Over the last two-and-a-half years, I have been constructing a family tree with a certain degree of obsession. Once you have constructed a family tree of a certain size on their website, Ancestry makes it easy to expand it by giving clues regarding possible parents or other close relatives of the individuals in your tree. I started with a tree, found online by my sister, going back on my six generations on my paternal grandfather’s side. Ancestry’s prompts have allowed me to take it back further, to 10 generations, with reliability. As I have performed these expansions, a number of interesting cousins have popped up. This diary is the third in a series describing famous or influential individuals who I’ve found to be related to me, no matter how distantly. (The first two are here and here.) Just last month, while exploring a previously unknown brach of the family, I discovered a cousin (4th cousin, once removed) named William Koehler who seemed to have a lot of hints attached to him. I googled his name and was surprised to find a long and detailed wikipedia page devoted to him. Turns out he had an interesting life: He was a graduate of the US Naval Academy, a Lieutenant Commander in the First World War, and a spy (for the US) in Russia during their revolution. Below the fold is a digest of the wikipedia biography, along with todays comments, but first, here’a a word from our sponsor.
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Hugo W. Koehler was born in 1886 in St. Louis, Missouri to Oscar C. Koehler, who helped to run a profitable beer-brewing business, and Mathilda Lange Koehler, the daughter of a St. Louis banker. Both of his parents were the descendants of German immigrants who had prospered in the US. His childhood included summer trips to Europe, which featured meeting the likes of physiologist John Scott Haldane, English statesman Lord Edward Grey, as well as the court of Emperor Franz Joseph and Empress Elizabeth of Austria. Koehler’s paternal grandfather is purported to have told him that Hugo was actually the son of Rudolph, crown prince of Austria, but this assertion has never been proven. (I’m related to him on his mother’s side, so he’s my cousin regardless of his paternity.)
Koehler spent his first two years of college at Harvard, and then transferred to the US Naval Academy, graduating in June of 1909. He spent his early naval career in the far east (China, the Philippines, Japan). He spent World War I at the rank of lieutenant chasing submarines in the Irish Sea. He was awarded the Navy Cross for his service in the war.
Various friends and acquaintances said Koehler seemed to have deep pockets, and it wasn’t entirely clear where the money was coming from (and the rumor about his parentage would be raised again). When he was at the Naval Academy, he had his own off-campus apartment with a servant whoo cooked his meals. Later in his naval career, there was an account of how, when there was a delay in the governmental appropriation for the Navy, he paid his crew their regular salaries with his own money.
After the war, Koehler was pressed into service collecting intelligence, and it turned out he had a talent for it. He reviewed the post-war condition of the Germany navy, and then became a part of a detachment under the command of Rear Admiral Newton McCully sent to Crimea to collect information about the Russian Revolution, then in progress, as well as to protect American citizens and interests, a mission that lasted almost two years. Essentially, he was a spy. Koehler even inserted himself into the conflict from time to time, and says that if he had been caught, he would have been summarily executed for espionage. Following this adventure, Koehler was promoted to the rank of lieutenant commander and posted as the naval attache to the US embassy in Poland.
In 1923, he returned to the US and was posted to the west coast. In 1926, he became an instructor at the US Naval War College in Newport, RI. In 1927, he married the divorcee Matilda Bigalow Pell, and thus became the stepfather of future US Senator Claiborne Pell (as in Pell Grants). Koehler retired from the Navy in 1929, noting that his wife would suffer during the long separations that continued naval service could require. Also during 1929, his only child, Hugh Gladstone Koehler, was born. After separation from the Navy, Koehler spent his time as a socialite in the upper reaches of society in New York and New England. He died in 1941 of Bright’s disease.
Given that my immediate family has always been quite mild-mannered and of modest means, discovering who was a naval officer capable of such derring-do was quite a surprise. You never know who’s hiding in your family tree.
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