My ancestor, Reinhart Gottfried Christian Saalmann, was born 25 January 1829, in the village of Hoym, located in a region called Saxony in eastern Germany.  The political landscape was in turmoil, with various German and foreign states vying for power over the region. In 1849, when Christian was 20 years old, Prussian troops occupied Saxony, suppressing popular uprisings against the Prussian King's desire to annex Saxony and several other small German states.  Christian was of an age to be conscripted into the Prussian army.

Family tradition says that to escape these dangerous and turbulent currents, Christian emigrated to the United States, settling finally in Branchville, Indiana to live with his growing family as farmer and father.  Ironically, the peril he escaped in Europe soon swept over him in the New World.  As a Union soldier in the American Civil War, he was captured and imprisoned in the infamous Andersonville prison... more

Christian Saalman's great-grandson, Otis Saalman, was also a farmer, as well as teacher and a career Army man during WWII.  He advanced rapidly in the ranks and in 1941 was a captain on General MacArthur's staff in Manila, the Philippines, when the Japanese army invaded.  After valiant but doomed resistance, Otis was taken prisoner. 

He and hundreds of other prisoners were forced to march 160 kilometers across the Bataan peninsula to distant prison camps without food and water, through tortuous, tropical jungles and oppressive heat.  10,000 prisoners died on this so-called "Bataan Death March".  But Otis and others escaped... more

Twenty years after her husband Christian's death and not long after her daughter, Anna Amenda married a man from Branchville named Hiram Marcus Esarey, Dorothea Saalman also married Hiram Marcus Esarey, but this one was the former's uncle. 

In fact, the Esareys and Saalmans have a number of connections from the past and in the present. An Esarey descendent, Duane Esarey, maintains an excellent Esarey family website that adds new dimensions to the Indiana Saalman records, providing photographs of Dorothea Saalman and related genealogy information from the Esarey family archives.