Otto Voit: Orphan Immigrant to Medal of Honor Recipient

Otto Emil Voit (February 5, 1845 – June 1, 1906) was a German-born immigrant and United States Army soldier who earned the nation's highest military honor, the Medal of Honor, for extraordinary bravery during the Battle of the Little Bighorn in 1876. His life traces a remarkable path: from an orphaned teenager emigrating from Freiburg, Germany, to a skilled saddler in the frontier cavalry, through decades of service marked by both hardship and heroism, to quiet retirement in Louisville, Kentucky.

The Voits of Jeffersonville, Indiana

A Voit family immigrated to the Ohio River port town of Jeffersonville, Indiana in the 1850s and still has a presence in the area.

The progenitor of this family, Stephen Voit, was born in 1816 in Bavaria and became a naturalized American citizen in New York City in 1842.  He likely immigrated through the port of New York in the late 1830s and migrated to Jeffersonville about 1853.