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- BIOGRAPHY:
Reithmann-Ohlson Families
Entries: 14712 Updated: 2008-06-23 04:27:05 UTC (Mon) Contact: Tom Reithmann
lyntom@cox.net
http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~reithmann/
BIOGRAPHY:
Two of Bernard Rottkamp's daughters, Caroline and Elizabeth, married George and Frank Froehlich, brothers in another large Long Island farming family with German-Catholic roots. Ralph Schmitt and Teresa Rottkamp were already second cousins through the Rottkamp family when she married Ferdie Schmitt, Ralph's first cousin.
This article is from the Wednesday, August 2, 1995 New York Newsday newspaper article (The Long Island Edition).
IT'S A SMALL WORLD FOR A BIG FAMILY There are villages with populations
smaller than the number of Rottkamps on Long Island
[ALL EDITIONS]
Newsday - Long Island, N.Y.
Author: By Ken Moritsugu. STAFF WRITER
Date: Aug 2, 1995
Start Page: B.04
Edition: Combined editions
Section: PART II
IN 1850, Bernard Rottkamp met Caroline Engel at St. Nicholas Roman
Catholic Church in Manhattan.
It was the start of something big. Really big.
The following year, Rottkamp, a 28-year-old immigrant farmer from Germany,
married Engel, a 17-year-old native New Yorker. They weren't Adam and Eve
but what came next is more reminiscent of Genesis. They begat 14 children,
who begat 279 children, who begat 794 children. Today, 144 years and six
generations later, the family can count a whopping 2,232 direct
descendants of the original couple. And about 2,000 are living, many on
Long Island The family is so big that relatives have stumbled into
previously unknown relations in their daily lives.
There was the young man and woman who dated three times before they
realized they were cousins. And the high school pals in Wantagh who didn't
find out that they were related until a year into their friendship. And
the East Northport dietitian who ran into two other dietitians she knew
professionally - but not as Rottkamps - at a huge Rottkamp family reunion
in Hauppauge this year.
"We knew we had a large family," says 87-year-old Josephine Seidler of
Valley Stream, one of the great-granchildren, who spent a year charting
the first family tree in 1947. "But we didn't know any of them if we fell
over them."
And they could fall over a Rottkamp in almost every walk of life. Once the
family name was synonymous with farming on Long Island. Now Rottkamps are
police officers and lawyers, priests and school teachers, computer
analysts and pharmaceutical sales representatives, carpenters and
investment bankers. A handful still carry on the tradition that Bernard
Rottkamp started as a worker earning $5 a week on a farm near Astor Place
in Manhattan. In 1861, he settled his family on their own fields in what
would become Elmont.
The evolution of the Rottkamps mirrors that of Long Island from an
agrarian to a suburban society. All but one of the 10 children of Bernard
and Caroline who survived into adulthood went into farming. The exception
was John Rottkamp, who became a butcher on Hester Street in Manhattan. Few
of the children in the early generations went beyond sixth or eighth
grade; they left Catholic school to work on the farm.
They lived through the Depression - well fed but with hand-me-down clothes
and no toys for the children. "My cousin passed clothes on to me. I wasn't
proud," says 71-year-old Ralph Schmitt of Valley Stream. "But being on the
farm, that's one thing you always had - plenty of good food."
Rottkamp men served in both world wars and Korea and Vietnam. During World
War II, some of the women worked at Grumman, where they ran into other
Rottkamp women.
After the war, successive generations left the potato fields to become
secretaries and mail carriers, grocery store workers and Long Island Rail
Road conductors. But they kept their green thumbs. As 61-year-old Carol
Ann Hintze of East Northport explains, "We all have nice flower gardens."
A few families stuck with farming - steadily moving east to stay one step
ahead of development as they moved from the family homestead in Elmont to
East Meadow to Melville to Calverton. In Melville they still farm land
they once owned and now lease back from Tilles Companies, land that may
soon be developed for offices.
Today a long list of Long Island landmarks lie on land once farmed by
Rottkamps, from Levitt homes in Hicksville to the Westbury Music Fair,
from Elmont High School to Newsday in Melville, from Green Acres shopping
mall to the Cross-Island Parkway, which split one Rottkamp farm in half,
part in Nassau County and part in Queens.
That was the farm in Springfield Gardens where Ralph Schmitt, a
great-grandson of the original couple, grew up and raised chickens for his
father until he was 27. He remembers fattening a turkey to 30 pounds on a
steady diet of corn; his mother, Theresa, had to go out to buy a pan big
enough for it, and they still had to hacksaw off the legs to make it fit
the oven.
Schmitt raised guinea hens, which he says he never really cared for,
before they took on a modern-day cachet as rock cornish hens. Accustomed
to bringing in warm, fresh-from-under-the-hen eggs for breakfast, Schmitt
was shocked the first time he encountered refrigerated eggs at the grocery
store - and even more shocked that people would want to eat them.
But times change, and so did Schmitt. His father retired and sold the farm
about 1950 - it's now covered by PS 176 and dozens of homes with neatly
kept lawns in a middle-class neighborhood - and Schmitt, who didn't finish
high school, had to find a job.
He lied about having a high school diploma and landed in a supermarket.
Schmitt spent 31 years amid cold eggs, chicken parts and frozen turkeys at
King Kullen and A&P. Retired now at 71, he lives in a Valley Stream senior
citizen complex not far from the old family farm and clips coupons for
meals around the corner at a fast food chain famous for chicken. His
verdict: "It ain't bad."
