Making Their Luck: The Zetmeir Family in Bavaria and America

By Karl David Zetmeir

MAKING THEIR LUCK is the personal family genealogy of the Zehetmeier family, and the story of how they immigrated from Bavaria in 1883 to settle first in the coal region of Kansas and then the harsh Oklahoma plains at the turn of the Twentieth Century. It is reflective of the common immigrant experience in America; that of leaving a country with no prospects to voyage to another in hopes of making a better life. Originally motivated to just discover his family’s place of origin in Germany, the author’s genealogical search turned into a lifetime pursuit of his family roots. From their first known ancestors in Germany, it follows their family tree to the author’s great grandfather crossing the Atlantic to settle in Kansas during its frontier times, and to later take a growing family by wagon across the plains to build a homestead in western Oklahoma. It is a journey over a path well-known to genealogists; years of detective work in libraries, archives, vital statistics, church records and family interviews to capture the story of his ancestors. He has added from local histories of the regions his family lived to gain a better perspective of their life and times. It tells of the hard scrabble existence of coal-mining, and surviving a near disaster, to cutting a sod house out of the desolate prairie to make a 160-acre homestead a place to raise a family and prosper. Far from just a ledger of names and birthdates, it describes how they worked and endured to carve out a life in a new country and set a legacy of hard work and integrity that has spanned their generations. The title itself stems from a popular family phrase: “If I only work hard enough, I’ll make my own luck.”

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Apr 11, 2021
• ISBN: 9781665521376

Karl David Zetmeir

Karl David Zetmeir is a retired US Army officer whose interest in his family’s German genealogy and history began with stories his father told during family trips. Born in Kansas City, Missouri, he graduated from North Kansas City High School where his studied the German and history. His military career led him to assignments in Germany, where he began what would be a thirty-year odyssey of researching his family story. He retired after twenty-eight years of active service as a Lieutenant Colonel, having served in various assignments in the United States, Germany, the Mid-East and Africa. These included Operations Desert Storm and Desert Shield, Bosnia-Herzegovina and the first US officer assigned to the German Bundeswehr’s psychological operations unit. He holds a bachelor’s degree in Political Science: International Politics from Park University, and a master’s degree in International Relations from Troy University. His final assignment was as a Special Operations Forces instructor at the US Army’s Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. Karl met his wife, Manuela during his first overseas assignment to Berlin, and they raised four children together. He currently works for the US Department of Veterans Affairs in Leavenworth, Kansas.

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© 2021 Karl David Zetmeir. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse  04/08/2021

ISBN: 978-1-6655-2138-3 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-6655-2136-9 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-6655-2137-6 (e)

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Scripture quotations marked KJV are from the Holy Bible, King James Version (Authorized Version). First published in 1611. Quoted from the KJV Classic Reference Bible, Copyright © 1983 by The Zondervan Corporation.

DEDICATION

This book would not have been possible without the help of others.

The contributions of so many family members over the years are

acknowledged and appreciated. I therefore respectfully dedicate

this book to all the storytellers in our family who have lived,

loved, struggled, endured, and worked to make their own luck.

Whatsoever you do, do it heartily, as to the Lord, and not unto men.

Knowing that of the Lord, you will receive the reward

of the inheritance: for you serve the Lord Christ.

-Colossians 3:23-24 KJV

If I only work hard enough, I’ll make my own luck.

-Les Zetmeir, 1920-2005

Karl David Zetmeir

Lieutenant Colonel, US Army (Retired)

Leavenworth, Kansas

2021

CONTENTS

The Journey

The History Of The Zetmeir Name

Bavaria And The Thirty Years War

Numbering System

Genealogy

Kansas in 1883-1900

Oklahoma Territory 1901-1920

Arkansas And Beyond: The First American Generation

Katharine Stangl-Zetmeir (Moore-Garrigues-Smith)

Joseph Zetmeir, Jr.

John l. Zetmeir

Emil A. Zetmeir

Mary F. Zetmeir

Family Anecdotes

Photographs

Bibliography

Your Story

Zetmeirs%20Emporia_repaired%20family%20photo_GS.jpg

The Zetmeir Family, Emporia, Kansas, circa 1889.

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THE JOURNEY

M Y INTEREST IN OUR FAMILY history really began when I was just a kid. I loved asking my folks for stories about the times in which they had lived. Because my father was a particularly good storyteller, our family trips were filled with his funny anecdotes and stories about his life growing up in Topeka, Kansas. They were about how they lived through the Great Depression, going to school, playing sports, his parents, siblings, relatives, working conditions, the railroads, the war, their neighbors and just everything about that time seemed to make cracking good stories that kept us entertained for hours. We knew of course, that our surname was German, but other than hearing they had come from somewhere around Munich, nobody knew for sure if that was true or not, or even when my great-grandparents had arrived in America.

As a result, my interest in our family’s German past stayed with me as I grew up. I studied German language in high school and even joined the high school German Club. When I graduated from North Kansas City High School in 1977, I enlisted in the US Army to be a Military Policeman. Even my choice of service was based in part at least, on the chance to be stationed in Germany and see the land of our heritage. After serving my first year in Virginia, I got my chance in March 1979 when I was reassigned to the US Army’s Berlin Brigade. It was in West Berlin that I met my future wife; Manuela Brümmer. Her family had fled East Berlin in 1961 just before the communist East Germans divided the city with the infamous Berlin Wall. Manuela spoke no English at the time and my paltry two years of high school German hardly made me a linguist, but it at least gave us a foundation to communicate.

I had met Manuela in the last four months of my three-year Berlin tour. In fact, I already had orders to go to California, so in 1982 I had to leave Berlin and Manuela for what became a lonely one-year assignment to Fort Hunter-Liggett, California. During that year, we maintained our relationship through letters and monthly phone calls. In April 1983, the US Army responded to an upswing in the terrorist threat in Europe by ordering an increased number of military policemen to be sent to Germany at once. Though I had already served a three-year tour in Berlin and had been back in the states less than a year, I was nevertheless identified as one of those to be transferred. To say the least, it was an incredibly happy Sergeant Zetmeir who received orders to transfer back to Germany, this time for duty with the 3rd Armored Division in Butzbach, a small town in the German state of Hessen near Frankfurt. I arrived in April 1983 and Manuela and I were both happy to be reunited. Verbal communication was still challenging, but I embarked on a rigorous language self-study effort and learned a lot very quickly. At least for the first years of our marriage, German would become our primary language and remain an integral part of our lives forever.

Manuela and I were married in Butzbach, Germany on 6 October 1983. As we later discovered, this was almost 100 years to the month since my great grandfather, Joseph Zehetmeier, had immigrated to America. After our wedding ceremony and a brief honeymoon in the Netherlands, we moved Manuela’s household things along with her four-year old daughter Sonja from Berlin to Butzbach and our new family was started.

The idea of actually researching our family genealogy began on a kind of lark. My folks Les and Colleen in Kansas City had been unable to attend our wedding in Germany, so in 1984 they decided to visit us in Butzbach to meet their new German daughter-in-law and granddaughter. I decided that I would simply use the time prior to their arrival to find out where in Germany our family had come from. That way, or so I reasoned at the time, we could all visit our city of origin together. I recall thinking that finding our home city could not be all that difficult a task. As it turned out, I was completely wrong about