The Peter Mueller Mystery Solved (I hope)

My mother's maiden name was Mueller.  Her father was Alfred or A.J. Mueller, who died when she was only 3 years old.  After that, her family kept in touch with the Mueller extended family, but since they lived in another city, and since her father was deceased, the families eventually grew apart. Obviously, I never knew my grandfather and as far as I can recall, never met any Muellers other than my mother's siblings and my Mueller cousins, the children of her brother Al.  Still, I have been trying to become acquainted with my Mueller ancestors and in doing so have been grappling with a mystery of two Peter Muellers, born, it seems, within a year of each other, both in the month of October. 

At first, I thought there was only one Peter Mueller, born in either 1873 or 1874.  Dates are often confusing if you go by census records so it was understandable that two Peter Muellers with birthdates in this time frame might merge into one - which is exactly what has happened on ancestry.com.  It seems I'm not the only one who's been confused. 

The Peter Mueller I was researching was an uncle of A.J. Mueller, my grandfather.  In other words, he was the brother of Charles Mueller, my great grandfather.  The records I found indicated he married a woman named Mary K. Wenning and was the father of 8 or 9 children.   This made sense since in the census records this family lives just down the road from my great grandfather, and Peter's supposed brother Charles.  So I was happily researching the family, finding a number of interesting details regarding intermarriages between many German families in the region, when I took a break and began looking through some papers I recently discovered - typed pages regarding the Muellers, with some notes in my mother's handwriting.  According to these records, Peter Mueller, the brother of Charles Mueller (my great grandfather) married a woman named Ida Hodde and they had only one child.  If this was true, then there obviously were two Peter Muellers, seemingly born a year apart.  On the other hand, my mother could have been wrong.

So I began searching for another Peter Mueller, married to Ida Hodde, and I found him.  It took me two days of searching grave records, census records, death records, and newspaper articles before I was able to confirm that there were two men with the same name.  One thing that gave it away was that on one census record the first Peter (married to Mary) listed his mother as "Catherine," and I knew that Peter who was the brother of Charles did not have a mother named Catherine.  His mother's name was Margaret.  Then I found a death record that listed the father of a Peter Paul Mueller as "John."  So it seemed this first Peter (who I orginally and mistakenly thought was the uncle of my grandfather) was the son of  Catherine and John.  Who was this John Mueller?

It turns out that John was the half brother of Nicholas, the father of Charles and the Peter Mueller who married Ida.  John married a woman named Catherine Wagner and they had four children, including Peter Paul, before John died in 1875.  This Peter P. is the one who married Mary K. Wenning and had a large family.  So the two Peter Muellers are actually cousins, or perhaps, 1/2 cousins.

Another interesting tidbit - my grandfather Charles married Susanna Wagner, who is apparently the sister of Catherine Wagner, who married John Mueller, the uncle of Charles.