Wednesday, August 6, 2014

Wedding Wednesday: Clara STROESSER and Robert Leo HILL




Page 8 of the 23 Nov 1940 edition of Omaha's Evening World-Herald:
Clara Stroesser to Be Wed Monday
   Miss Clara Frances Stroesser, daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Harry Stroesser, will be married Monday to Robert Leo Hill, son of Mr. and Mrs. George A. Hill. Msgr. E. J. Hunkeler will perform the morning ceremony at St. Cecilia’s cathedral.
Clara STROESSER was the second daughter of Harry STROESSER and his wife Mary Josephine (CRAIG), and my grandmother’s older sister. One of their other sisters, Kay, had been married the previous year, also at St. Cecilia’s cathedral. Clara and her husband were always referred to by my branch of the family, and, I believe, all the other STROESSER branches, as “Clare and Tudd.” They continued to reside in Omaha for the rest of their lives.

In the same issue of the Evening World-Herald, but on page 14, Clare and Tudd appeared in the list of marriage licenses.


MARRIAGE LICENSES
Name and Address.                            Age.
Theodore Gurazany, 2922 Gold St. .....31
Vera Grezywa, 4436 G St. ............27

Monroe Wells, Sioux City, Ia. .......33
Roberta Olson Binder, Sioux City, Ia. .26

James Raymond Penny, 3511 Harney St. ..........................over 21
Mary Ann Falcone, 1230 South Seventh St. ...................over 21

Joseph E. Eakley, 2537 Cass St. ......21
Margaret Roach, 4418 Cass St. .......21

Robert Leo Hill, 4011 Cuming St. .....27
Clara Stroesser, 417 N. 40th St. .......22

Joseph P. Faluck, St. Louis, Mo. ......27
Marcia Dillon, 2612 C St. ............21

Donald C. Higgins, 2020 S. 20th St. ....22
Marjorie M. Milotz, 2440 Redick Ave. 19

Paul R. Vannatten, Minneapolis, Minn. .........................over 21
Gloria E. Meadows, 1004 N. 49th St. ..............................over 21

Allan L. Means, 2309 S. 33d St. ......23
Naomi Chapman, 2853 Fowler Ave. ...22

(I have included all the marriage licenses in my transcription for the benefit of those who might be related to others on the list.)

Sunday, August 3, 2014

Sunday’s Obituary: Harry STROESSER

Page 12 of the 29 Feb 1964 issue of Omaha’s Evening World-Herald:
Harry Stroesser, 85, Courthouse Carpenter
    Harry Stroesser, 85, of 417 North Fortieth Street, a carpenter who was a union member and officer for more than 50 years, died Friday at home.
    Mr. Stroesser was born in Luxembourg and came to Omaha about 1910. He was the Douglas County Courthouse carpenter from 1930 to 1953.
    Survivors: wife Mary; daughters Therese, Santa Monica, Cal.; Mrs. Mary Johnson, San Diego; Mrs. Clara Hill, Omaha; Mrs. Catherine Korman, Philadelphia; Mrs. Anna Ehmen, Santa Maria, Cal.; Mrs. Rose Hoyt, Salem, Ore.; Mrs. Joan Welsh, Van Nuys, Cal.; and sons Edward, Dan and Joseph, all of Omaha.
    Services are pending at the Leo A. Hoffman Mortuary.

Harry STROESSER, born Johann STROESSER in Heispelt, Luxembourg on 18 Oct 1878, was my great-grandfather. I am not certain at what point he stopped using the name Johann; by the time he reached the U.S. he was known as Harry, or Henry for more formal occasions.

His obituary had been printed earlier in the day, on page 22 of the regular edition of the Omaha World-Herald, with an error in his age and an omission of his funeral services. Otherwise the two obituaries are much the same.


For the following three days, he appeared in the death and funeral announcement section of the various editions of the World-Herald.

A holy card in memory of Harry STROESSER,  probably given out on occasion of his funeral, was found among the effects of his daughter Rose, my grandmother.

Front of holy card
Back of holy card

Tuesday, July 29, 2014

Wedding Wednesday: Harry STROESSER and Mary CRAIG


My great-grandparents, Harry STROESSER and Mary Josephine CRAIG, were married in Omaha, Nebraska on 8 Sept 1915. Thus far I have been unable to find any newspaper account of the ceremony; quite possibly one was never published. (It seems a bit surprising, though, given that Harry's name was frequently in the newspaper during this era due to his activities with the Carpenter's Union. I would have thought that would make him prominent enough to merit an article.) However, I did run across an article celebrating their twenty-fifth anniversary.


