Peter Guetig belongs to the fourth generation of immigrants and is related to three Schoenbaechler and five Kaelin lines - all with Einsiedeln roots.“My Einsiedeln heritage is conspicuous when I look at my family tree; and I am proud of having Swiss blood in me, astonishing, the many Schoenbachlers and Kaelins in my family.”
Here in Louisville immigrants have married people from their most immediate homeland. Then, they all knew each other. And it happened often that before marriage one had to talk with the pastor of Holy Trinity Church because of a possible blood relationship.
“Unfortunately, I have never been in Einsiedeln and know only a few German words. A pity, but that’s how it is: earlier, I didn’t have time to travel, and now I have Parkinson’s and am not that mobile anymore. But I ‘travel’ in my thoughts. My family research, I started it in the 1980s, when I had less work during the winter months.”
For years, Peter Guetig rummaged through the libraries of Louisville and consulted the Yellow Pages of telephone books, as well as the city directories, to establish his large Einsiedeln relationships. “It is enormous Sisiphus work.” Lacking time, Peter never joined the Gruetli Society but keeps extensive contacts with the families of his wide and large relations.“What a surprise: Thanks to the project ‘Einsiedeln Elsewhere’, I learned a few days ago of a Louisville cousin I hadn’t known before, David Kaelin. We have never met although we have common Kaelin great-grandparents.”
Martin Joseph Schoenbaechler, Peter’s great-grandfather on his mother’s side, emigrated from Oberegg at the Etzel to Louisville in 1883, together with his older brother Alphonse Gottfried. “It is said that a third brother had come along, but had perished in an avalanche on the way to Le Havre.”
In the 1880s and 1890s, Louisville was surrounded by numerous milk farms. The milk farmers, many from Switzerland and especially from Einsiedeln such as the Schoenbaechlers, Zehnders, Kaelins, Bisigs, and Ehrlers of the Cannons Lane, sold their milk in the expanding city of Louisville, and in adjoining counties of Kentucky. “For a gallon of milk they received ten cents.”
Jefferson County war damals der grösste Milchlieferant At that time, Jefferson County was America’s largest milk provider. It was a growing region and immigrants kept busy writing home: ‘Come to St. Matthews; here the milk business is great; here milk and honey are flowing!’”
Soon after his arrival in Kentucky, the some 20 year-old Martin Joseph from Oberegg began working as a milker in St. Matthews on the rented farm of his landsman, John Martin Kaelin. The farmstead belonged to the German Georg Guetig.
At that time, of course, no one guessed that decades later kinship ties would enmesh Einsiedlers with the Guetig family. “By the way, my great-grandfather, Georg Guetig, was the first who founded a school here for colored children.” For financial reasons, most Einsiedeln immigrants did not own but rented their farms. On his farm, Martin Joseph Schoenbaechler got to know Josephine, the oldest of the Kaelin daughters. In 1884, the farming couple John Martin and his wife Josephine both died within three months from poisoned water. They left 12 orphans behind, the youngest just about three months old. “On his deathbed, John is supposed to have offered the young Schoenbaechler the rented farm in case he should marry Josephine, his oldest daughter aged 17.”
The eleven siblings of Josephine had to leave their home; together they were all brought to the St. Joseph's Orphanage Home of the Ursulines on Frankfurt Avenue. “In our family one still talks today of the great tragedy in St. Matthews - many of my cousins come from that Kaelin family. By the way, at the entrance to the Home panels still refer to the Kaelins. The descendants of the orphans gratefully and generously support the Home still today. And in summer there is every year a large fundraising picnic - co-organized by Kaelins.”
Martin Joseph und Josephine Schoenbaechler hatten zusammen Martin Joseph and Josephine Schoenbeachler raised the very large family of 14 children who were born between 1887 and 1912. Some time between 1906 and 1908 the growing family left the milk farm on Cannons Lane in St. Matthews. “They wanted to live ‘downtown’, and my great-grandfather later worked in a brewery. Around 1901, he did a painting of the farm, later also a picture of the brewery, and both works still exist. They are most radiant and highly prized in our family.
My grandfather, Martin Anton Roman Schoenbaechler, was the fifth child in the family. In 1927, he too married a woman with Einsiedeln roots, Marie Augusta Rosa Kaelin of Louisville. Her parents had emigrated from Einsiedeln and Willerzell. I well remember my grandfather. I should have asked him so much more about the earlier generations, their emigration, and their life at the turn of the 20th century. I am sorry about it. He could yodel and spoke Swiss German; and I had gone fishing with him.”
Not long ago Peter Guetig, now age 66, wrote and published a book about “Louisville Dairies” that proves how genuinely family history (and histories), as well as the dairy industry interest him: “So that the knowledge about days past is preserved, and that it never will be forgotten how important the dairy industry has been for the region; nor how strongly our forebears from Switzerland, and especially those from Einsiedeln, have left their mark.”
