Feb 2, 2001 - my son Daniel Frederick Bertsch has been born and is doing fine!
Dec 15, 1999 - my father Wayne Edward Bertsch has passed away.
Family reunion info:
If you have not received a mailing yet, please send your name
and address to
Bertsch Reunion 2005
Attn: Pat Ritter
1902 North Griffin St
Bismarck, ND 58501
August & Pat Ritter 701-255-2780
Ken & Kaye Dohn 605-225-4426
Theo & Lorraine Bertsch 605-225-7618
(Bertsch family reunions are held every three years. The last was in 2002, in Aberdeen, South Dakota.)
Please email Ed@Bertsch.org if you'd like to attend this reunion, arrange a car pool, find someone to share a room with, whatever.
I would like to have a listing of Bertsch family members who are on the net -- links to your email and, if you have them, your web pages.
Click here to browse my family tree!
Betty and I were married on October 26, 1996, and our sons Eddie and Danny were born October '97 and February '01
I can trace my Bertsch ancestors back to Michael Bertsch, born in 1625, in Benningen, Germany, which is near Stuttgart. He was mayor of that town, twice.
I recently received a JPEG of the Bertsch seal from Germany. I've got a large version(109k) and a small version(23k).
I was born in Saint Paul, Minnesota, in 1966. My father Wayne Bertsch was also born in Saint Paul, in 1941. My grandfather, also named Edward Andrew Bertsch, was born in Bismarck, North Dakota, in 1904. Going backwards in time from Grandpa Ed, there's his father Andrew, born in South Russia in 1873, Andrew's father Christian, born in South Russia in 1850, and Christian's father David, born in Klein-Ingersheim, Germany, in 1808.
The reference to South Russia above is a village named Johannestal, which is in the vicinity of Odessa in the Ukraine. Many germans came to this area to take advantage of the free farm land and other incentives offered originally by Katherine the Great. Successive monarchs of Russia made the deal worse and worse, and in the 1890's my ancestors left Russia, and came to South Dakota.
German farmers who came to America via Russia are called German-Russians or Germans-from-Russia, and there is a web site called Odessa devoted to the study of these people.
(Picture showing me, Erich, Steve, Dad, grandma Bertsch, and Lise)
Distribution of Bertsch surname in America, based on 1990 census:
Click here for quite a bit of Bertsch family reference materials
Like to read phonebooks?
Here's the Social Security Death Index for people with the surname Bertsch
Do a Webcrawler search for Bertsch
[ Bertsch| Rastetter| Eidsmoe| Quirk| or misc. ] Genealogy