Monday, May 4, 2015

The Unexpected Upheavals of Life


The photograph of Aunt Rose, in her fanciful pose with my father’s family, may have represented a particularly pleasing episode in her life. If my guess of the picture’s date as 1915 is accurate, it was about the time she married George Kober, a New York City postal employee.

George was evidently successful at his post, for future census records documented his promotion at work. His was a modest but pleasant home in one of the more suburban-looking neighborhoods of Queens Borough in New York City, valued, according to the 1930 census, at $8,000.

The Woodhaven, New York, Kober address was also home to George’s mother-in-law, listed in the 1920 census as Anna Krouse. This was not the only year I had found Anna and Rose listed together in a census record. Though the Kobers were married in 1915, the New York State census was evidently taken before the date of their marriage. At that point, however, Rose was still living with her mother—though I had to search in Brooklyn, to the south of Queens borough, to find them.

Finding Rose in the 1915 census helped clear up one question about the Kober marriage record, which had designated George’s bride to be one Rose Miller. Sure enough, in the 1915 census, there was Anna—this time, with her surname spelled Krausse—living with a person designated as her “duaghter,” having the name, Rose Miller. Check.

Pondering whether Rose’s surname of Miller was a name from a previous marriage or whether Anna had been the one to marry again, I found one detail in the 1915 census which might confirm the former. In that record, both women were listed as born in Germany. One—Anna—was entered as being an alien. The other—Rose—was listed as a citizen. Both declared they had been in this country for thirty years. Rose’s citizenship likely was owing to marriage to an American—though, of course, I’ll need documentation to be certain.

This possibility meant that Rose, aged thirty nine by the time of this census, was either already divorced—an unlikely scenario in that era—or widowed.

That, however, was the snapshot of her life on the date the census was taken, June first, 1915. By November, life became quite different. By then, Rose and George had married, and Rose and her mother moved into the Kober home on 96th Street in Woodhaven.

One hardly had time to breathe a sigh of relief for the two widow women, though. For the longest time, I had not been able to find Anna in the 1930 census—not to mention, I couldn’t find any of the three in the 1925 state census. Yet, though Anna would have been eighty two by the time of the 1930 census, I could not find any documented reason why she was not at her place in the household at that later enumeration.

That is where going back to retrace those research steps at a later date can help. This time, rather than search for the assumed death record, I perused the local newspapers for any mention of the family. That is how I found this tiny, but tragic, entry in The Brooklyn Standard Union from Thursday, September 29, 1921.


Woman Ends Her Life With Illuminating Gas

Evidently despondent, due to prolonged illness, Mrs. Anna Krauss, 71 years old, who lived with her daughter, Mrs. Rose Kober, at 729 Ninetieth street, Woodhaven, ended her life last night by inhaling illuminating gas.

12 comments:

  1. oh Jacqi, that's awful, how shockingly sad for the poor family. I wonder what was wrong with her.

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    1. Dara, whether she turns out to be a relative or not, you can be sure I'm going to send for the death record to find out. It should say in the certificate.

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  2. Goodness gracious. How sad. At least there is an answer to one question. Would a death certificate answer any other questions?

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    1. The certificate should also include the names of her parents and where they were from...although Wendy, you and I know that is not always included, if the reporting party didn't have the information--or was too stressed out to think clearly at the time the report was taken.

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    1. Yeah. It was pretty much a shock to find this one in the paper.

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  4. Well of course I had to look that up. It could have been accidental.
    Toxic asphyxiation due to the displacement of oxygen from oxyhemoglobin by carbon monoxide. [Medical Dictionary Online].
    Illuminating gas: was a synthetic mixture of hydrogen and hydrocarbon gases produced by destructive distillation (pyrolysis) of bituminous coal or peat. It was used for gas lighting, as it produces a much brighter light than natural gas or water gas. Although also sometimes called coal gas, it should not be confused with water gas or syngas, which are made from anthracite coal or coke plus water, and chemically quite different. Illuminating gas was much less toxic than these other forms of coal gas, but less could be produced from a given quantity of coal.
    Illuminating gas consists mainly of methane, ethylene and hydrogen. The experiments with distilling coal were described by John Clayton in 1684. George Dixon's pilot plant exploded in 1760, setting back the production of illuminating gas a few years. The first commercial application was in a Manchester cotton mill in 1806. In 1901, studies of the defoliant effect of leaking gas pipes lead to the discovery that ethylene is a plant hormone

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    1. That's an interesting thought, Far Side, that it might have been accidental. Hopefully, the death certificate will provide more information. There may also have been an investigation, to insure it was suicide and not something else...

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  5. Under the photo in upper left...

    http://bklyn.newspapers.com/image/59971248/ some familiar names..

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    1. Yes, quite a few names there, in fact. I've seen that one before, Iggy, but not sure what to do with it. I have no idea who the Eissler family would have been. It's not a surname familiar to me.

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    2. My thought was this article "proves" that the ladies in question definitely knew each other - as to who was related to whom, there is no telling.

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    3. Good point, Iggy--and where there are those associations, there may be more among those names. Hopefully, those surnames will surface again and lead us to additional clues.

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