Deep Roots Family Tree Blog

I’ve always had an interest in my ancestors and where they came from. I spend most of my time working on my mom’s side of the family (usually the Martin’s and Amerman’s, but Bartl, too) partly because I grew up sitting around a table with the adults playing pinochle and listened to all their stories and not paying any attention to the game. I still cannot play pinochle. I grew up going to yearly Martin Family Reunions and have had the chance to meet the people who make up the many branches of my mom’s side of the family. It’s what was familiar to me.

I think it all started because I have a somewhat unusual last name. One of those that can be pretty memorable and frequently mispronounced. One that sparked my journey to find out where it comes from – but no real or concrete answers as of yet. German is the most frequent guess, but Ancestry DNA found that I don’t get any German DNA from my dad’s side of the family at all, which is very surprising.

Misemer [miz-mer]. It’s not a very common last name so if you are/were a Misemer in North Dakota between the early 1900s and the late 2000s, we are probably related somehow.

I didn’t see or get to know this side of the family as they were located on the completely opposite side of the state, about 4.5-5 hour drive from Jamestown to Williston and navigating the Badlands of North Dakota. We did not make this journey often.

For my dad’s side of the family, I didn’t have the family tree laid out for my like I did on my mom’s side, thanks to family history keepers before me. I started from scratch. My dad’s dad, Arthur Misemer, died a couple of years before I was born. Lung cancer, apparently. I always thought it was heart related.

Anyway. I knew very little going in. Dad had talked about Grandma Grace and Grandma Betsey (his grandparents) and I knew that Grace was married to Knute, who was from Norway. All of whom died before I was born, including my grandpa, who died in 1987 .

Whenever I would ask my dad about the Misemer side of the family, he would usually just question why I was asking. Curiosity was usually my answer, but he would still dance around the questions. I’m not sure why. My aunts and uncle didn’t have any more information than I did, so it was up to me.

I can’t remember how old I was or who found it, but a picture of my grandpa and his mom and siblings showed up. I had never seen it before in my life. Dad told me who they all were. His dad, his uncle Donald “Dee”, and aunts Loretta, Lorraine, and Genevieve. This is the only other photo I have of my grandfather.

All of that backstory just to get to Dee. He has two registration cards that are just slightly different and I’m trying to figure out if it’s significant. I can’t remember if I found it out by myself just from researching or if my dad told me that Dee was in the army and was KIA in the Korean war.

Through Ancestry.com I followed his paper trail. Born in 1928, enlisted in the Army when he was 18, then went to Korea to fight and never game home. He was a Private E-2 in the United States Army, a light weapons infantryman. Almost 17 years later, Donald’s nephew Wesley, my dad, would be drafted and sent to Vietnam with the same occupation.

His casualty date is August 3rd, 1951. He was 23 years old. My dad would have been around 2 and a half when Donald died. He never got the chance to meet the person who gave him his middle name.

My dad came home, Donald did not. So today I wanted to take the time to honor Donald. I looked for any other information on him or old yearbooks that are slowly being added to the Ancestry.com database but I came up empty handed. It doesn’t look like he ever got married or had children which is one of the reasons my branch of the Misemer’s is going to die out. After my generation, there will be no male child that carries the Misemer name. I’ve always felt a little uncomfortable about that. But that’s a story for another time…

Happy Memorial Day, 2025