Peter John Riedel
Peter John Riedel was born on 5 February 1874 in Herzog, a German Catholic colony on the Volga in the province of Samara, the third child of Johannes Peter Riedel and Anna Maria Braun. Both his parents were born in Herzog in the 1840s, grandchildren of the families who had founded the colony in 1766. In the autumn of 1887 the family sold up and sailed from Bremen on the steamship Donau. The passenger list gives Johan, 40, Marie, 39, and eight children: Catha, 17, Amalie, 15, Peter, 12, Dorothea, 10, Johannes, 7, Joseph, 5, Alexander, 1, and Michel, three months. They landed at Baltimore on 10 November 1887. The baby Alexander died at the landing of consumption. The family went on to Kansas, to the Herzog settlers at Victoria in Ellis County and then to St. Peter in Graham County, a Catholic colony on the high plains to the northwest.
In 1893 Peter, nineteen, married Anastasia Geist, a daughter of John Geist and Catharina Barbara Gerber of the Obermonjou families at Victoria, born in Kansas the same year as himself. On 15 March 1893 a Peter Riedel entered land in Kansas. The young couple tried Colorado: their first child, Elizabeth Delaphene, was born at Hugo, the county seat of Lincoln County on the Kansas Pacific line, on 4 April 1896. They were back in Graham County by 1899, when Joseph was born, and the census of 1900 found them in Bryant Township, Peter a farmer of 26 born in Russia, married seven years, with Daisy, as the enumerator heard Anastasia, and the two children. On 8 August 1905 he entered a second tract. Six more children were born at St. Peter: Michael, August, Eugenia, Andrew, Bernard and Helen, the last in 1915. The census of 1910 found all seven then living at home in Bryant Township.
He registered for the draft in 1918 as a man of 44. In 1920 the farm held Peter, 45, who had arrived in 1887, Anastasia, 45, seven children from Joseph, 20, down to Helen, four and a half, and a Kathrine Lisabeth Riedel, 19. His father had died at St. Peter in 1905 and his mother at Ellis in 1911. In 1930 only Bernard and Helen were still at home, and in 1940, a widower of 66, he was living at St. Peter with his son Andrew and his daughter Eugenia Rome. Anastasia had died on 24 March 1938. Peter Riedel died on 22 July 1940. They lie together in the WaKeeney City Cemetery in Trego County under a gray granite stone, RIEDEL, In loving memory, PETER J. FEB. 5, 1874 JULY 22, 1940 FATHER, ANNASTASIA MAY 12, 1874 MAR. 24, 1938 MOTHER, with two porcelain photographs set into the stone: Peter in a dark suit and tie with a high collar, Anastasia in round spectacles.
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Cite: Heirology, "Peter John Riedel (1874-1940)", https://heirology.com/ancestors/peter-john-riedel-1874-1940-bb70d4.