Page 7 of the 8 Sept 1940 issue of Omaha's Sunday World-Herald:
Children Will Help Fete Anniversary
   Ten children will help Mr. and Mrs. Harry Stroesser, 417 North Fortieth street, celebrate their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary today.
   Ever since Stroesser and his wife, the former Mary Craig, were wed, they have lived in the same home. Nine of the children still live with them there.
   The sons and daughters, ranging in age from 24 to 6, are Mary, Clara, Catherine, Anna, Edward, Rose, Daniel, Joseph, Theresa, and Joan. Catherine has been Mrs. John Korman since November.
The marriage of Catherine STROESSER and John KORMAN appeared in last week's Wedding Wednesday post. Rose STROESSER was my grandmother.

The STROESSER home at 417 N. 40th St in Omaha

Sunday, July 27, 2014

Sunday’s Obituary: Peter STROESSER


Page 23 of the 3 Nov 1927 issue of the Evening World-Herald:


STROSSER--Peter, infant son of Mr. and Mrs. Henry Strosser, 417 N. 40th St.
   Services at 11:30 a. m. Thursday, Interment Holy Sepulcher.

Peter was the third (and, fortunately, the last) of Harry and Mary STROESSER’s sons to die in infancy. His brother Joseph George’s death notice appeared in last week’s “Sunday’s Obituary” post. I have not as yet found a notice for the death of the first of these unlucky infants, Francis. 

Two years after this loss, Harry and Mary were blessed with the birth of a son who managed to survive infancy. This child was apparently named in remembrance of his less fortunate brothers: Joseph Peter Francis. 

There were also two older boys who survived: Edward (“Ed”) and Daniel (“Dan”), as well as seven girls: Mary, Clara (or Clare), Catherine (“Kay”), Anna (or Anne), Rose, Therese (“Teri”), and Joan.

Tuesday, July 22, 2014

After Elsie’s Manuscript


Aunt Elsie

If you have been following my Amanuensis Monday series transcribing the manuscript my great-aunt Elsie wrote, you know that it stopped before her family moved from Idaho to Oregon. However, I can continue (admittedly, in less detail) from there. Each time I visited her she told me other stories, which, thankfully, I recorded as soon as I got home.



I have before me the notes from two conversations with Elsie, one on 18 Apr 1999 and one that I unfortunately neglected to note the date, but it would have been in late 1998 or in 1999. Some of what she said repeats what is already written in her manuscript, so I will omit those parts. The rest I will sort more or less chronologically and present in the following paragraphs.



The day of one of our conversations. My “nephew’s” mom was also there, but apparently she was taking the picture.

Going back to the times that Elsie wrote about in her manuscript, she told me a couple things that she had not written about. She told me that when she was a little girl she used to sit on her dad’s lap and curl his moustache. She said he had some kind of special wax or cream that he would put on it.



She also remembered that her dad always said that tea should be the color of whiskey. Elsie told me that she was so young she didn’t know what whiskey was, but she always remembered that tea ought to be the color of it.



And now we arrive where the manuscript left off. The first world war has ended, and Walter Sr. (Elsie’s dad) has fallen in love with Oregon because berries and nuts grow on the sides of the road. He had been working in the shipyards in Portland during the war, while his family remained in Idaho. But now the war is over, and he has decided that the whole Underwood family will move to Oregon.



When they came, they took a train from Idaho to the Oregon town of Canby. That seems a remarkable stopping point to me, as Canby is a fair distance south of Portland, and a pretty small town. I wonder how they even heard of it. However, perhaps it was more prosperous at that time, or perhaps they knew someone there. Elsie said that they stayed with friends for a while, though she didn’t say whether those friends lived in Canby or Portland. And unfortunately, if she mentioned their names, I did not write them down. But after staying with those friends, whoever they were, the Underwood family got a house in the area of Portland known as Errol Heights.



Elsie left home at age 15; she didn’t get to finish high school. At that time she moved in with a prominent Portland family, the Banfields. There is now a freeway named after them. She looked after their little girl, Harriet. She also cooked for them. On Thanksgiving, she would prepare their Thanksgiving dinner before going home to her own family for the holiday.



The little Banfield girl picked out a set of dishes for Elsie. They were a buttercup pattern because she said that Elsie was just like a buttercup. Mrs. Banfield told Elsie to go to a particular store and look at this particular set of dishes. She knew that Elsie loved to set the table. So Elsie went to the store and looked. She liked them, but, she protested to Mrs. Banfield, they were so expensive, and she had such a large family. (Her “family” at this time is, naturally, referring to her parents and siblings. She had not yet married.) But Mrs. Banfield wanted her to have these dishes. So she had the store do a table setting display with them for Elsie and told her to go look at them again on her day off. Elsie felt very awkward about it, but Mrs. Banfield’s word was law, so she went. She nervously entered the store. The salesgirl asked if she could help her.



