Emma Scheibel Steele, 1894-1952

March is Women’s History Month, and it’s a good reminder for us to tell the stories of the females in our family tree. Today I’d like to tell you about my great-grandmother, Emma Scheibel, who married Homer B. Steele.

Emma Scheibel Steele and Homer Steele, with daughter Wilma, 1919

Emma is an important branch on my family tree because she’s my mother’s mother’s mother. In DNA terms, that means she’s my direct mitochondrial line ancestor. From her, and her mother before her, and her mother and so forth through umpteen generations, I’ve inherited my mitochondrial DNA type. It’s a genetic pathway to the past that I don’t have for any other ancestral line.

Emma Laura Scheibel was born on 6 March 1894 in Columbus, Ohio. Her parents were Ludwig Scheibel and Pauline Treebte or Treebto (which I’ve learned is actually spelled “Treptow”). On the birth register, her name was recorded as Pauline.[1] I don’t know whether that was an error on the clerk’s part, or whether her parents later changed their minds about her name, but she appears as Emma in every other record created about her.

Emma’s father, Ludwig Scheibel, was born on 29 September 1839 in Germany, possibly Württemberg.[2] He sometimes went by the American name Louis. Her mother, Pauline Treptow, was born in Blumenfelde, Kr. Konitz, West Prussia, on 25 February 1855.[3] They married in Columbus on 13 April 1880. It was Ludwig’s second marriage.[4] A widow, he already had a son, Peter Scheibel, from his first marriage.

According to my grandmother, Wilma (Steele) Herrel, Ludwig and Pauline retained a lot of their native customs and spoke German at home. In public, they spoke English with a heavy German accent. Knowing this, I imagine Emma grew up speaking both English and German.

When the census was taken in June 1900, Emma was six years old and not yet attending school. Ludwig Scheibel, age 63, was a harness maker, and owned the family’s home at 428 E. Fulton St. He had immigrated to the U.S. in 1852 and was a naturalized citizen. Pauline, age 45, had immigrated in 1875. She had given birth to nine children, but only five were living. They were Louisa Scheibel, age 15; Willie Scheibel, 13; Augusta Scheibel, 9; Emma; and Albert Scheibel, 4.[5]

On 11 April 1907, when Emma was 13 years old, her mother Pauline Scheibel died of tuberculosis.[6] Those had to be difficult years for the family, as her brother Willy died as well. By summer 1910, Emma’s school days were behind her. She was 16 years old and working as a nurse in a hospital.[7]

But there was another blow yet to come. On Christmas day 1910, Ludwig Scheibel died of apoplexy (stroke).[8] Emma and her siblings were orphans.

I’m not sure how Emma met Homer Burdell Steele, a native of Cheshire, Gallia County, Ohio. Homer worked as a shipping clerk for the Federal Glass Company in Columbus, and lived in the same part of town. Perhaps their paths crossed at church. Rev. Hines married Emma and Homer on 20 May 1915, when she was 21 years old.[9] Their first child, Wilma (my grandmother), was born 23 September 1917.[10]

Emma and Homer’s second daughter, Rosemary Steele, was born 28 November 1919.[11] After Rosemary, they had four boys in succession: Kenneth Steele, born 1 March 1925[12]; Homer G. “Junior” Steele, born 26 November 1929[13]; William “Billy” Steele, born 2 February 1931[14]; and Ronald Steele, born in 1932.

In addition to her children, Emma also cared for her invalid father-in-law. Wilma explained, “My grandmother Minnie King Steele lived with us many years as Grandfather George Steele had a stroke & could not work. Grandmother worked at Federal Glass Co. (now out of business) with my father. My mother took care of Rosemary, me & Grandfather.”[15]

Wilma identified the picture below as the last one she knew of that shows the entire family. It was probably taken in the summer of 1939. In the back row, from left to right, are Wilma, Emma, Rosemary, Kenny, and Homer Steele. In the front, from left to right, are Billy, Junior, and Ronald.

