Sometime around the year 1680 Johann Eckhart Gissel was born in Bürgeln, a small village in the Lahn Valley area of the Prussian state of Hesse-Kassel. By 1703 Johann had moved to Marburg, a city about 5 kilometers away. There he married Anna Christine Beer and they raised a family of six. Thus began the Marburg clan of the Gissel’s of Prussia.

Marburg was the home of the Gissel’s for five generations, spanning 160 years. Their common occupation was fabric makers and fabric dyers, plying their trade on the Ketzerbach, within sight of the famous St. Elizabeth’s Church. Hesse-Kassel fought against Napoleon during this time, and the Brothers Grimm wrote their fairy tales while living in Marburg. Between the years 1857 and 1863, the last remaining Gissels in Marburg emigrated to New York. They included my great-great grandfather, Georg, his brothers Herrmann and Christian, and his sister Sophia.

Georg landed in New York City and became a butcher. He married Henriette Schmid, who also hailed from Hesse-Kassel. The first of their six children was Johann, my great-grandfather, the first U.S. citizen in my family tree. Their second child, Augusta, lived to be 95 years old. Georg naturalized as a U.S. citizen in 1873, and Americanized his name as ‘George’. Johann was also changed to ‘John’. Both Henriette and George died young, 40 and 41 years old respectively.

Georg’s brother Herrmann, who immigrated in 1859, also settled in New York and his descendents today live in Massachusetts, Vermont, Wisconsin, Florida, North Carolina, Alabama, and California. Georg’s immigrant sister Sophia today has descendents in the Capobianco family of Bay Shore, NY.

John married into a family which also hailed from Hesse-Kassel when he took Emily Loos as his bride, a year after my grandfather John Herman was born to them. John Herman was the first of eight children of John and Emily Gissel and one of those children, Charlotte Rose, is today living in Levittown at 98 years old. Levittown is where most of my New York cousins live, but I also have cousins in Queens, Staten Island, and on active duty in the U.S. Army.

I knew my grandfather as “Pappy”. Pappy was booted from the U.S. Navy when it was found that he was an underage enlistee. He was a professional boxer at age 17, but the victories came hard and his career was short. He also married for the first time at 17, but became a widower only four years later. He may have served in WWI, but we don’t know for sure – the epitaph on his headstone in the Long Island National Cemetery says that served in WWI, but his military records were destroyed in the 1973 Military Records fire.

Pappy remarried when he took the 15-year-old Mae Marion Mattes as his bride in 1916, and my father Clifford John was born the next year. Granny and Pappy moved around upstate NY and Brooklyn, finally settling in Islip. In 1918 my aunt Lillian was born, and three years later my aunt Charlotte was born.

My father was born Clifford John Gissel, that is noted on his birth certificate. Sometime during his early years the family named was changed to Gissell. Our common belief is that my grandmother didn’t like the sound of Gissel and added another ‘l’. One of Herrmann Gissel’s Grandsons, Herman Charles, did the same thing, some of the Gissells in California are his descendents, the others are the descendents of Georg. I respond to both names and recognize the proper name of the clan is Gissel.