her paddle wheels were apparently 39 feet in diameter. She had two boilers and three furnaces. Here's what she looked like:

Imagining William's six week trip to his new life only increases my admiration for my immigrant ancestor. It seems like it would have taken courage, fortitude and optimism to leave his family, friends and known life and endure the journey, first to Bremen and then across the ocean to the unknown. Whatever drove him to the extreme decision to make the journey to America, I appreciate the sacrifices he made to start his new life!

WILLIAM THE LOCKSMITH

Great-great-grandpa William Ritterhouse was a schlosser or locksmith. Most locksmiths were blacksmiths who made locks, so they were called locksmiths. As early as 1411, Charles IV of Germany created the title of "Master Locksmith". Locksmiths were skilled metalworkers who trained as apprentices and became journeymen locksmiths. One source I read mentioned that the work of a locksmith required ingenuity and accuracy. Ingenuity was probably needed to stay ahead of the lock-pickers.

To become a master locksmith, the journeyman designed and produced a one-of-a-kind "masterpiece" lock as a "test". These locks were displayed without covers to show the component parts of the mechanisms, their functions, etc. and were never actually used on a door. The lock displayed above was made by great-great-grandpa William. I'm wondering if it could have been his "masterpiece" lock. It has been passed down through the family. At one time, William's granddaughter, Edna (the daughter of Charles), owned it, but she passed it to her youngest brother, Merle Ritterhouse, who willed it to his grandson, Jim Ritterhouse, the current owner.

William was identified sometimes as a blacksmith and sometimes just as a smith. The ship record listed him as a smith. Then in 1850, according to the census, he was working as a blacksmith in Blair, Pennsylvania. The 1860 Tazewell County, Illinois, census also states he is a blacksmith. By this time, locks were being mass-produced, but maybe not out in the prairies of Illinois. William also farmed, probably because he couldn't support his family on his smithing alone.