Elizabeth Kreifels – overview

At the end of the series about the Rademachers in Snyder, we left off with Ted Rademacher moving household goods and livestock to a farm north of Longmont. This was sometime during 1926. By September 1927, he had married Elizabeth Kreifels. So who was Elizabeth and how did they meet?

We’ll now start on a series of posts about Elizabeth’s ancestry and exploring her family’s multiple connections to the Burkey family and then ultimately to the Rademacher family.

Elizabeth was the daughter of Louis Kreifels and Josephine Ortman. Elizabeth’s father’s family, the Kreifels, were farmers. Their migration path took them from Germany to Missouri, Minnesota and Nebraska. Her mother’s family, the Ortmans, were city folks. Their roots were in Vienna, Austria and a German-speaking area of what is now the Czech Republic.  When the Ortman family came to America, they settled near Omaha, Nebraska. You can see a four-generation pedigree for Elizabeth here.

Elizabeth’s paternal grandfather, Herman Kreifels, was a German immigrant who came to America in 1846. He settled in Missouri where a brother, Sebastian, joined him a few years later. There, the two Kreifels brothers met and married two sisters: Herman married Anna Margaretha Blommer and Sebastian married Anna Gertrude Blommer.

The Blommer sisters were the daughters of Mathias Blommer, a fascinating man who left behind some detailed writings about his life in America. So in our next installment, we will start our story with Mathias Blommer, Elizabeth’s great-grandfather, who came to America in 1840.