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Over 50 years of research into the Stratton, Schneider, King, and allied families—from colonial Massachusetts to Indiana and beyond. Built by Bill & Karen Stratton.
Strattons of Massachusetts Bay
Running Through the Sands of Time
On 31 August 1861, at Indianapolis, a clerk wrote the name as Ferdinand Schellsmidt.
The missing letters mattered, and they did not matter. A Prussian-born man could carry Schellschmidt in his own mouth and still find himself turned into Schellsmidt on a soldier roll, then Shellsmith in the records of a later English-speaking family. America had a way of sanding a name until other people could hold it. It made the word easier to say, but not always easier to recognize.
Ferdinand would have known that before the war. He had crossed the ocean already. He had become a naturalized citizen in Indiana. He had learned that a name could be altered by a clerk, a neighbor, a schoolchild, or a newspaper, and yet the man inside the name still had to earn bread, make music, keep house, and answer when called.
That August day, the call came from the war.
Camp Morton stood north of the city, on the old state fairgrounds near what would later be remembered as Nineteenth and Delaware. In May of that first war year, the fairground had become a rendezvous camp for Indiana volunteers. Men drilled where crowds had once come to look at livestock, tools, crops, and prize animals. The barns and sheds had learned a new vocabulary: company, regiment, muster, order, march.
Ferdinand did not enter as a musket man. He entered as a musician in the band of the 11th Indiana Infantry.
I pause over that word, musician, because it is one of the few bright lamps the record leaves burning. It does not tell me what instrument he carried that day. It does not tell me whether Catherine Schmidt already stood in his future with her own name waiting to be shortened to Kate. It does not tell me whether he was afraid. It says musician, band, 11th Indiana, Indianapolis, 31 August 1861.
That is enough to hear the first note.
Before it was a war city, Indianapolis was a city still becoming itself.
There was mud after rain and dust after dry weather. There were wagons, horses, shop doors, market baskets, church bells, handbills, tavern talk, and the hard argument of politics. There were trains, and in 1861 trains meant more than travel. They meant uniforms leaving. They meant wounded men returning. They meant news arriving with coal smoke on it.
There were German voices too.
German immigrants had brought trades, churches, clubs, schools, memory, and music into Indianapolis. The Indianapolis Maennerchor had been founded by German immigrants in 1854 and became one of the city’s important musical societies. It sang in German and in English, which is one quiet way to describe immigrant life: one foot planted in the old language, one trying to keep balance in the new.
The Schellschmidt name belonged in that world of music. Adolph Schellschmidt appears in Indianapolis musical history as an early music teacher and Maennerchor figure. Historic Indianapolis identifies Ferdinand, Conrad, and Amelia as musically gifted members of the family. The history of the German-English Independent School gives an even smaller but sharper clue, naming Adolph Schellschmidt and Ferdinand Schellschmidt under the heading “Several of the Original City Band.”
A single printed line can be a small thing. In genealogy, a small thing is never merely small. It is a nail head under old paint. It is the edge of a buried foundation. It is a speck that must remain a speck until evidence enlarges it, but it is still worth marking.
Cousin David, Ferdinand Paul Stratton’s son, later carried the family tradition in the same direction. He said the whole family were musicians and that some played professionally. A county biography of Frank Nelson Stratton’s family said Otilie Shellsmith’s father was “a musician by profession” and that “the whole family are musically inclined.” That does not answer every question. It does tell me I am not imagining the music from nothing.
So I picture Ferdinand first by sound. Not grandly. Not as a stage figure under a chandelier. I picture a working musician in a city that needed music for parades, picnics, schools, church gatherings, social halls, and public sorrow. A man who knew that a march can lift a crowd before the crowd knows it has been lifted. A man who knew when the note was clean and when it was not.
The 11th Indiana did not stay long in Indianapolis.
The regiment was organized on 31 August 1861, the same day Ferdinand enlisted and mustered. On 6 September, it moved to Paducah, Kentucky. The war pulled it quickly away from the fairground, away from the German singing halls, away from Indianapolis streets, and down toward river country.
Paducah sat where water and war met. The Ohio and Tennessee rivers mattered because armies could move on them. Gunboats mattered. Landings mattered. Mud mattered. Cold mattered. Rumor mattered too, because every camp was full of men who had heard something from somebody who had heard it from somebody else.