Tragedy struck on 14 November 1939 when Billy, playing in the basement with a friend, accidentally started a fire. “The buckle on his shoe caught on a wire on baled wax paper & he lit a match to see what he could do,” Wilma recalled.[16] The waxed paper ignited and Billy, unable to free himself, perished in the fire. He was eight years old.

I imagine that was something that haunted Emma the rest of her life.

Time went on, although it seems Emma was not well as she reached middle age. “My father always took care of my mother as she had a heart condition,” Wilma noted.

Sadly, Emma lost another son to another accident. Junior had enlisted in the Navy after high school, and, at 20 years old, was posted in the Panama Canal Zone. He was off duty but helping a friend do some repairs on radar equipment when he touched a live wire. He was electrocuted instantly and died on 18 May 1950.[17]

Emma succumbed to congestive heart failure two years later, on 23 November 1952. She was 58 years old. She was buried in Sunset Cemetery in Columbus, along with her sons Billy and Homer Junior.[18]

My grandmother remembered Emma as a good mother and home maker. While she had few outside interests, she strongly believed in God, home, and family, and wanted her daughter to be happy and prosperous.[19]

My mother remembers Emma, too, particularly the way she made homemade German noodles. She would roll the noodle dough out and cut it into long strips, then slice it into noodles. Those raw noodles looked really good to a little girl! But Grandmother Steele wouldn’t permit anyone to taste before cooking. Now that I think about it, maybe that was a result of the challenges of feeding a big family through the Great Depression.

There’s something that struck me as I wrote this. You see, I’ve had this information about Emma for quite a while; it’s not new research. But it wasn’t until I sat down and wrote this profile that I actually began to see her life. I think there’s a big difference between bits of information in a database and a story that pulls them together into a cohesive narrative, even a short one like this. The process of writing it out as a narrative somehow creates something bigger and more engrossing than you think when you’re only looking at the pieces individually.

It also makes me realize I have more research to do on Emma’s family. Writing does that—it stimulates you to fill in the gaps and reach further into the records. Yes, it takes time, but it’s time well spent in the end.

Is there a woman in your family tree that you’d like to understand better? If so, you might try writing a little profile or vignette for her. Lisa Alzo offers a month’s worth of “Fearless Females” writing prompts to help you (see her March 2016 blog archive). Gena Philibert-Ortega shares some of her favorite tips and resources for researching females in her Women's History Month 2016 series. I hope you enjoy finding and telling the stories of the women in your family history, too.

--Shelley

---

[1] Franklin County, Ohio, Probate Court, birth records, vol. 6, p. 30 (1894), Pauline Scheibel; Ohio History Center (OHC) microfilm #BV10,944.

[2] “Ohio Deaths, 1908-1953,” digital image, FamilySearch (www.familysearch.org: accessed 3 Nov 2013), death certificate #66095 (1910), Ludwig Scheibel; citing original records, Ohio Dept. of Health, Ohio History Center, Columbus; Family History Library (FHL) microfilm #1,952,768.

[3] Evangelische Kirche Grunau (Kr. Flatow), “Taufen, Heiraten, Tote 1850-1859,” p. 107-108, entry 17, Auguste Pauline Treptow (baptized 11 March 1855); FHL microfilm #1,496,973, item 2.

[4] “Ohio County Marriages, 1789-1994,” digital image, FamilySearch (www.familysearch.org: accessed 3 Nov 2013), Ludwig Sheibel and Paulina Trabtan (1880); citing Franklin County, Ohio, marriages, vol. 15, p. 285, Probate Court, Columbus; FHL microfilm #285,148.

[5] 1900 U.S. census, population schedule, Columbus, Franklin County, Ohio, Ward 4, E.D. 55, p. 6A, dwelling 123, household 141, Ludwig Scheibel; digital image, Ancestry (www.ancestry.com: accessed 3 Nov 2013), citing NARA microfilm publication T623, roll 1267.

[6] Columbus, Ohio, Board of Health, death certificates, 1907 vol. 2 (1 March – 30 April), no. 351, Paulina Scheibel; Ohio History Center, Columbus, OHC microfilm #GR9874.

