Anna Catherine Riedesel was born May 5, 1853 in Wunderthausen in the house known as Seimes or Weißkopfs. She was the tenth of eleven children of Georg Ludwig and Maria Catherine (Homrghausen) Riedesel. By the time she was a young woman, villages such as Wunderthausen were becoming even poorer relative to the rest of Germany which was undergoing rapid industrialization.

It was no surprise that she and her older sister, Florentine Riedesel, were among the many young people heading for America. They and others from Wunderthausen were aboard the S. S. Donau out of Bremen which landed in New York on November 25, 1871. A couple of generations of Wunderthäuser and their descendants had settled in Warren County, New Jersey, and the sisters joined them.

In 1877 she married Karl Busch. He was German but we don’t know his origins. We know the names of only four of their seven children. She was widowed by 1910 and died herself in 1931. Her gravestone names her as “Anna K. Riddle”, wife of Charles Bush and she was referred to as “Radle” or “Riddle” elsewhere. A few Riedesels who arrived there in the early 1800s were also turned into Riddles and Radles.

Detailed Genealogy Report
Descendant Report
Find a Grave Link (Hillside Cemetery, Oxford NJ)