Gäbler Genealogie

Source: “A Family History,” Researched & Written by Nancy May de l’Arbre, 1991

Ida Mueller’s parents were both German, having emigrated separately to upper Michigan in their early twenties. Her father, Carl (Charles), was born in Schwelm, Westphalia, Prussia on July 16, 1839, the son of Hermann Henry and Amelia Langewiesche Mueller. He was an educated young man with a commercial college background, but when faced with being drafted into the Prussian army, he chose to leave his job and his landed family and go to America, landing in New York in 1859. He went to Houghton, Michigan, where he had a cousin. Unable to speak English, he had to take a common laborer’s job in the Pennsylvania mine at Eagle Harbour. It was here that he met Anna Katherine Keidel, who was living at the time (and possibly working) in the home of the mine superintendent.

Charles was 21 when the Civil War broke out, and he hastened to enlist in Company F, First Michigan Volunteer Infantry. He participated in numerous engagements and was finally felled at the battle of Shepherdstown, not by a bullet, but by a double inguinal hernia. Carried from the field unconscious, he was hospitalized at David’s Island, New York, and after three weeks honorably discharged for disability. A year later he was serving under a captain’s commission as a recruiting officer in upper Michigan. During this time he was married to Anna Keidel on March 3, 1864, at Eagle Harbour, Michigan.

Thereafter he worked at a number of occupations, and in 1872 was admitted to the bar, serving seven terms as City Attorney of Wausau, two terms as District Attorney of Marathon County, and Justice of the Peace from 1887 to 1895.

The Muellers had two children: Herman, who drowned in the Wisconsin River at the age of 9 on July 6, 1873, and Ida Ernestine, who married Jacob Mortenson.