Over 200 years of Reitz family history in letters, photos, and comments, 1790-2010. Reitz glassmakers from Germany worked at John Frederick Amelung's New Bremen (Maryland) Glassmanufactory in the 1790s, then with Albert Gallatin's glassmaking enterprise in New Geneva, Pennsylvania, 1794-97. Ultimately Lewis and Philip Reitz acquired ownership of the Federal Hill Glassworks in Baltimore, Maryland. This family heritage scrapbook includes the lengthy written record of Philip Reitz's 1851 trip back to ancestral villages (Sulzbach, Friedrichsthal) and his visits to Paris and London World's Fair. Hermann Gerhardt Boisselier emigrated from Leipzig to San Francisco in 1849, before California had even become a state. He brought a German 48er's enlightened sensibility, valuing freethought, secular and scientific education, and progressive politics to his children, Emma, Victor, Herbert, and George, and via them, to us. Victor and Charles Bartell fought and fell as Union soldiers in the Civil War. They wrote seventeen letters home which are here preserved and transcribed. So too are fourteen letters from Herbert Boisselier who served in Cuba during the Spanish-American War of 1898. A letter home from World War I soldiers, Philip and Gerard Reitz, serving in France is included here also, as are three letters describing an eyewitness account of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake from Victor Boisselier, who lived through it. James Buchanan, admittedly not one of the nation's finest presidents (pro-slavery), wrote frequently to one of our g-g-grand fathers (an ancestor of Diana Henrich Reitz), Maj. Charles Shriner, Sr. An 1851 letter urging him to mobilize the Democratic Party apparatus in Pennsylvania is featured here. Maj. Shriner later became a Republican and was a member of the Electoral Collage from Pennsylvania who cast a vote for Abraham Lincoln in 1864. His son, Charles, became a physician, served in the military in the West, and settled in Baxter Springs, Kansas. As a scrapbook project, this volume organizes (in a preliminary fashion) the otherwise sprawling archive of family writings and records from our German-American past. It makes copies of these materials compactly available to everyone who might like to see them, especially our family's newer generations. Its primary source documents may even be of interest someday to further studies of 19th century German-American history.