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- Wise/Hunt Family
Entries: 262 Updated: Mon Nov 4 18:17:22 2002 Contact: Julie Wise
BIOGRAPHY: The name was originally Hund meaning "dog". Otto immigrated to America in 1870 and landed in Baltimore. His mother's family, the Ruska's have an interesting history. Otto's second cousin, Julius Ruska, was a prominent professor and Director of the Institutes of Medicine and Science in Berlin and Heidelberg. He had two sons, Ernst and Helmut who were also prominent German physicists. Ernst was the inventor of the electron microscope and won the Nobel Prize in Physics for West Germany in 1986. Their father, Julius, had commissioned a thorough research of the Ruska family which is contained in a 16 page report in German and was sent to me (David W. Rhodes) from the genealogical archives in Grafenhausen. The first recorded Ruska, Nicholas, was born out of wedlock, the son of a prominent Italian Swiss portrait painter of the 18th century, Francesco Carlo Rusca, and a woman of noble birth, Maria Theresia Agatha Schmidt. Her father, Josef Ignaz Schmidt was a prominent official in the area and her grandfather, had been inducted into the nobility by the Hapsburg Emporer in Vienna. The matter was hushed up so no mention of the child's parents are given in the baptisimal or official records. The story had to be pieced together from other sources.
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1851 - 