From the Swiss Alps to the American Prairies
I thought I knew the story of my ancestors’ migration. The “rolling ball of hay” created the urgency that combined the push of economics and the pull of family. Soon our family was home in America.
All I knew was that my 2nd great-grandfather, Paulus Ris (1808-1851)1 had been killed by a rolling ball of hay. I knew that his widow, mother-in-law, and their five surviving children came to America two years later. This article will describe how I found their trail and the path it’s led me on now. Before I get started, though, a little reminder:
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Those four words, “rolling ball of hay,” had helped me find generous cousins on both sides of the Atlantic. My American cousin, Joel Gerich, had heard the same story and found me through an earlier post about my 2nd great-grandparents. That story referenced Paulus Ries (1846-1934) as the little 7-year-old boy who made the trip with his widowed mother, grandmother, and siblings.
I now know that Joel is a great-grandson of that little boy’s youngest daughter, Anna Clara Ries (1877–1967). That story, including the sticky bit with a “rolling ball of hay,” had been passed down his family line as well. We both have copies of the same 1933 testimonial our shared great-grandfather, Paulus, gave to each of his children, including his Anna Clara and my grandfather, Theodore Ries (1891-1986). A clip from the 19 Dec 1933 transcript of the original testimony, in German:
As we’ve gotten to know each other, Joel has shared stories, photographs, and records from his collection. Together, they have given me a new perspective on our family. The exercise made me realize just how little I knew about Dad and his family.2
Joel had grown up around grandparents and cousins near where our ancestors had lived in Minnesota and Wisconsin. In Zoom calls and emails, Joel has shared background about this ethnic German and Lutheran enclave after their arrival in America. As to the origins, he knew the family was Swiss and from the canton of Glarus, but things got fuzzy from there.
That defined a challenge for me and a way I might contribute to the genealogy work he’d started. Once I knew that Glarus was a starting point, it didn’t take me long to find GlarusFamilyTree.com.3 The site owner, Patrick Wild, has been focused on helping families from Glarus (or “Glarners”) connect to their ancestral home in the Swiss Alps for decades. This exploration was at the heart of my post last year:
I’ll dig deeper to explore the migration path and the community these connections created in a new series for Projectkin this fall.
The inspiration for this series comes from a moment of discovery at RootsTech 2026. New tools made it possible, but I didn’t see it coming. The result was transformative, helping me see a larger picture that contextualizes my family's experience and places it in our national landscape.
The breakthrough in my migration story came just before the conference, when Relatives at RootsTech opened. I discovered a new FamilySearch tool that showed contact information when I tapped the name of someone who had contributed records to an ancestor’s profile. I’d been looking at a record for Anna Maria Mertz (1792-1859)4, my 3rd great-grandmother. She was my 2nd great-grandfather Paulus’ mother-in-law. He’s the one who was killed in this accident in the Alps.
Relatives at RootsTech showed me that I had a surprising number of American relatives connected to me through Anna Maria’s father, Johannes Georg Mertz (1767-1949). Many, if not most, lived in Indiana.
Exploring Johannes Georg’s profile led me to a family history document compiled in the 1950s by a distant cousin, Eugene Mertz. Looking closely, I soon realized it had been attached to Anna Maria’s profile as well, describing her as Johannes Georg’s daughter from his first marriage to Salome Lehmann (1765–1804). It went on to explain that after Salome died in 1804, he married her younger sister, Anna Maria Lehmann (1779–1847), and raised another family.
By 1839, 35 years after marrying the younger sister Anna Maria, Johannes Georg may have decided that economic conditions and religious persecution against protestants in their Black Forest home in Kappel had made it difficult to remain. Advertising and agents helped make that move seem compelling.
We don’t know exactly what compelled them. Still, the Eugene Mertz document describes Johannes Georg taking his wife, Anna Maria, and their family of grown children and grandchildren sailing for New York on April 23, 1839. In due time, they would travel the Erie Canal to the interior of the continent.
The larger picture helps me realize that until my great-grandparents’ generation, my father’s side was almost entirely German. An exploration of the widow, Christina, and her mother, Anna Maria, gave me an entirely new perspective on the circumstances of their journey.
