Walter Chrysler - Ancestry

Ancestry

Walter Chrysler's father, Henry (Hank) Chrysler, was a Canadian-American of German and Dutch ancestry. He was an American Civil War veteran who was a locomotive engineer for the Kansas Pacific Railway and its successor, the Union Pacific Railroad. Walter's mother was born in Rocheport, Missouri and was also of German ancestry. Walter Chrysler was not especially interested in his remote ancestors; his collaborative author Boyden Sparkes says that one genealogical researcher reported "that he had a sea-going Dutchman among his forebears; one Captain Jan Gerritsen Van Dalsen", but that "as to that, Walter Chrysler made it plain to me he was in accord with Jimmy Durante: 'Ancestors? I got millions of 'em!'." However, he thought enough of genealogy to include in his autobiography that his father, Hank Chrysler, "Canadian born, had been brought from Chatham, Ontario, to Kansas City when he was only five or six. His forebears had founded Chatham; the family stock was German; eight generations back of me there had come to America one who spelled his name Greisler, a German Palatine. He was one of a group of Protestants who had left their German homeland in the Rhine Valley, gone to the Netherlands, thence to England and embarked, finally, from Plymouth for New York."

Other researchers have since traced his ancestors in more detail. Karin Holl's monograph on the subject traces the family tree to a Johann Philipp Kreissler, born in 1672, who left Germany for America in 1709. Chrysler's ancestors came from the Rhineland-Palatinate town of Guntersblum.