But the farm boy remains. Every spring, Schmitt comes home from King
Kullen with a bunch of rhubarb and a pint of strawberries that he stews
over a low flame with sugar and a little water. "My nephews and nieces,
they say, `Rhubarb? What's that?' "
John Herman, who married Rottkamp granddaughter Anne Froehlich, also left
the farm but for a related field. When he lost his New Hyde Park farm
during the Depression, he got a job as a sales representative for a New
Jersey fertilizer company. "His territory was Long Island, and he sold to
all his relatives," recalls his daughter, Carol Ann Hintze.
Today Hintze's 24-year-old son, Philip, is a sales representative on Long
Island for another New Jersey company, pharmaceutical giant Merck. And
although he knows the area only as subdivisions and strip malls, his
territory - which runs from Syosset to New Hyde Park - was once dotted
with Rottkamp farms, including his grandfather's.
Besides farming, the other constant in Rottkamp life was St. Boniface
Roman Catholic Church in Elmont, where the children went to school and
everybody went to Mass. There are so many Rottkamps buried in the church
cemetery that "even gravediggers can be confused about where the graves
are," Schmitt said.
In the close-knit German-American farming community, many Rottkamps
married in-laws whom they met at church. "They were all farming families
and there was no one else," said Hintze, whose mother's brother married
her husband's sister. "They had no cars, and there was church. They all
went to church."
Two of Bernard Rottkamp's daughters, Caroline and Elizabeth, married
George and Frank Froehlich, brothers in another large Long Island farming
family with German-Catholic roots. Ralph Schmitt and Teresa Rottkamp were
already second cousins through the Rottkamp family when she married Ferdie
Schmitt, Ralph's first cousin.
The first person to try to untangle the jumble of roots in the family tree
was Josephine Seidler, who set out in 1946 to find out just how many
Rottkamps there were. "It was just curiosity that started it," she says.
By the next year, she had compiled the first family tree, showing 512
direct descendents, and organized the first family reunion. About 450
Rottkamps turned out on June 29, 1947, at the former Commercial House in
Queens Village. Dinner was $2.25 a person, and the dancing continued until
midnight.
Today the task of keeping track of the family tree has fallen to
68-year-old Teresa Schmitt, a widow carrying on the farming tradition in
Melville with the help of her two sons, Ferd, 42, and William, 41. Her
daughter Margaret, 36, runs the farmstand on a corner of the property.
Schmitt herself takes orders on the phone at her house from other Long
Island farmstands and an Upper West Side fruit and vegetable market.
But a sign of the times has gone up along the edge of the Schmitts'
cornfields. The family sold the land 15 years ago to Tilles Companies, and
has been farming it on leased time. Earlier this year, Tilles put up signs
announcing that the land had received local government approval for
commercial office development.
Tilles is talking with several potential users about developing the site,
says Gary Lewi, a company spokesman. It says something about the Rottkamp
presence on Long Island that Lewi grew up in a North Merrick home built on
a former Rottkamp potato farm, and remembers buying fruits and vegetables
from a Rottkamp farmstand at the end of the street.
Teresa Schmitt knows that the day will come when her family will have to
retreat from the farm, as previous generations did from theirs. "You don't
really know," she says when asked about the future. "We think about it.
But you know, when the time comes, something happens."
The phone rings, jarring her back to the present. She takes an order from
the Manhattan fruit and vegetable market: 50 boxes of basil, six of
chicory, 55 each of green and red leaf lettuce and 30 of Boston lettuce,
all of which will be delivered the next day.
It's the same hand that carefully pencils in each new birth, death and
marriage in the family-tree book, and updates a thick 3-ring binder full
of family addresses, carefully divided into the 10 family branches.
The term family tree may be a bit of an understated misnomer for this maze
of intertwined branches. Family forest may be more like it.
The last edition of the family tree, issued in 1990, is a 60-page,
calendar-size booklet. An update, issued this year at a family reunion in
March, lists 25 pages of births and deaths just in the past five years.
The number of descendants has more than quadrupled since the first reunion
in 1947, and the price of the reunion dinner, held in March at the IBEW
hall in Hauppauge, has gone up 13-fold to $30. And despite about a dozen
reunions over the years, Rottkamps still don't know all their relatives.
Take Carol Ann Hintze, 33, who shares the same name as her mother. At the
March reunion, the dietitian and nutritionist at Little Neck Community
Hospital ran into two other dietitians whom she knew previously, but not
as extended family.
Similarly, Susanne Zimmer Stone, 31, and Stacy Friedmann Field, 30, were
part of a group of Wantagh girls that hung out together at the swimming
pool and the roller rink during their high school years.
One day, Stacy asked Susanne if she were related to Jack Zimmer. "Yes,
that's my uncle," Susanne replied.
Well, Stacy said, Jack Zimmer also happened to be a good friend of her
great-uncle, Herbert Wulforst. What the girls learned later from their
parents was that Wulforst and Zimmer weren't just old pals from Jamaica
High School; both also were Rottkamp descendants.
And that's how the two high school girls discovered that they, too, were
related. "I was surprised and happy," says Susanne Stone, now a nurse in
pediatric chemotherapy at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in
Manhattan. "It's a small world."
Especially when you're a Rottkamp.
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1822 - 1891 (68 years)