Ewald and Maria Hausdorf from Austria transcribed the diary of Balthasar Best, a Civil War soldier of the First Minnesota Regiment and later in 1874 one of the first citizens of Traer running it's first hotel.

How did they come across the diary of Balthasar Best?

It happened coincidentally by playing around and collecting historical information on the Internet.   We were curious whether we can find American immigrants bearing the same family name. And yes, we discovered (meanwhile) most of them and also Lieutenant Colonel Charles F. Hausdorf who was the last commander of the famous 'First Minnesota'. Consequently we came in contact with Wayne Jorgenson who is a great collector of artifacts and historical researcher of the Minnesota Regiments in the Civil War because we wanted to know more about Charles. We learned that many soldiers of that regiment were German immigrants and we offered our assistance in case any translation skill would be desired hoping to get more information about Charles. However, the story about him was not known either because no researcher before had discovered that the name he used as an orphan during the war was Frank Houston.

Wayne Jorgenson owns the Civil War diary 1863 of Balthasar Best and asked us to look at it, because so far nobody could read the old Germans script. The content of the diary was unknown. It was a hard work but eventually we "deciphered", read and transcribed the diary, understanding that this can be a small contribution to American history by us. The research did not stop here, we also tried to investigate not only the life of Balthasar but also of all persons, events, places and other facts mentioned by him in the diary and all comrades of his company of that time. The result is a book ready to be published with the title: The Civil War Diary 1863 of Private Balthasar Best.