William J. Bartell was born around 1842 in New York, New York, to immigrants John and Augusta Bartell. The family moved to Ganges, Michigan, sometime in the 1850s, and his father worked as a shoemaker there. Bartell enlisted in the Union army on September 25, 1863, and mustered in as a corporal in Company I of the 11th Michigan Cavalry on October 16. The regiment spent the next two years stationed in Kentucky and Tennessee. He mustered out in Pulaski, Tennessee, on August 10, 1865.
Bartell returned to Michigan after the war, and he married Celia Harland in Kalamazoo, Michigan, on October 7, 1867. They had at least five children: Frank, born around 1869; Ella, born around 1870; Minnie, born around 1873; Gertrude, born around 1881; and Caroline, born around 1888. They settled in Ganges, and Bartell worked as a house painter. By 1870, they owned $450 of real estate. The family moved to Douglas, Michigan, sometime in the 1870s, and by 1880, Bartell was working as an engineer. They moved to Saline County, Kansas, in the early 1880s, and Bartell operated a dairy and poultry farm there. He died there on December 14, 1915, “following a stroke of paralysis.”