[7] 1910 U.S. census, population schedule, Columbus, Franklin County, Ohio, Ward 2, E.D. 43, p. 1, dwelling 13, household 14, Lewis Scheibel; digital image, Ancestry (www.ancestry.com: accessed 4 Nov 2013), citing NARA microfilm publication T624, roll 1180.

[8] “Ohio Deaths, 1908-1953,” FamilySearch, death certificate #66095 (1910), Ludwig Scheibel.

[9] Franklin County, Ohio, Probate Court, marriage records, vol. 60, p. 315, Homer Steele and Emma Scheibel marriage (1915), Columbus.

[10] Ohio Department of Health, birth certificate #77908 (1916), Wilma Lucille Steele; Office of Vital Statistics, Columbus.

[11] “U.S. Social Security Applications and Claims Index, 1936-2007,” database, Ancestry (www.ancestry.com: accessed 21 Mar 2016), Rosemary Naomi Steele Rhoten.

[12] “U.S. Social Security Death Index,” database, Ancestry (www.ancestry.com: accessed 6 July 2014), Kenneth N. Steele (1925-2013).

[13] Ohio Department of Health, birth certificate #98192 (1929), Homer George Steele; Office of Vital Statistics, Columbus.

[14] Ohio Department of Health, birth certificate 11272 (1931), William Steele; Office of Vital Statistics, Columbus.

[15] Wilma Steele Herrel, Grandmother’s Book, scrapbook, 1989; privately held by Shelley Bishop. This 9” x 11” book contains notes, descriptions, photographs and memorabilia ca. 1917-1989; the author (now deceased) gave it to Bishop in 1989.

[16] Ibid.

[17] Ibid. Also, Homer G. Steele obituary, The Columbus Dispatch (Columbus, Ohio), 20 May 1950, p. 2A.

[18] “Ohio Deaths, 1908-1953,” digital image, FamilySearch (www.familysearch.org: accessed 21 Mar 2012), death certificate #70642 (1952), Emma L. Steele; citing original records, Ohio Dept. of Health, Ohio History Center, Columbus; FHL microfilm #2,246,396.

[19] Wilma Steele Herrel, Grandmother’s Book.

Wilhelmina Mueller Herrel: A Fearless Female

Wilhelmina Carolina Mueller, my great-great-grandmother, spent most of her life in a country far from the one she originally called home. She was born on Christmas Eve, December 24, 1859, in Germany.(1) Family tradition holds that she came from Bavaria. The picture below, showing her with two of her grandsons, was taken about 1911-1914 in the German Village neighborhood of Columbus, Ohio.

In 1880, when she was 20 years old, Wilhelmina immigrated to the United States.(2) I have yet to find her on a passenger list or immigration record. I presume she came as part of a family group, but because Mueller is a common surname and I don’t know the names of any other family members, and women who married did not have to apply for naturalization, I have little to go on. I also don’t know if she knew her future husband before she came to America. What I do know is that she settled in the large German community in Cincinnati, Ohio. On January 25, 1883 at St. Peter’s Evangelical Church in that city, she married Johann George Herrel.(3)

John and “Mina” Herrel made their home in Cincinnati, where he worked as a carpenter, for the next 20 years. She became a U.S. citizen by virtue of her husband John’s naturalization, about 1890. Mina bore ten children, according to the 1910 U.S. census.(4) I have only been able to account for seven of them to date: Otto, Harry, Albert, Amelia/“Melie”, Edith, Bertha, and Frank Herrel. I believe two of the others were little girls who died young, but the identity of the tenth child is a mystery. Melie also died of diphtheria at a young age.

The family moved to Columbus between 1900-1910. They lived in a home on Sycamore St. in German Village for over two decades. John established a business, John Herrel & Sons, making wooden refrigeration cabinets. Over the years Mina picked up the language of her adopted country, and in both 1910 and 1920 the census taker indicated she could read and write English. Her place of birth in all records found to date was noted simply as “Germany.”