“I’m supposed to look at a table setting,” said Elsie.



“Oh! You must be Elsie,” said the salesgirl, and showed her to the table setting.



It was beautiful, but once again Elsie protested the price to Mrs. Banfield. It was no use: Mrs. Banfield wanted her to have the dishes, so she bought them for her. She also insisted to Elsie that they be used for everyday, not saved for special occasions.



At the time of my visit, Elsie proudly showed me the dishes, and told me that she still had the entire set. She was just shy of her 92nd birthday.



She said that one time they had duck for dinner, and it tasted like fish.



Sometime after all the Underwood girls were out of grammar school, Walter and Flora Underwood (the parents) moved to Netarts, on the Oregon coast. Walter’s sister and her husband, known as Aunt Sadie and Uncle Alvy, lived next door. Walter built both houses. He preferred living at the beach to living in Portland. He sold flower bulbs there.



Here I must interject a story of my own. The houses in Netarts are no longer in the family, but when my Dad was a child he used to visit his grandparents there. When I go with him for a drive in that area it is like a guided tour: he points out the house that belonged to his grandparents and comments on the changes that have been made in the neighborhood, he shows me where the dump was where his cousins used to shoot rats, he tells about the dune that was behind the Schooner Restaurant and how the kids used to run down it until one day a boy was covered by sand and died. I have accompanied him on enough of these excursions that I can almost tell some of the stories myself, although Dad tells them best. He is an excellent storyteller. Like a little child, I beg him to tell them again and again.



One day, my parents and I were on such a drive, and we saw a garage sale sign. Not one of us can resist a garage sale. And then we realized that the sale was at Walter Underwood’s old house! We definitely had to stop. Among the other items displayed in the front yard were a large number of gladiolas. “The man who used to live here ran a nursery,” explained the woman running the sale. “That was my granddad,” my dad said. These were flowers descended from those originally planted by my great-grandfather. So naturally we bought as many gladiolas as we could carry—not only were they lovely to look at, but they were family heirlooms!


A gladiola resembling those we got from Walter Underwood, Sr.’s former garden.  
By 3268zauber (Own work) [CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons
But we must go back in time again, and return to the stories that Elsie told me. There is little left; the rest is more like snippets of information than stories, but they are still worth telling.


During WWII, there was a scare at Netarts Bay. Walter Sr. and two other men watched on the ground all night, but fortunately nothing happened.



When V-J Day came along, people swarmed into Safeway, the grocery store where Elsie worked.



Elsie’s sisters Aileen (my grandma) and Inez worked for Jantzen Knitting Mills. Aileen was the floor manager, and Inez was a spinner.



My grandma, Aileen, is the last woman from the right in the second row. Her sister Inez is directly behind her.

Elsie also said that she remembered going back to Idaho and visiting her sister Vida’s grave with her mom. If you recall, Vida was the baby who died of typhoid fever, apparently when the Underwoods were living in Burley, Idaho. “Mom allways thought she could have saved Vida,” Elsie wrote in her manuscript. She told me that Vida had been the only one of the children who had brown eyes.



That is the end of the notes I took on the two visits I mentioned. There were many more visits and many more notes, but I was just beginning to become serious about genealogy and still had a lot to learn about organization. The other notes are scattered amongst my papers, yet to be sorted into any sort of identifiable structure. I often, when going through old paperwork, run across a stray piece of scratch paper or even an envelope covered in genealogical notes from those early days.



However, since you have already spent so much time getting to know Aunt Elsie, I suspect you may be interested to learn about the rest of her life.



She married a man named Ferris Jones on 21 July 1928 in Portland, Oregon. I don’t know much about their marriage, as Elsie seldom talked about it except when saying something like, “That was when I was with my first husband, Ferris.” I once asked her about Ferris, but all she would say was, “He wasn’t good to me.” They divorced sometime before 1960, but I have not yet been able to find the record.



Despite how well I thought I knew Elsie, I learned only last year that she was married on 9 July 1960 to a man named Donald Peterson. They probably met at work, since I know that Elsie worked at Safeway, and he was a meat cutter at Safeway. There are, of course, a number of different Safeway locations, and I don’t know at this time whether they were both at the same location, but it does seem the likeliest scenario. Their marriage, however, was very short-lived. Even my dad, who was a child at the time, was surprised to hear of this marriage, having no recollection of it, and I could not find a single picture of Donald in the family album.

