My Genealogy Hound

Joseph J. Roth, blacksmith and wagon-maker, Spring Bluff, was born in Highland County, Ill., in 1847, and is the youngest of three children born to Sebastian Roth and wife, who both died with cholera, in 1849, and our subject remembers very little of his parentage. His godfather, Joseph Hoffman, took care of the little follow until he was eight years of age, when he was bound to Gabriel Oestrich, a brick mason. He received a good common-school education, and at the age of seventeen enlisted in the Union army, In Company K, Tenth Illinois Infantry, and served throughout the war, participating in Sherman’s raid through the South. At the close of the war he returned to Illinois and learned the trade of blacksmith and wagon-maker, under Stephen Schwartz. In Highland, Ill., in 1872, he married Emelia, daughter of Charles F. Erxleben, and by this union there were six children, only three of whom are living, viz.: Otto J., Mathilda J. and Aminda E. He immigrated to Missouri in the fall of 1878, and settled at his present homestead, at Spring Bluff, on a farm of sixty acres, but is still following his trade. He is a worthy member of the holy Catholic Church, to which he lends cheerful aid. In politics he is a Democrat.