Wilhelmina Mueller Herrel died October 7, 1933 at the age of 73. Her son Otto, the informant for her death certificate, put “unknown” for both her father’s and mother’s name. Her obituary in The Columbus Dispatch gave no clue as to her parents or where she began her life. It read simply: "HERREL—Wilhelmina C., 73 years, widow of John Herrel, [died] Saturday night. Survived by sons Otto J., Harry F., Albert W., and Frank M.; Daughters Mrs. Edith Weber, Mrs. Bertha Carter, all of Columbus; 11 grandchildren. Funeral services in residence, 431 Sycamore St., Wednesday, 2 p.m. Interment East Lawn by the Edward E. Fisher Co."(5)

I still have many unanswered questions about Mina. Who were her parents? What town in Germany was she born in? What were the names of her other children? And finally, what was she like? Was she a good cook? I wish I had thought to ask my grandpa, Fred Herrel, to tell me about his grandmother when I had the chance. From the photograph, she looks kind and motherly. In fact, she is smiling in most of the photos I’ve seen of her—a rarity in the days when solemn portraits prevailed.

I consider Wilhelmina Mueller Herrel a “fearless female” because of the strength and hard work it must have taken to come to a new land, learn the customs and language, and raise a family. I hope that as time goes by I will find new clues to help answer some of the questions I have and come to know her a little better.

--Shelley

Written for Lisa Alzo’s “Fearless Females” blogging series, as part of Women’s History Month. Lisa does a wonderful job writing about her ancestors and helping others do the same at her blog, The Accidental Genealogist.

(1) “Ohio Deaths 1908-1953,” digital image, FamilySearch (www.familysearch.org: accessed 23 April 2009), certificate no. 55927 (1933), Wilhelmina Herrel; citing original records, Ohio Department of Health, Ohio Historical Society, Columbus.

(2) 1920 U.S. census, Columbus Ward 3, Franklin County, Ohio, population schedule, E.D. 57, p. 1B, dwelling 18, family 18, John Herrell; digital image, Ancestry (www.ancestry.com: accessed 25 June 2009), citing NARA microfilm publication T625, roll 1380.

(3) St. Peter’s German Evangelical Church (Cincinnati, Ohio), “Copulationen, Confirmanten, St. Peters Germeinde, Angefangen 1874,” p. 152, Johann Herrel and Mina Mueller marriage (1883); FHL microfilm #1514064, citing original records held by Wright State University, Dayton, Ohio.

(4) 1910 U.S. census, Columbus Ward 1, Franklin County, Ohio, population schedule, E.D. 29, p. 3B, dwelling 73, family 74, John Herrel; digital images, Ancestry (www.ancestry.com: accessed 23 June 2009), citing NARA microfilm publication T624, roll 1180.

(5) Wilhelmina Herrel obituary, Columbus Dispatch (Columbus, Ohio), 9 October 1933, p. 6A, col. 8.

A Fearless Females Success Story

For the last four years, Lisa Alzo has offered Fearless Females: 31 Blogging Prompts to Celebrate Women’s History Month. While I’ve only posted stories on a few of the prompts, I tend to write about the women in my family throughout the year. Recently, a post I wrote in February on my great-grandmother, Mary Eberhard Comfort, led to emails from three new cousins. We’ve been corresponding, and I wanted to share an example of how a simple blog post can lead to some pretty amazing collaboration.

Mary’s mother was Polly Scheirer, whose photo I posted as a Fearless Female in a short post in 2011. I didn’t have much information on Polly’s life at the time, nor have I attempted to research her since. I just had a small copy of her image, labeled on the back by my grandmother, Nora Eberhard Ballenger. But my new-found cousins not only had more information about Polly—it turns out they also had the original charcoal drawing that my image must have been made from. The thing was, the drawing was unidentified, and they had no idea who it was of. It had nearly been thrown out several times over the years. Now, thanks to their willingness to keep an unknown drawing, my Grandma’s foresight in labeling her small copy, and my posting it on my blog, we’ve all come together. The drawing is identified, and we’re in the process of sharing what we know about the Comfort and Scheirer families, to everyone’s mutual benefit. That’s a modern genealogical success story, in my book.

