He immigrated to the U.S. in 1884 and became a naturalized citizen in 1900 in Milwaukee. He married Norma Springer in 1907 and died November 11, 1915 six weeks after his youngest daughter's birth. Three children: Gertrude Katherine Stoessel Esche, Robert Frederick Stoessel, and Irmgard (sp?) Stoessel.
His older brother Emil immigrated to the U.S. with his wife and a young daughter. My mother believes (possibly from having seen it in an old newspaper clipping?) that Emil lived in New York and died in Willamette, Oregon on a trip of some sort.
As you can tell from my great, great-grandfather's name (Moses) and his father's name (Ascher), I come from the Jewish line of Stoessels, and all these dates and names come from the Jewish registry books in the Czech Republic. By the time my grandfather came to the U.S. in the late 1880's, he told people that he was a non-practicing Catholic (and perhaps he was by then -- after Emperor Joseph ordered in the late 1700's that Jews could live outside the ghettos, many of them became secularized). My grandfather opened a jewelry store in Milwaukee and went back home at least once to visit relatives. He died in 1915 in Milwaukee, only two years after my father was born, so everything I know about him is hearsay.
His brother Emil emigrated to the U.S. with his wife and a young daughter. There's a family story (possibly in a newspaper clipping?) that his brother lived in New York and died in Willamette, Oregon on a trip of some sort, but we haven't done any research about this, and we don't know any other family members on that side of the family.
My mother is convinced that John Stossel of the ABC News must be descended from Emil Stoessel, because John Stossel looks so much like the painting we have of my grandfather. However, I doubt this because our name was spelled Stoessel even back in the early 1800's, instead of Stossel with an umlaut, so it isn't very probable that Emil Stoessel would have dropped the "e" whereas it's very probable that one of John Stossel's ancestors might have dropped the umlaut when he emigrated to the U.S.
The name "stoessel", of course, derives from the word "stossen", meaning to push. Since "stoessel" specifically means a pestle (as in, mortar and pestle -- now it also means an engine tappit), my mother always assumed that one of my father's ancestors must have been a pharmacist or a doctor. When my husband (I kept my maiden name) and I were in Austria several summers ago, we visited a museum in Hallein (about an hour's drive from Salzburg), where there's a huge underground salt mine. The museum has a long mural describing the salt mining process, and the last step, the person who stuffed in salt into barrels for shipment, is labeled the "stoessel". Since many of the Stoessels I've met have come from the mountainous areas of Bavaria, Switzerland, Austria or the previously German-speaking portion of the Czech Republic (which is where my grandfather came from back in the 1880's), I'm guessing that a lot of us Stoessels are descended from salt-miners, not from doctors! (Of course, we may be pushy people also!)