In those early months of the war, regimental bands were not decorative afterthoughts. Nearly every regiment wanted one. Bands played for parades, reviews, guard mount, departure, and morale. They could make a raw volunteer regiment feel, for a few minutes, like a thing with one pulse. They could also find themselves close to hospitals, litters, and the practical grief of army life.
Ferdinand’s regiment served at Paducah until early February 1862. Then came operations against Fort Henry and Fort Heiman, and the investment and capture of Fort Donelson. Those names do not belong only to generals and maps. They belong also to the ordinary men in wet clothes, in cold camps, on crowded roads, and near rivers carrying the war deeper south.
If Ferdinand was with the band through those movements, he was near a turning point in the western war. Fort Donelson brought Union victory and Confederate prisoners. It also changed Indianapolis. The fairground camp that had helped organize Indiana volunteers was soon converted into a prisoner-of-war camp, and thousands of Confederate prisoners came north by train.
The sound of the war had changed pitch.
The record grows blunt where the story wants tenderness.
Ferdinand mustered out on 3 April 1862. The reason given was disability.
That word carries very little and hides very much. A fever could do it. Exposure could do it. A lung could fail after damp weather and smoke. A wound could sour. A hand could stiffen. The stomach could turn against army food and river water. The nerves could find their own way of breaking. Disability was one word for many ways a body could refuse to go on.
I do not know which one belonged to Ferdinand.
He survived the war. That is one mercy the record gives. It does not give the morning he left the regiment. It does not give the man who signed the paper, the fellow musician who packed beside him, the soldier who envied him, or the soldier who knew better than to envy any man sent home damaged.
The timing is sharp. Three days after Ferdinand’s discharge, the 11th Indiana would be in the Battle of Shiloh. I will not put him there. A family story has no right to steal a battlefield from the men who were actually present. But the nearness of the date has its own ache. He was close enough to the edge of Shiloh for the shadow to fall across his page, and far enough away that I must leave him out of it.
He went back to Indianapolis with whatever the service had taken and whatever it had left behind.
The city he returned to was no longer only a place that sent men to war. Camp Morton had begun holding Confederate prisoners captured after Fort Henry and Fort Donelson. The old fairground had become a fenced war place. Soldiers stood guard where state fair crowds had once drifted. Prisoners arrived by train, ill-clothed, tired, and beaten. Indianapolis had the war inside its own fences now.
A musician would hear that.
Five months after his discharge, Ferdinand married Catherine Schmidt.
They married on 2 September 1862. Her name too had crossings. Catherine could become Kate when English wanted it shorter. Schmidt stood near Schellschmidt in sound and origin, the names almost touching even before the people did.
September 1862 was not a peaceful month in the Ohio Valley. Confederate movement in Kentucky brought fear toward Cincinnati, and ordinary men from Ohio and Indiana were called toward that emergency. Dr. Nelson Donnellan, another ancestor in the larger Stratton story, was later remembered as one of the Squirrel Hunters at the defense of Cincinnati.
I do not make more of that than I should. Ferdinand had been discharged months earlier. Donnellan’s Squirrel Hunter episode is not Ferdinand’s service. There is no evidence here that the men met or even knew one another’s names. But the dates stand close enough to create atmosphere. While one future family line made a marriage in Indianapolis, another moved through the same regional alarm of Indiana, Ohio, Kentucky, Cincinnati, Lew Wallace, and the sudden summoning of civilians into war.
That kind of coincidence is dangerous if forced and useful if respected.
I imagine the wedding as quiet, not because there was no happiness in it, but because wartime happiness knows not to shout too loudly. A man discharged for disability. A woman beginning a household. A city of soldiers, prisoners, flags, rumors, train whistles, and German songs. A marriage made in uncertainty is still a marriage. Perhaps especially then.
In 1863 the government made lists.
That was another way the war reached into homes. It came not as music or marching but as paper. Districts. Classes. Ages. Citizens. Immigrants who had declared intention. Trades. Residence. Marital status. Prior service. Men born here and men born elsewhere, all reduced to columns.
Ferdinand’s name went into that machinery.
