Sometimes, you find yourself doing everyone else’s genealogy before you can figure
out which one is your own. Rose Kober—the supposed sister of my paternal
grandfather—was the one key to possibly help me establish just who this man
really was. And yet, she had a story of her own, which made tracing her
heritage almost as difficult as working on John T. McCann’s.
Thanks to a late-life revelation by my now-deceased aunt, I
discovered the name of the one known sibling of my grandfather—well, at least
her married name. Amend that: one of
her married names.
My task was to trace her life, both forwards to the point of
her obituary and backwards to any pre-marriage documentation of her life in her
parents’ home. This, hopefully, would provide records of both Rose and her brother John,
along with their supposed parents, John and Anna. It might also lead to any
immigration records—which, as I could tell from the 1920 census, was a declared
part of Rose’s history, though not claimed by John.
Because John T. McCann was proving to be such an enigma—one could
never be too sure he was who he said he was, considering the discoveries of
earlier census records providing a very different
name for my father’s father—Rose became the hope for stabilizing the research
ups and downs. If I followed her (I reasoned), it would lead me to the answers
about her brother.
So, I worked my way into the future from the point at which
I had found Rose in the 1920 census. There, she had been living with her
husband of five years, George W. Kober, in Woodhaven, a neighborhood of the
Queens borough of New York City.
While I couldn’t locate either one in the 1925 New York State
census, George and Rose Kober were still at the same address in the 1930 census as they were in 1920.
Things seemed to be going well—at least financially—in the
Kober household by 1930, for George was now the Assistant Superintendent for
the Post Office. That, however, didn’t last long, for an April 11, 1932, entry in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle told the brief
tale:
KOBER—On Sunday, April 10, 1932, GEORGE WASHINGTON, beloved husband of Rose, son of the late George W. and Pauline D. Kober and brother of Mrs. Pauline K. Thomas. Funeral services at his home, 8929 96th St., Woodhaven, L. I., Tuesday, April 12, at 8 p.m. Interment Wednesday morning, Woodlawn Cemetery.
You found something! :)
ReplyDeleteYes...bit by bit...although I'm quite pleased at how much more I'm finding on this second pass through my research on this couple. Hopefully, it will lead me to the point where it connects Rose and my grandfather--and provides the actual names of their parents.
DeleteShe sounds like she had a life full of twists and turns.
ReplyDeleteShe has certainly been full of surprises for me! At least, as far as I've been able to find, this time around.
Delete