Niclaus "Nicholas" [Carlton] Emch was born on 29 February 1852, at the village of Amti Bucheggberg in the Canton of Solothurn, Switzerland and died on 29 August 1930, at Leith in Grant County, North Dakota. Son of Johannes Emch (1814-1878) and his wife, Anna Knörr (1820-1878). He was a boy of five years old when his family left northwestern Switzerland and made their way to the Belgium port of Antwerp and book passage on the American packet ship SS Charles Cooper for the United States. As a young man in America he changed the spelling of his first name to "Nicholas" added his middle name of Carlton to his full name.
On 18 June 1876, at Canal Winchester in Fairfield County, Ohio Nicholas married his Scot-Irish wife, Rachel Rebecca Torrence (1857-1947). They made their home initially on a farm in the Liberty Township of Fairfield County, Ohio until 1881, when Nicholas moved his family to Lancaster County, Nebraska. Subsequently, by early 1883, they had moved and were renting a farm near Carroll in Wilbur Township in Wayne County, Nebraska, where he became a successful farmer. Nevertheless, Nicholas longed for land of his own. In 1905, he and two neighbors went to then Morton County, North Dakota to investigate homesteading opportunities. In 1906, Nicholas returned along with several others, including his son, Herbert, and proved their homestead claims in Roosevelt Township northwest of Leith in what became Grant County. The following year, in 1907, his wife and four of their children (Roy, Carlton, Edythe, and Charles) arrived at the homestead in Morton County , North Dakota. Two more sons, Franklin and Ora along with their sister, Nellie, and her husband, Wilhelm "William" Christian Kamrath, also arrived in 1907, and homestead near Leith. Daughter, Maude, and her husband, David E. Jones, arrived in 1912.