Their journey from Europe to America had to have been one of family reunification. They were reconnecting with their extended family from the Black Forest. Our family story reflected common elements of migrant story patterns that have reached across the planet for generations, creating pathways through community, linguistic, and religious connections.
A Story of Migration. Over the next several months, I’ll be exploring the immigrant side of my family story.
The Women Were Driving!
All of this occurred a dozen years before Paulus, our ill-fated patriarch, was killed in Switzerland in 1851. By 1839, Johannes Georg’s firstborn daughter, Anna Maria, Paulus’s mother-in-law, had married and was living in Linthal, Glarus. Had Anna Maria been corresponding with her aunt Salome (also stepmother) or her cousins (also half-siblings)? Did she know about the migration to America? Ten years later, did she know that Johannes Georg had passed away in Indiana?
It’s hard to believe she didn’t.
Before I continue my story, let me reintroduce you to my great-grandfather, Paulus Ries (1846-1834),5 and his first-generation siblings. He was the second surviving son of Paulus and Christina, born in Linthal, Glarus. In the German testimonial I described earlier, given near the end of his life, he describes arriving in America as a 7-year-old boy in November 1853.
My cousin Patrick in Glarus shared a copy of the original parish register that described the accident that killed the elder Paulus, just a few months after his wife, Christina, gave birth to their daughter and youngest child, Regula (Rachel) Ries (1851-1925).
We know our ancestors came to America. The testimonial gave us some clues about “when” and even “where” the journey began and ended, but we were missing “why” and “how.” My realization that relatives were already in America changed everything.
Neighbors Had Already Moved In
Revisiting the Eugene Martz document, we can see how Johannes Georg is connected to our family. I might not have gotten much past the first chapter on racial origins had my newly-discovered cousin not referenced Johannes Georg’s 1839 migration to America.
This wasn’t exactly evidence, but it made me realize that I hadn’t even considered that friends and neighbors (“FANs”) might have blazed a trail to America before my immediate ancestors. That was a huge oversight.
Before her husband died, my 2nd great-grandmother, Christina, had lost four of her nine children. One child lived just three weeks before succumbing in August 1849. When Regula was born in April 1851, it must have been a joyous moment for the family. That happiness would be cut short by the accident that killed Paulus on August 24th, 1851. You can appreciate how vulnerable Christina must have felt after he died.
Christina’s mother, Anna Maria, was the key to unraveling the story. I’d initially pegged her as a grandmother simply living out her days.6 Christina was born out of wedlock in Villigen, Baden, before arriving in Linthal, Glarus. Her daughter was 12 in 1827 when, at 35, Anna Maria married Jost Dürst (1789–1844). They lived together in Linthal, though they didn’t have any children together before Jost died in 1844.
When she’s 17 and just five years after her mother married, Christina marries Paulus. A year later, the birth of her namesake, Anna Maria Ries (1833–1893), makes Anna Maria a grandmother. Eight more grandchildren are born to the couple. Sadly, by the time of the 1853 departure, only five had survived to make the trip to America.
I don’t know much about where Anna Maria lived after Jost. Documents show that a little over a year later, she married Samuel Blesi (1793-1880), a widower in the nearby village of Schwanden, a few kilometers along the Linth River in Glarus. Samuel had been married twice before, though both wives had died by 1844. He and his first wife had seven children, though perhaps only two had survived, and both were under fifteen. We have to assume that Anna Maria moved in with him in Schwanden while staying in close contact with her own grandchildren.
Weaving Threads into a Path
This migration story is woven from threads of at least three Swiss towns along the Linth River in Glarus, including Linthal, Schwanden, and Mitlödi. This is in addition to Kappel, Villingen-Schwenningen, and other Black Forest towns of Baden-Würtenburg which are today part of Germany.
We know that two years after the terrible accident, Christina, her mother, Anna Maria, and the five surviving children somehow made the trek to America, arriving in Indiana in 1853. We also know that Samuel filed for divorce in 1856, perhaps due to “desertion,” an accepted cause for divorce in Switzerland at the time.
From there, the details get sketchy. The route they took may well have taken them through Baltimore and across the Appalachian Mountains to Wheeling, Virginia (now West Virginia), on a newly opened leg of the B&O Railroad. Paulus’ 1933 testimonial states that they arrived in Indiana in November 1853.
