User:Evansknight/sandbox/Gustav Willius

Gustav Otto Conrad Willius (25 November 1831 – 24 September 1924) was a German-American immigrant, who, along with his brother Ferdinand Willius, held a prominent position in the early years of the state of Minnesota. His is most well known for his role as a banker in Saint Paul.

Family and early life
Gustav Otto Conrad Willius was the fourth and youngest child of the Bremen wine merchant Friedrich Willius (20 March 1783 – 12 May 1838) and his wife Johanna Dorothea Doris Charlotte Niemann (15 September 1793 – 16 February 1832).

His siblings were
 * Conradine Louise (7 May 1821 – 20 May 1839),
 * Johanna Wilhelmina (23 March 1824 – 20 June 1839) and
 * Johann Wilhelm Ferdinand Willius (16 February 1830 – 7 November 1916).

Friedrich Willius was the son of the merchant Conrad Willius (10 October 1745 – 27 October 1825) and his wife Anna Martha (née Pfeiffer; 10 June 1753 – 2 March 1806), and was originally from Kassel. He relocated to Bremen in the 1820s prior to starting his family. Through his mother, Friedrich was the nephew of the theologian and preacher Johann Jakob Pfeiffer, and his cousins included Burkhard Wilhelm Pfeiffer, Franz Georg Pfeiffer and Carl Jonas Pfeiffer. Dorothea's parents were Gottlieb Niemann (10 September 1750 - 1849), a native of Minden and a merchant specializing in importing goods from the Netherlands, and Dorothea Tietzel (or Tietzeln).

Gustav's mother Doris died less than three months after his birth, and this loss left his father inconsolable, to the extent that Gustav later remarked how he never got to know his father, and felt as though his father blamed him for his mother's untimely death. Friedrich Willius died in 1838, when Gustav was only 6 years old, and an epidemic of scarlet fever took both of his older sisters in the following year, so by 1839, Gustav and Ferdinand were the only members of their immediate family left alive. The boys' uncle Carl Knippenberg, husband of their mother's elder sister Friedericke, was charged with arranging for their care; due to Friedrich's ineptitude in business and sudden death, that involved selling their house and assets in order to provide for their education. To supplement their meager inheritance, their paternal uncle Conrad Willius and their maternal uncle Dietrich Niemann also provided them with funds to ensure they completed their education and had some small money to help them start their careers. The boys were eventually enrolled in the Educational Institute of Lehe, which was effectively a posh orphanage. The building that once housed the school is now the Landhaus Louisenthal in Bremerhaven.

Personal life
On 17 September 1872, Gustav married Emma Klausmeyer in Cincinnati, Ohio. She was the daughter of Wilhelm Klausmeyer (1817 – 24 November 1893) and Emilie Strobel (1826 – 1863), both immigrants from Bavaria. Wilhelm Klausmeyer was a choir director, a pianist, and an early member of the board of directors of the Cincinnati Conservatory of Music. Emma's brother Alfred Klausmeyer was the founder of the Anchor Buggy company, an early American manufacturer of automobiles.