 

Here are the women in this line, and the posts I’ve written about each of them:

My grandmother, Nora Eberhard, who married Lloyd R. Ballenger:

There’s One in Every Family: The Life of the Party

Eberhard Children

Hunt School Souvenir

Thanksgiving at the Kids’ Table

 

My great-grandmother, Mary Comfort, who married John Llewelyn Eberhard:

The Legacy of Mary Comfort Eberhard

Baptismal Fraktur of Mary Comfort

Eberhards at Otterbein Cemetery

My great-great-grandmother, Polly Scheirer, who married Lewis A. Comfort:

Polly Scheirer Comfort: A Fearless Female

 

This experience has given me a new incentive to keep posting these kinds of pictures and stories about the women--and men--in my family. After all, you never know when someone might find one and reach out (that’s one reason why I put my email address on my home page). And I love making new connections with long-lost cousins, don’t you?

--Shelley

Finding Daughters by Searching on Father's Name: Tuesday's Tip

Last Friday night, the Twitter airwaves were busy with people sharing their tips for finding female ancestors on #GenChat. Jen Baldwin has compiled many of them into a Storify piece. One question that arose was: how do you find a woman in later records if you don’t know who she married, or where? If you don’t know her married name, you might not be able to find her death record, for example—and death records can be a particularly rich source of information.

There’s a little technique I’ve found helpful in some of these situations. It doesn’t work every time, but when it does, it’s a gem. Any online death index (or birth or marriage index, for that matter) that’s searchable by father’s name is a good candidate. Since I the use “Ohio Deaths, 1908-1953” database on FamilySearch.org constantly, I’ll use that as an example.

A few weeks ago I was searching for the death record of Rebecca Clark, daughter of George Clark and Rachel Orr. I had her name and approximate birth date from census records, but lost track of her when she left her father’s household. I turned to the “Ohio Deaths” collection on FamilySearch, and entered only her first name, Rebecca, leaving the space for the last name blank. Then I clicked on “Parents” under “Search by a Relationship.” I entered her father’s name, George Clark. I usually don’t enter a mother’s name unless I get too many results. I didn’t enter any geographic information, since I didn’t know where she was living when she died.

With that little bit of information—her first name and father’s name—I hit the Search button, and up popped a list of people whose death certificates show George or Geo. Clark as their father. Those named Rebecca were at the top, and the one I was looking for happened to be first on the list. Her married name was Cook, and just like that I discovered her birth and death dates (at least, as they were reported on this record). How easy is that?

Now, I admit this is a pretty simple example. You might ask why I didn’t just search for a marriage record—and in this case, Rebecca’s marriage record is also easy to locate. But sometimes you can’t find a marriage record, or a woman marries for a second or third time and becomes difficult to track. This little trick may be just what you need in those cases.

The same technique also sometimes reveals a child (male or female) who was born and died between census enumerations, and whose only record is on an old county death register. Many of the county death registers I’ve seen only put the parents’ names if the person who died was young. So if you try it, keep your eye out for an unexpected result.

So, just a little tip, a small tool to add to that ever-growing toolbox that each family historian depends on. Another of my favorites is Using Obituaries to Find Married Names. Gena Philibert-Ortega is doing a wonderful series this month on "Researching Your Female Ancestors" on her blog, Gena’s Genealogy, with a different resource featured every day. She’s giving me a lot of new ideas that I hope will help with finding and understanding the women in my family. And Lisa Alzo is encouraging bloggers to share their findings with “Fearless Females: 31 Blogging Prompts to Celebrate Women’s History Month.” What's your favorite?