We know the ship Johannes arrived in Baltimore on Oct 22, 1853, carrying a large group of neighbors from Anna Maria’s home village of Kappel (Villingen). Handwriting, spelling, and a preference to document men over women make it difficult to be sure they were on that ship. The Ris/Ries family names were likely mangled and may have been listed under “Mertz” or “Gehring” as part of a larger party.
After Relatives at RootsTech introduced me to my extended cousins on the Martz side7, I learned about the elder Mertz family's 1839 migration from the village of Kappel, near Villingen-Schwenningen. Among related migrations along the same path are these:
Gehring 🔗 Mertz families
In Rottweil, Württemberg, in March 1827, Johannes Gehring (1798–1850) marries Salome Mertz (1810–1871). Salome was Johannes Georg’s second-oldest daughter by his second wife, Anna Maria. By 1847, Salome had given birth to 11 children in Württemberg, nine of whom survived the trip to America. One son died on the voyage, but two more were born in DeKalb County, Indiana.
Gehring 🔗 Ries families
Five years later, in April 1854, and six months after the November 1853 arrival of our widow and grandmother-led Ries family from Switzerland, Anna Maria Ries (1833–1893) marries John George Gehring (1827–1906) in DeKalb County. John was Johannes and Salome’s eldest son, and Anna Maria was Paulus and Christina’s eldest daughter.
It now seems laughable that I thought this family made the journey to America alone and without contacts. Exploring census records for local farms helped me discover another family with connections crossing to the Alps from the Black Forest:
Kunderd — Mertz families
Down the Linth River a bit in Mitlödi, Glarus, Rudolph Kunderd (1816–1899) married Anna Merz (1806–1870) in October 1836. She was the eldest surviving daughter of Johannes Georg and his second wife, Anna Maria Lehmann (1779–1847), elder sister to Salome, who had first married into the Gehring family, and a half-sister to Anna Maria, the senior (and hay-victim) Paulus’ mother-in-law.
Anna and Rudolph joined their father's family in their move from their Glarus ancestral home to Indiana in 1839, just weeks after their second child and first daughter, Anna Maria Kunderd (1839–1909), was born in March 1839.
A generation later, a Mertz grandson marries another Kunderd member.
Martz — Kunderd families
On Thanksgiving Day, November 25, 1886, Johannes Georg’s grandson, Daniel Martz (1857–1887), marries Anna Elizabeth “Libby” Kunderd (1868–1953). When her husband died a year later, Libby remarried and chose Jacob Atz (1862–1929), her late Daniel’s first cousin through a shared grandfather, Christian Saurer (1783–1868) from Bern, Switzerland.
This article is one installment in my ongoing research into my paternal ancestors’ journey to the United States. It’s a reminder of how so many of these family histories begin with “origin” stories about homelands but turn out to be much more complicated. I’ll take the ancestral memories of chocolate, cuckoo clocks, and alphorns. What may be more interesting is how these connected and formed who we all became as descendants.
Over the coming weeks and months, I’ll periodically add to this story in various forms. I can tell you about …
How I used Vibe Genealogy’s fantastic AI Jane GEM in my Gemini configuration to sort through clues and find my way to what may be the elusive ship that brought the family to America from Bremen to Baltimore.
Many of these family members, including Johannes Georg and his second wife, Anna Maria, are buried in graveyards within a short drive of the 2026 NGS Conference site in Fort Wayne, Indiana. I’ll be visiting their grave sites and visiting one of the best genealogy libraries in the country while I’m there.
This research has also opened many doors for conversations with my Ries, Mertz, Gehring, and so many more cousins.
Finally, this research into my own migration story has inspired me to pursue an idea that’s been itching me for a while. I’ve started working with several community members here to piece together a program that will build on the Stories250 project to encourage families to tell their migration stories.
Stay tuned for the rollout of a new series on Migration Stories this fall. This will be an ongoing series, will welcome stories in your existing catalog, and will feature migration paths with origins and destinations around the world. Have ideas or feedback for me. Now’s the time to tell me👇
As part of the Migration Stories project, I anticipate building collaborations around KnightLab tools such as the Timeline tool used in the Stories250 and Lafayette projects, as well as the StoryMap tool in progress for this project. (Explore it at Projectkin.org/hay-journey.)
