John Gundlach was born in 1849 and grew up around Baltimore Harbor in Maryland. He was not able to join up (due to his age) until 1864 when, finally, his mother signed for him. He served from 1864 to 1869 and was 19 when he was discharged from the Union Navy. I'm guessing he observed medics or corpsmen or doctors (whatever they were called then) on board his several ships and determined that medicine and helping others was what he wanted to do with his life.
In 1883, he became a licensed Allopathic Doctor from the Homeopathic Medical College of Missouri at St.Louis. By this time he was married to Sophia and had Alpha, Helen and Georgiana. Thanks to Google Images for a picture of this college.
Alpha was his uncle's name and Uncle Alpha Gundlach was a dentist in Spokane. Soon John and Sophia moved their family to Spokane was he is listed in the City Directories as a doctor and on the census as a physician. Dr. John Gundlach died here in Spokane in 1910.
The real point of this story, Tika wanted me to stress, is that I knew very little about John George Gundlach except some of the high points of his life. I wanted to know what his young life as a sailor might have been so I Googled "Civil War Union Navy" and found several pages of helpful background material. I had not a clue as to what homeopathic medicine was or an Allopathic Doctor. Again thanks to Google, I learned that Allopathic medicine was practiced by homeopathic doctors employing natural herbs and simple home remedies to effect cures.
Tika reminds us all that there is so much background material that we can find on the Internet about our ancestors........ you just have to come in out of the snow and go Googling.
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