--Shelley 

Related Posts:

Polly Scheirer Comfort: A Fearless Female

Using Obituaries to Find Married Names

The Legacy of Mary Comfort Eberhard

The Legacy of Mary Comfort Eberhard

Some people leave great legacies in business, politics, or education. Others are recognized for their military service, philanthropy, or contributions to science. Mary Comfort Eberhard left a different kind of legacy—humbler, perhaps, but impressive nonetheless. She raised sixteen children to adulthood in the farmlands of Pennsylvania and Ohio at the turn of the 20^th century.

One of her daughters, Nora Eberhard Ballenger, would later recall that Mary used to bake 12 to 14 loaves of bread, including her favorite pan rolls, twice a week. “My mother never baked under 16 to 20 pies and two large cakes on weekends. We always had a great crowd,” she remembered. “We grew almost everything we ate—vegetables, meats, eggs. She made her own dumplings and even churned her own butter.”

A beautifully illustrated fraktur, written in German, shows that Mary Madina Comfort was born 28 May 1875 in Whitehall Township, Lehigh County, Pennsylvania. Her parents were Lewis Comfort and Polly Scheirer Comfort.¹ On Christmas Eve, 1891, when Mary was 16 years old, she married John Llewellyn Eberhard in Allentown.² No doubt their Christmas that year was a merry one—and it would be the only one they celebrated without a child in the house for more than 40 years.

Mary and Llewellyn made a home for themselves in Salisbury Township, Lehigh County, Pennsylvania, where he worked as a milk dealer. Their first baby was born in August 1892. Others followed, more or less every other year. By January 1902, there were six little Eberhards: Eva, Roy, Harold, Helen, Mabel, and Irma.³

In 1903, they decided to move west to the area around Bellefontaine, Ohio, where Llewellyn’s brother William Eberhard and his wife lived. They rented a farm, and Llewellyn resumed his dairy work. Mary resumed cooking, cleaning, and caring for her large brood. By 1910 she had given birth to seven more children: Emma, Enoch, Bert, Clarence, Carrie, Anna, and Nora.⁴

Bert and Clarence were twins, born prematurely. Mary would later tell Nora that she did her best to keep the tiny babies alive, nestling them in boxes laid in front of the open woodstove oven door. But despite her efforts, both boys died within a few days.

In 1913 the family moved again, this time to farmland between Galena and Johnstown, Ohio. There they put down roots in the community, and Mary started doing “custom hatchings”—incubating certain varieties of chicken eggs, to order, for customers. She used her egg money to supplement the income from Llewellyn’s dairy work. Meanwhile, she had five more children: Bertha, Robert, Georgia, Blanche, and, lastly, Mildred, in 1920.⁵

An article in the June 1929 edition of The Milky Way, published by the Moores & Ross dairy company, featured Llewellyn Eberhard and his family. “Mrs. Eberhard uses one room of the house as an incubator room, and does custom hatchings at 3½ cents an egg,” it reported. “She has been doing this for 15 years. The incubator has a capacity of 3000 eggs. Mrs. Eberhard is also quite a baker. She bakes 14 loaves of bread at one time, twice a week. It is nothing for her to bake 22 pies, four cakes, 200 doughnuts and 200 cookies at one baking.”⁶

Of course, Mary didn’t do everything alone. The children all had chores, either in the house, barn, or garden, depending on the season and day of the week. Nora preferred the house chores, because she didn’t like the smell of the cows. On washing day, Mary would organize several of them into a makeshift assembly line to get the clothes and sheets through the hand-cranked washer and wringer and out onto the clothesline. Nora sometimes helped her mother on baking days, and other times it was her job to tend to the younger children and keep them out from underfoot.⁷

Eventually, as the children grew up and moved out of the house, Mary’s baking, laundry, and egg-hatching responsibilities eased. She and Llewellyn celebrated their golden wedding anniversary with their family on December 21, 1941. He had retired three years previously, and the hard work of Mary’s earlier years was behind her as well.

