What this is. The Schmidt side, running the other way: back from Edward to his father Otto, a Prussian-born schoolmaster in London, and forward to Edward's son William Edward and a house in San Diego. Four generations and three countries.
Why it matters. Everything before Kittery in this family is German and English, and it is the half most of us have never seen.
"I am not a native of this country, but a Prussian."
Otto Schmidt wrote that sentence about himself on 2 June 1842, in a letter asking a London charity for money. It is the first and only first-person statement of where this family came from, and everything before it was inference.
He is where the Schmidt name enters this story. Four generations later it reaches a man in California.
Otto Schmidt was born about 1801 — two separate hands record him as forty-one in 1842 — and by the 1830s he was in London, working as a teacher of languages. That phrase follows him through every English record he appears in: his marriage entry, five baptisms, a birth certificate, his wife's death certificate.
He was also an author, and the books say where he had been. The charity recorded his bibliography:
Stories from German Writers with Analytical Glossary (London, 1830) · Progressive German Reader (London, 1835) · Grammaire Française (Berlin, 1828) · Synopsis of German Grammar (1841) · Anglo-German Reader (London, 1842)
A Frenchman's grammar published in Berlin — the capital of Prussia — fourteen years before he told the Fund he was a Prussian. The books and the man agree. He came, as he put it himself, "not a refugee of any denomination" but for professional purposes, and "having devoted my best years and energies to the instruction of Englishmen."
⭐ His own father is named in one document and only one. Otto's 1837 marriage entry gives him as Charles Louis Schmidt, barrister. All four Inns of Court have been searched and all four return nothing — which is itself the finding. A "barrister" who belonged to none of the four was almost certainly not an English barrister at all, but a continental advocate whose title an English clerk translated into the nearest word he had. The search for him belongs on the continent, not in London.
On 8 August 1837 Otto Schmidt married Henrietta Adonis Jourdan — and the certificate corrects two things at once.
She married as Henrietta Dubarle, and her condition is entered as widow. She had been married before. Her father was John Jourdan, gentleman. Otto is entered as a bachelor; it was his first marriage.
It was a civil ceremony — entry number two in the whole district, in the first weeks that civil marriage was possible in England at all.
And sixteen days later, on 24 August 1837, five children were carried to the font together at Old Church, St Pancras. They were his and hers, all of them born before the wedding. The eldest, Caroline Henrietta Jane, had been born on 15 May 1830. The youngest was fifteen weeks old. Edward Alfred Henry Schmidt, born 17 September 1833, was three years and eleven months.
By 1838 the rate books have Otto as the occupier of 15 London Street, St Pancras.
Everything this family knows about Otto Schmidt as a person comes from one month.
On 2 June 1842, from 4 Pitt Place, Parsons Green, Fulham, he filled in an application to the Royal Literary Fund — a charity for authors in distress. The form is answered field by field in his own hand:
⭐ Read the fourth line again. Ten children in twelve years, and five of them alive.
And the arithmetic checks. Twelve years back from June 1842 is June 1830 — and Caroline Henrietta Jane had been born on 15 May 1830, one month before that. He was counting exactly, from his first child, and he knew the number.
Three months earlier, on 26 March 1842 at twenty minutes past noon, a daughter had been born at Parsons Green and registered as Sophia Amelia Schmidt. The informant on that certificate is "H. A. Schmidt, Mother" — Henrietta herself, registering a baby while dying.
Four men vouched for Otto: Richard Simmons, Bisset Hawkins M.D., J. Hardwick and General Charles Imhoff. The Fund's committee met and granted him forty pounds.
On Thursday 9 June 1842 he wrote to thank them, and it is the last day this project can place Otto Schmidt alive and writing:
Its contents are so overpoweringly beneficent, that I do not know what to say… Permit me now to request you to accept for Your Honourable Committee the expression of my profound gratitude for the extreme liberality with which they have condescended to relieve me and my family, in granting me the sum of forty pounds.
Henrietta died fourteen days later, on 23 June 1842, at Parsons Green.
The forty pounds did not hold the household together. The father lived apart from the children; the children were scattered.
By the census of 1851 Edward was seventeen and in service — an errand boy living over a chemist's shop in Holborn, in a household of a master, an assistant and himself. Not a family. In November 1851, at eighteen, he sailed alone for New York.
Caroline, the eldest — the girl born in May 1830 whose birth started her father's count of ten — was admitted to Wyke House asylum at Isleworth on 10 October 1898 as a private patient. She died there on 28 June 1909. She was seventy-nine.
⛔ Otto's own end is unknown. After that letter of 9 June 1842 the record simply stops. No death, no burial, no later address. The man who wrote the only sentence this family has about where it came from then walked out of the record entirely, and finding him is the largest open question in the whole project.
Edward's own life has a page of its own on this site, and it does not shrink in the retelling: the false name at the recruiting desk, the crushed hand at Pensacola, the marriage at York, the Dismal Swamp, the asylum at Washington, the small house on the Navy Yard road at Kittery, and a death in 1881 that the town clerk wrote down as general debility.
One detail belongs here rather than there. In 1880 a census taker asked Edward Schmidt of Kittery what he did for a living, and wrote down one word.
Teacher.
The same word the London clerks had written beside his father's name, forty-three years and one ocean earlier.
William Edward Schmidt was born on 26 September 1871, the youngest of Edward and Mary's children, at Kittery. He was nine years old when his father died — one of the four heirs who took fifty-nine dollars and forty-three and a half cents each when the estate was finally settled in 1884.
He did not stay in Maine. The federal censuses track him across the continent: Maine, then Washington State by 1900 and 1910, then Kansas, and finally San Diego, California, where he appears in 1930, 1940 and 1950. He married Madge — later recorded as Margaret — Oswald, and among their children, on the 1910 census, is Kenneth Schmidt.
William Edward Schmidt died at San Diego on 9 March 1959, aged eighty-seven.
(The family's compiled record adds that the marriage was at Washington, Kansas, on 8 April 1903. That comes from the family tree rather than from a document, and this project treats it as reference rather than evidence.)
Otto Schmidt — Prussian, teacher of languages in London, author of five schoolbooks, father of ten children of whom five were living when he wrote it down, granted forty pounds by a charity three weeks before his wife died, and then gone from the record.
Edward Alfred Henry Schmidt — christened at nearly four, orphaned of his mother at eight, an errand boy at seventeen, alone in New York at eighteen, a landsman under a false name at twenty-five, an officer at twenty-nine, and a teacher at forty-seven.
William Edward Schmidt — born at Kittery, fatherless at nine, and buried in California eighty-eight years later, four thousand miles from Star Island and three thousand from Parsons Green.
And Kenneth Schmidt, on a census page in 1910, from whom it comes down to us.
X-RLF1842, X-RLF1053, V-387, V-388, V-389, V-390, V-395, V-391, V-392, B-09, B-06, B-07, B-08, V-385, B-10, X-01, X-TNADISC-WYKE, C-05, X-FTSWEEP-OTTO, X-OTTONOTOURS, F-14.04-schmidt-line.md · do not edit this file —
edit the Markdown and re-run md2html.py