By then he was Prussian-born, naturalized in Indiana, living in Indianapolis, a musician by profession, a husband, and a veteran of short service that had already ended with disability. The draft book did not have room for the human particulars. It did not say whether his hand tightened when he saw his name. It did not say whether Catherine worried. It did not say what part of him still belonged to the 11th Indiana and what part of him had already turned toward the duties of marriage and work.
Paper is a poor instrument, but sometimes it is the only one that survives.
Children came into the house after the war years began to pass into family life.
Laura. Otilie Katherine. Arthur. Julia. Estilla. Irma.
Names entered the line. Names to be spelled, shortened, corrected, carried, misplaced, and found again. Schellschmidt would become Shellsmith in some records and in family use. The hard German middle of the name softened into English, but the family music kept showing through.
Otilie would later marry Frank Nelson Stratton and bring Ferdinand’s line into mine. This story does not try to settle Otilie. She waits for another telling, and I know that telling needs care. Here she belongs simply as Ferdinand and Catherine’s daughter, as a child of the musical Shellsmith household, as one of the bridges by which the note crossed into the Stratton family.
In the Frank Nelson Stratton biography, Otilie is described as a teacher in the public schools of Indianapolis at the time of her marriage. Her father, in that same account, is a musician by profession. Those are useful facts because they give the family more than names. They give work. They give sound. They give a household in which discipline and instruction may have mattered.
Cousin David remembered that Grandpa Ferdinand was a gentle soul.
I do not know whether that is exact truth, descendant affection, or the softening that time sometimes gives the dead. I have met enough Stratton temper on paper to be cautious about any word that sounds too smooth. Still, I do not want to throw the word away. Family memory is evidence of a kind, not proof in itself, but not nothing either.
Maybe gentle meant he listened before he spoke. Maybe it meant he could teach a child a tune without impatience. Maybe it meant the war had taken some appetite for loudness from him. Maybe it meant only that a grandchild needed him to be gentle and kept him that way.
The record leaves room for more than one possibility.
What remains of Ferdinand is not a full portrait. It is Prussia and Indiana. It is naturalization. It is a profession. It is Camp Morton and the 11th Indiana. It is Paducah, Fort Henry, Fort Donelson, and a disability discharge just before Shiloh. It is Catherine in September. It is the draft book. It is children. It is Otilie waiting down the line. It is a family tradition of music. It is a name changing shape without disappearing.
Somewhere in the record he is Ferdinand Schellschmidt. Somewhere else he is Ferdinand Schellsmidt. Somewhere in the family he becomes Shellsmith. Somewhere in memory he is Grandpa Ferdinand.
The note does not depend on the spelling.
It only has to be heard.
Author’s Note: Ferdinand Schellschmidt, also found as Schellsmidt and Shellsmith, was born about 1834 in Prussia and was naturalized in Indiana in 1855 according to the family GEDCOM. My research notes include a Civil War Soldier Records and Profiles entry showing Ferdinand Schellsmidt enlisted and mustered on 31 August 1861 as a musician in the band of the 11th Indiana Infantry, mustered out on 3 April 1862, and was discharged for disability. His residence was Indianapolis, Indiana, and he survived the war. Public histories place the 11th Indiana at Paducah, Fort Henry, Fort Donelson, Clarksville, and Crump’s Landing before Shiloh; Ferdinand was discharged three days before Shiloh, so I have not placed him in that battle. Ferdinand married Catherine Schmidt, also Kate, on 2 September 1862. Their daughter Otilie Katherine Shellsmith married Frank Nelson Stratton. Family tradition from cousin David, son of Ferdinand Paul Stratton, says the Schellschmidt/Shellsmith family were musicians, that some played professionally, and that Grandpa Ferdinand was remembered as a gentle soul. A county biography of Frank Nelson Stratton supports part of that tradition by calling Ferdinand a musician by profession and saying the whole family were musically inclined. The scenes, dialogue, and interior lives are imagined. The Donnellan/Squirrel Hunter connection is used here as family-history atmosphere only, not as proof that Ferdinand and Dr. Nelson Donnellan met.
Wm. F. Stratton, May 2026
Over 50 years of research into the Stratton, Schneider, King, and allied families—from colonial Massachusetts to Indiana and beyond. Built by Bill & Karen Stratton.
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