In March 2015, Vicky initiated the publication of an article about “Einsiedeln Elsewhere” in the Louisville Courier-Journal. She reported: “I was overwhelmed! Dozens of e-mails and telephone messages arrived on the very Sunday the article ­appeared. Many others followed.” The interest of people with an Einsiedeln background in Louisville seemes to be intense, and it is obvious that the heritage lives on unabated. Something is needed to get the ball rolling and explore the roots. The “Einsiedeln Elsewhere” project has achieved this. The huge response, the hundreds who expressed interest by attending an informational gathering - all with ancestors from Einsiedeln - speaks volumes.

For years now, Vicky Birchler Ullrich and her husband Bob have pursued the history of both of their families through extensive genealogical research. A glance at their website (www.ullrich-birchler.com) offers much insight into the families’ ­extended genealogies. In 2015, they published a book about German ­immigration to Louisville, “Germans in Louisville: A History”. Vicky Birchler Ullrich was the first interview candidate for the “Einsiedeln Elsewhere” project. She explains: “Although Bob is an engineering professor by profession, he has been passionate about genealogy for a long time and has been exploring our ­families in ­detail for twenty-seven years. Through his efforts, I too have become more familiar with my family roots.

Unfortunately my father passed away when I was six years old, and we naturally had more contact with the family of my German-­Irish mother. But Switzerland and Einsiedeln never ceased to captivate me. On the contrary, although I do not have a Swiss passport and speak neither German nor the Einsiedeln dialect, my Einsiedeln roots have remained important to me.

My membership in the Swiss Ladies Society, the sister organization of the Grütli Helvetia Society, has kept me in touch with the Louisville Swiss. It has about forty active members with Swiss roots, many of them having Einsiedeln ancestors. I hope that the ‘Einsiedeln Elsewhereʼ project will bring new younger members into the society, since its membership is quite senior. Years ago, I learned at my first meetings of the Swiss Ladies, that two of the attending members from one of the Schönbächler families had known my father, Edward Louis Birchler, personally. They had grown up in the same neighborhood. It was a touching experience! They mentioned that he had been good-­looking, and one of the ladies told me that as a teenager she had developed a crush on him.”

Vicky has served in the Swiss Ladies Society in a variety of ­positions: “I have filled them all from president to being a ­regular member. I like the cohesion. We meet three to four times a year, and we chat, share refreshments, and sometimes play a form of bingo called SWISSO, which involves terms such as ­‘Einsiedeln,’ ‘Skifahren’ (skiing), ‘Skipiste’ (ski run), etc. ­

We celebrate a Christmas party with the members of the Grütli Helvetia Society. The ties to the land of origin disappear more and more in Louisville. ‘Swissness’ is gradually vanishing. ­Older people pass on, and with them memories and stories vanish. Of course, it is the normal process of assimilation, but I still lament it. We are now the fifth to the seventh generation since the arrival of Swiss immigrants, and we know all too little about our past. Perhaps interest in matters of the past is tied to age, but this project offers an opportunity to learn more about our roots! The leisure to search for one’s roots comes only after reaching age fifty or more, and after career, family, and children. Several years ago, one of my cousins called that he had found a box of old photos after his mother, my aunt Elizabeth, died. He was unable to identify the family members in the photos, but knowing of my interest in genealogy asked if I wanted the photos. Bob and I drove to Cincinnati to fetch the documents and discovered a treasure trove: a picture of my great-grandparents, Leonz Zacharias Birchler and Catharina Elisabetha Oechslin, with their children. One little boy in the picture was Frank Stephan Birchler, my grandfather.”

In the cozy Ullrich-Birchler family room, where a cuckoo clock loudly announces the hour, and where many ancestral pictures are displayed, Vicky leafs through the family history: Leonz Zacharias came from Trachslau and Catharina Elisabetha from Bennau. They were married in March 1852 in Einsiedeln and emigrated to America several weeks later. Bob and Vicky found passenger ­records that showed there were fifty to one hundred Einsiedeln immigrants on board the steamboat Great Western that sailed from Liverpool in May 1852. The vessel also carried many German and Irish immigrants. It arrived at the port of New York on May 29, 1852. They still have the passport of Zacharias, which states that he was a carpenter. The first daughter was born in Louisville in 1853, so Zacharias and Catharina must have come directly to Louisville from New York. Why? Who knows, except that many ­other Swiss immigrants migrated to this city.

In 1853, two of Zacharias’s brothers, Meinrad Leontius Zacharias Birchler and Meinrad Stephan Birchler, emigrated to Louisville with their mother, Maria Anna Lucia Kälin Birchler. They came on the steamboat Admiral and arrived in New York on September 15, 1853. Meinrad Leontius Zacharias Birchler died in 1854, and his widow married another Einsiedler, Frank Eberle.

On Bloody Monday, August 6, 1855, at least twenty-two people lost their lives in the ethnic and religious strife that embroiled the German and Irish Catholic immigrants of Louisville. It led the Birchler family to move to Fulda in southern Indiana, in the vicinity of the St. Meinrad monastery, a daughter monastery of Maria Einsiedeln. According to the diary of Jacques Martin, a Frenchman who chronicled the early history of Fulda, his neighbor, Zacharias Birchler, built a lovely farmhouse for his wife. Zacharias tried farming, but with little success. Catharina did not feel happy in southern Indiana and wanted to move back to the city, so before 1859 the family returned to Louisville. ­Zacharias’s brother, Stephan, married Maria Anna Hurm in Fulda, so he stayed in southern Indiana. Today, because of Stephan and his thirteen children, there is a large contingent of Birchler relatives in the environs of St. Meinrad, Indiana. The mother, Maria Anna Lucia Kälin Birchler, died in Fulda in 1860.

Zacharias and Catharina had six children who lived to adulthood: Josephine (1853) and Rosa (1855) were born in Louisville before the family moved to Indiana. Joseph (1859), Benedict (1861), Frank (1862), and Caroline (1864) were born in Louisville after the family returned from Indiana.

According to the 1860 U.S. Federal census, Zacharias and Catharina were living on the northeast corner of Breckinridge and Jackson Streets in what is now the Smoketown neighborhood of Louisville, and Zacharias was working as a carpenter. In 1865, the family moved to the Isaac Everett estate on Bonnycastle Place, where they became dairy farmers. When the Everett estate was acquired by the city of Louisville to establish Cherokee Park (about 1877), Zacharias and Catharina bought property on Workhouse Road (now Lexington Road), near Gillman’s Point (now St.Matthews), where they continued dairy farming well into ­retirement. Zacharias died in 1903, and Catharina died in 1904.

It is noteworthy that three of the children of Zacharias and Catharina married other Einsiedeln immigrants: Josephine married Alois Friedrich Schönbächler, Rosa married Fred Kälin, and ­Caroline married Tobias Bisig. Frank married Rosa Zehnder, the daughter of Einsiedeln immigrants, Dominick Zehnder and ­Josephine Schädler. Frank and Rosa were Vicky’s paternal grand­parents. All of these families stayed in Louisville. Son Joseph Birchler moved to Coulterville, Illinois, where he married Mary Lena Vogel from Macon County, Missouri. ­Together, they had a family of ten children, whose descendants still live in southern Illinois. Son Benedict Birchler joined the U.S. Army and served several enlistments, including service in the Spanish-American War. He was married once, briefly, and died in Redlands, California in 1938.

Source: www.ullrich-birchler.com