Marriage record for Elsie and her second husband Donald. Two of the witnesses are Elsie’s sister and brother-in-law.

She married a third time on 20 April 1963 to Lee Crocker. This was the uncle that I knew, and the marriage that lasted. Elsie once told me how they met, and I know that I recently saw those notes, but evidently I did not put them where they belonged, because I don’t see them now. However, I do remember that the story involved square dancing and seeing Lee walking around with his three children.


Lee, as I knew him, was a quiet, but very kind man. Elsie, in contrasting him to her first husband, said, “He’s good to me.” Elsie never had any biological children, but she took in Lee’s as her own. Their mother had passed away in 1960. I know that Elsie loved those children very much. Every time I visited she was sure to show me the latest pictures of her kids and grandkids and to tell me what each one was up to. Unfortunately, I never got to know them personally very well, though we did meet a few times, but Elsie always made sure to tell me the latest news. (I suspect she kept them apprised of the latest news about me, as well.)



When my own grandmother, Aileen, passed away in 1989, Elsie and Lee took over as sort of my surrogate grandparents. It is difficult to put into words what they meant to me. It was shortly after my grandma died—memory makes me want to say the day after, but I’m not sure that is correct—that I spent a very special day with Lee and Elsie. I think it was the first time that I had stayed with them without my parents, and it might even have been a sleepover. But after that day, although I still missed my grandma, I didn’t feel quite so much like she was gone. And I knew that whenever I needed Grandma Aileen, I could always call on Elsie.



Lee passed away on 11 April 1992. After that, Elsie moved into a smaller apartment. I remember “helping” her move. (I doubt if I was much help!) We explored many treasures hidden in her huge closet. She did not have to move far; they had lived at an upscale retirement home called Willamette View Manor, and she stayed within the manor, just in a different hallway.



Elsie remained lively and spry into her 90s. She kept some rosebushes in the manor’s garden and made a habit of leaving roses at her neighbors’ doors in the morning so they would have fresh flowers for their rooms.



And then one day she fell. I have never understood how a broken bone can completely destroy a person’s health, and I probably never will. But Elsie spent the rest of her days in the hospital. She passed away on 20 June 2001.



I think her life was well summed up by one of her friends at the funeral. I don’t know who it was, only that she lived at the manor. She told my mom and me that, having no family of her own, she had never quite understood why Elsie was always talking about hers. Sometimes it would rather annoy her that Elsie was always talking about others. But, seeing how many people were at the funeral and how much love there was, “Now I understand.”

Wedding Wednesday: Catherine STROESSER and John KORMAN


Page 16 of the 21 Sept 1939 issue of Omaha’s Evening World-Herald:
Betrothed
   Mr. and Mrs. Harry Stroesser announce the engagement of their daughter, Miss Catherine Stroesser, to John J. Korman of Omaha, son of Mrs. Veronica Korman of Philadelphia. No date has been set for the wedding.
This was the third daughter of Harry and Mary STROESSER, and my grandmother’s older sister. It would seem that Catherine (better known to us as “Kay”) and her fiance soon set a date, because they were married three months later.


Page 10 of the 11 Dec 1939 issue of the Evening World-Herald:
Korman-Stroesser
Rites Performed
   Rites performed November 6 at St. Cecilia’s cathedral by Msgr. E. J. Hunkeler united in marriage Miss Catherine Stroesser, daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Harry Stroesser of Omaha and John Korman, son of Mrs. Veronica Korman of Philadelphia.
   The bride’s attendant was her sister, Miss Clara Stroesser, and best man was David Keegan. A reception was held at the home of the bride’s parents the afternoon of the wedding. The couple, who are now living in Omaha, will leave shortly to make their home in Philadelphia.
A number of the STROESSER children were married at St. Cecilia’s cathedral, including my grandparents. The happy couple did indeed move to Philadelphia, and lived the rest of their lives in that area.


Sunday, July 20, 2014

Sunday’s Obituary: Joseph George STROESSER (1925-1925)

Page 19 of the 12 May 1925 issue of the Omaha World Herald:
STROESSER--Joseph George, 417 N. 40th St., May 10; infant son of Mr. and Mrs. Harry Stroesser.
   Services at Hoffman-Crosby funeral home, Tuesday, 2 p. m. Interment, Holy Sepulcher.
This Joseph George STROESSER was my grandmother, Rose Edith STROESSER's younger brother, in fact, the very next child born. He was one of three boys in the family who died in infancy. The other two were Francis, who died in 1918, and Peter, who was born in 1927 and died soon thereafter.

Harry and Mary STROESSER headed a large family, even with these three sad occurrences. Ten of their children survived to adulthood.