I've talked from time to time about how valuable the information received from relatives is, but how everything must be verified - although it is tempting to believe that our family stories are always true, information changes over the years as stories are told again and again. It's a bit like a game of telephone, and when putting together a genealogy, it is the researcher's responsibility to document and verify everything. You know what they say about assumptions!
As many of you know, I have been actively trying to locate my grandparents' cousins (or their children, in the case of those cousins no longer alive). An important first step has been tracing the lives of their parents, the aunts and uncles of my grandparents.
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| Original caption: "Uncle Otto & me" |
My great-grandmother, Loretta Bauer Taylor, was one of three sisters who lived to adulthood (a fourth sister died at age six, and an unknown sibling died in infancy). Tracing her sisters has been difficult, in part due to the fact that, for reasons unknown, by the time my grandparents were married in 1948, my great-grandmother had very little contact with her mother or her sisters. My only source for information on these two women was my grandmother, who knew only a bit about them.
The older of the two sisters, Evelyn Bauer, was married to a man by the name of Otto Wiese (seen in the image at the right, with my grandfather, about 1925/6). I was able to locate Evelyn's death records fairly easily, but I seemed to hit a bit of a brick wall when looking for information on Otto. This past Thanksgiving, when telling me what she knew about the Bauer sisters, Grannie told me she'd never met Otto and that she thought Evelyn and her husband had divorced because she was, in Grannie's words, "a career woman." Still, a divorce didn't explain why I could find no records of Otto past the 1930 census, when he was living with Evelyn and their two daughters, Virginia and Patricia.
This past week, I was browsing through a compilation of death notices from the New York Times from the first half of the twentieth century. On a whim, I typed in Otto's name, and was quite surprised to see the following record first on the results list, from August 1934:
"WIESE - Otto A. Guiding Star Lodge, No. 585, F. and A. M. Brethren: Sorrowful announcement is made of the passing of Brother Otto A. Wiese. Masonic Funeral services at his late residence, 1,052 Rhinelander Av., Friday evening at 8:30 o'clock."
Our Otto's full name was Otto Adolph Wiese. Could this be the same Otto Wiese? And if it was, did this mean he and Evelyn had divorced between the 1930 census and his death in 1934? Or had they not actually been divorced at all? The next record in the results list was another announcement of Otto Wiese's death:
"WIESE - Otto A., Aug 7, 1934, beloved husband of Evelyn M. Wiese and father of Virginia and Patricia. Masonic service Guiding Star Lodge, No. 585, F. and A. M., Friday, 8:30 P.M., at his late residence, 1,052 Rhinelander Av., Bronx."
If there was any doubt that this Otto was Evelyn's husband, that announcement removed it. Evelyn and Otto were, in fact, not divorced at all. Grannie never met Uncle Otto, not because of a divorce, but because he had died 14 years before she married into the family. Whether someone else in the family was divorced and she got them mixed up, or she simply made an assumption based on his absence, I really can't say.
At the last census before Otto's death, Evelyn was not working. At this point, I think it is safe to say that Evelyn was not a career woman by choice, but by necessity. At the time of Otto's death, her children were 10 and 6, and as a construction worker, Otto can't have left a great deal for them to live on.
Evelyn Wiese outlived her husband by nearly 60 years, but never remarried. She died in 1992, at the age of 95. I am still trying to trace her children, Virginia and Patricia, but it is difficult without exact birthdates or any indication of what their married names might be.