Family Endnote
My direct family members, cousins, and relations mentioned in this story include:
Johannes Georg Mertz (1767-1949): patriarch, Anna Maria’s dad, my 4GG.
Salome Lehmann (1765–1804): dies young, Anna Maria’s mother, my 4GG.
Anna Maria Lehmann (1779–1847): our Anna Maria’s aunt and half-sister.
Anna Maria Mertz (1792-1859): “grandma,” our Anna Maria, and my 3GG.
Christina Mertz (1815-1894): “the widow,” and my 2GG.
Paulus Ris (1808-1851): Christina’s husband, “hay victim,” and my 2GG.
Jost Dürst (1789–1844): Anna Maria’s first husband, married in 1827.
Samuel Blesi (1793-1880): Anna Maria’s second husband, married in 1845.
Anna Maria Ries (1833–1893): Christina’s eldest daughter. Married in 1854.
John George Gehring (1827–1906): Christina’s son-in-law, by 1854.
Paulus Ries (1846-1934) — Paulus’s son, immigrant at 7 yo, and my GG.
Regula (Rachel) Ries (1851-1925) — Paulus’s daughter, toddler on journey.
Anna Clara Ries (1877–1967) — Paulus’ youngest daughter, born in the US.
Theodore Ries (1891-1986) — Paulus’ youngest child, born in the US.
Because of the number of repeated first names, I’ll include links to FamilySearch.org profiles as a cross-reference for individuals. You will need a FamilySearch account to view them, but the account is free. Once you sign up, you may discover that we’re cousins. More at RelativeFinder.org; look for my private group called “Projectkin.”
Also, note that the family name has changed in spelling. Here in America, all instances seem to spell it Ries. In Switzerland, all references are to Ris.
I’ll add that my Dad, Al Ries, was well known in Marketing circles for his work as a Positioning pioneer. As we celebrate his centennial year, his legacy lives on in the incredible work my sister has continued at Ries.com. I’ve been discreet with the name simply because I see no reason to muddle SEO buckets filled with the Ries branding strategies with our genealogy story. I’ll be privately sharing this story with our family.
In retrospect, that wasn’t much of a challenge 🤭.
Buckle up. In case you missed my earlier reference, there really are a lot of repeated names here. I expect it’s a naming tradition that gives firstborn children their grandparents’ names. The only way I’ve been able to keep them straight is by linking back to FamilySearch profiles and by being consistent about pairing them with distinguishing (birth-death) dates on the first instance, then repeating names in boldface with those FamilySearch links.
All American records discovered so far seem to indicate that since arrival in the US, the family has spelled the name “Ries,” though in Swiss records the name is consistently spelled “Ris.” To address that, I’ve used the Swiss spelling for Paulus Ris (1808-1851) who died in Switzerland, but “Ries” for those who migrated to America.
Do grandmothers even DO that? Did they ever?
As if we didn’t have enough trouble with repeated names, the Mertz name is also spelled several ways. I’ve settled on Mertz, though many records and translations spell it as Martz, März, Merz, and variations. :
I loved reading of how you collected this research and were able to create a really great story. That rolling ball of hay certainly started something big.
Barbara, I've read your post this week with great interest.
You are aware that I have ancestry on both the paternal (Longenecker) and maternal (Metzler) from Switzerland. The Metzlers are from the Canton of St. Gallen, Switzerland, but I'm not sure about my father's side. However, I do keep as reference a book (Pitchforks and Pitch-pipes) that charts nine generations of Longeneckers from their migration from Europe to claim farmland in Pennsylvania, granted them by then-governor William Penn in the early 1700s. None were killed by a rolling ball of hay that I'm aware of!
You have taken advantage of all the research tools now available for tracing genealogy.
And your research reveals the impetus for your ancestors' migration and insight into their lives. Brava -- and so inspirational. Maybe you'll discover that we are, after all, related!
After a vacation voyage and the graduation of two grandsons in separate ceremonies, I am just now getting back in gear. Thank you for all this!