Albin Emanuel Dittli was born on May 30, 1872 on a farm in Gurtnellen, Switzerland. Albin's parents were Johann Joseph Maria Albin Dittli and Anna Maria Helena Indergand
The town of Gurtnellen was several walking hours away from the farm. The town of Silenen was closer. So they often did business and attended church in Silenen.
The Gotthart railroad was being built during the time of Albin's youth by Italian crews. He watched them cook and eat palanta, and subsequently learned to eat it. The Italians were mostly hard rock miners and built the tunnels. Sometimes he would use the tunnels for short cuts.
He got into the shoe business because there were too many children on the farm and his Dad could not afford to hire all of them, so he apprenticed Albin to a shoe maker in the neighboring town of Amsted where he learned the shoe maker trade during a period of three years. Then he went out "waltzing", which meant looking for work in other towns. You went to a town and asked a shoe maker there for a job. If he could hire you he would. If not he would usually give you a small gratuity of about one frank, which was merely to help you along and was not considered charity or begging. Eventually he ended up in the City of Lucerne working for a very famous man for a number of years. Albin was an expert shoe maker by then and had learned the French language in French Switzerland. He had also become an orthopedic shoemaker, being able to make shoes for people with crippled feet.
While in Lucerne he met Maria Josepha Regina Niderist. She went by the name of Regina. Regina's parents were Joseph Anton Bernard Niderost and Maria Anna Hicklin. Regina was born 24 June 1873 in Ibach, Schwyz.
When Albin met Regina he was foreman at the shoe factory. His boss in Lucerne later came to Altdorf and helped Albin and Regina buy a shoe business which was for sale. That is, he helped them evaluate the stock and thus saved them a good deal of money. The mans name was Walks Vogel.
The shoe store was a Bally agency. That is, they sold the high quality Bally brand shoes. They had an exclusive on the fancy women's shoes and made a twenty five per cent profit on them. Regina thought that was a very high profit margin and felt guilty about it.
Albin (1872) was very frugal. He had both a shoe repair shop and the store. In the repair shop he would collect all the bent nails and his children we were given the job of straightening them for reuse.
In 1918 at the end of World War I the Swiss government had a program to help the deprived children from many nations, mostly German and Austrian. Regina applied for a boy from Vienna whose parents they had known. The boy arrived and was treated as if he was one of their own children. Many years later this boy visited again in Altdorf, then went back to Austria. Then World War II broke out and we could never find out what happened to him. His name was Ferdinand Spittower.
Mother sewed the money he had earned into the lining of his overcoat and ordered him to tell none except his mother when he got home. She also gave him two boxes of clothing to take home. Later they received a tear drenched letter of gratitude from the mother.
In the late thirties Regina wrote to her son Albin telling of Hitler in Germany and warning that he would bring war to Europe.
Regina had a good business head.
In those days the people tended to live all their life in the same village, usually marrying someone from that village. Over the hundreds of years that these villages had had a basically immobile society the people of each village developed very slight differences in their speech from each other village. As Regina worked in the shoe store occasionally a stranger would come in from one of the villages scattered around Gurtnellen. After she talked with the stranger for a couple of minutes she would always be able to tell him which village he came from because she recognized the differences of speech that each village had.
Albin worked very hard all his life till he became almost blind due to cataracts.
Information provided by my dad, Albin, and by my Uncle, Joseph Dittli.