Emil Ochsner (1877-1953) grew up in Bennau near Einsiedeln and went to Louisville as a young man. His granddaughter, Marcy Walker Murdoch, tells what may be known about him. For instance, that he was 5.7 feet tall, had brown eyes, but no other special marks, all mentioned in Emil Ochsner’s naturalization certificate of 1913. The document is preserved nice and neat in a thick folder, together with hundreds of other documents such as pictures, genealogies, newspaper clippings, and nationality certificates. Marcy is her family’s memory supported by the items in her folder.
No difficulty is too big if the adding of another branch to her family genealogy is involved. The unclear relationship with another Ochsner family in Louisville left her no rest. Without further ado, she ordered DNA-tests from a specialized firm in Houston, Texas, on the basis of saliva samples. The result: The families had a common 18th century ancestor and some new cousins of the sixth degree.
Marcy’s husband who is of Scottish descent is interested in family genealogy too. They live in a comfortable home in St. Matthews. Besides exploring her Swiss roots, she is also vitally interested in her American descent. She is a proud member of the Daughters of the American Revolution because she is able to trace her family roots all the way to the time of the American War of Independence. Mary’s interest in her own roots is, however, not a purely intellectual matter but also involves practice. She especially loves Swiss yodeling. Her mother, her grandfather, her aunts, all had enjoyed it. And she herself had simply imitated them. At three years old, she would yodel in the middle of the street or in a grocery store. Yodeling, she claims, is a “gift from God”. Later, she purchased all kinds of recordings, cassettes, and CDs that offered yodeling songs.
The music would cheer her up when feeling sad. “I have so much of Switzerland in me”, she observed. Marcy does not speak German. Her mother didn’t either, except for a few words of Swiss German that she called “low German”. The texts of the yodeling songs Marcy cannot understand, but she is trying to catch their sound. She was told in Switzerland that her kind of yodeling was not quite right, but she loves it anyway.
Marcy tells of her grandfather Emil Ochsner. He died in 1953 when she was but three years old. What ever she knows about him, she had to glean with great effort from older relatives and from various notes. He had come to Louisville at age 22 in 1899. Four sisters and three brothers were later to follow him to Louisville, but he was the first “American” of the family. Several moved on westward, some all the way to California.
Emil, however, stayed put and was employed at the dairy farm of a Gyr family. He was working his way up and together with his brothers Benno and Meinrad was able in 1931 to purchase his own farm in Middletown some miles east. It belongs to the family to this day. But the land is leased out and the farm buildings are in disrepair. In America Emil Ochsner also got to know his wife Anna Maria Eberle who had come from Einsiedeln to Louisville in 1903. They got married in 1907 in Saint Boniface Church.
Marcy observed that in Louisville, Swiss traditions were unfortunately vanishing. In her family, however, contacts with the old homeland never quite ceased. Dozens of faded postcards from Swiss relatives in Marcy’s folder attest to it. She, too, was keeping contacts, although, these were mostly limited to Christmas cards.
But she had been there, in Einsiedeln, and she had seen the house of her grandfather in Bennau and where he had gone to school. Marcy grows emotional when she talks about it - the visit had been the fulfillment of a dream. She would not want to have missed it for anything. She would have liked to stay much longer than the merely few hours but was tied to the schedule of the traveling group. During the visit, Marcy proudly wears a “Dirndl” she had purchased on the same trip in Austria. There were otherwise all too few occasions to wear it.