On April 15, 1958, Mary Madina Comfort Eberhard passed away in Sunbury, Ohio, at the age of 82. Her obituary named her 15 surviving children (Helen predeceased her), and noted that she left 39 grandchildren, 44 great-grandchildren, and 1 great-great-grandchild. She was buried in Otterbein Cemetery in Westerville.⁸

Today, Mary’s legacy lives on in her many descendents, which now include an untold number of great-, great-great-, and great-great-great-grandchildren. She wasn’t rich by any monetary standard, and her days were filled with the hard, plain work of raising a family and keeping house. But somehow, I don’t think she would have changed a thing. My only regret is that I wasn’t born in time to sample her baking.

--Shelley

© Shelley Bishop 2013.

Sources:

1.     Mary Madina Comfort (Kumfert) fraktur, birth and baptism, 1875 (Whitehall Township, Lehigh County, Pennsylvania); privately held.

2.     Lehigh County, Pennsylvania, marriage certificate no. 3753 (1891), Llewellyn John Eberhard and Mary M. Comfort; Court of Common Pleas, Orphan’s Court Division, Allentown.

3.     1900 U.S. Census, Salisbury Twp., Lehigh Co., Pennsylvania, population schedule, E.D. 49, p. 5B, dwelling 95, family 97, Lwellyn J. Eberhard; digital images, Ancestry (www.ancestry.com: accessed 14 Oct 2008); citing NARA microfilm publication T623, roll 1429.

4.     1910 U.S. Census, Rushcreek Twp., Logan County, Ohio, population schedule, E.D. 144, p. 9B, dwelling 216, family 222, Llewellin Eberhard; digital image, Ancestry (www.ancestry.com: accessed 13 Aug 2008); citing NARA microfilm publication T624, roll 1205.

5.     1920 U.S. Census, Harlem Twp., Delaware Co., Ohio, population schedule, E.D. 72, p. , dwelling 99, family 99, Llewellyn Eberhard; digital image, Ancestry (www.ancestry.com: accessed 13 Aug 2008); citing NARA microfilm publication T625, roll 1377.

6.     Moores & Ross, Inc., “The Milky Way”, vol. 5 no. 6, June 1929; photograph and article on the L. J. Eberhard family (cover and p.7); privately held.

7.     Personal recollections by Nora Eberhard Ballenger, collected over a period of years by Shelley Ballenger Bishop and Edward Ballenger II.

8.     Mary M. Eberhard obituary, Columbus Evening Dispatch (Columbus, Ohio), 16 April 1958, p. 7A.

Polly Scheirer Comfort: A Fearless Female for Wordless Wednesday

This is the only image I have of my great-great-grandmother, Polly Scheirer Comfort. It’s scanned from a photo that belonged to my grandmother, Nora Eberhard Ballenger. On the back she wrote “Mom’s Mom.”

Nora’s mom (my great-grandmother) was Mary Comfort Eberhard. Our family is lucky enough to have Mary’s baptismal fraktur, written in German, from Lehigh County, Pennsylvania. I wrote about this family treasure in Baptismal Fraktur of Mary Comfort. The certificate names Polly Scheirer as Mary’s mother.

I’m still searching for details to document Polly’s life. Polly was a common nickname for Mary or the German name Magdalena, so one of those was probably her given name. I know she was married to Louis Comfort by 1870, and that they lived in Lehigh County. In addition to her daughter Mary, she also had a son, Henry Comfort.

I chose Polly’s picture today in keeping with Lisa Alzo's “Fearless Females” theme for Women’s History Month on The Accidental Genealogist. Even though I don’t know much about Polly, she looks like a pretty strong woman to me. 

More Questions than Answers: Augusta Bishop

Don’t you love those ancestors who left a nice paper trail for you to follow? With time and study, you come to know and understand them, forging a bond of kinship across the ages. Then there are those who generated precious few records, leaving only crumbs for their descendants to trace. When questions outnumber the answers, it’s harder to create that bond.

My husband’s great-great-grandmother, Augusta Bishop, was one of the latter. So far I’ve located just four records on which her name appears: her marriage certificate, the 1860 census, her death record, and this tombstone in Freedom West Cemetery in Freedom, Ohio. Now worn and nearly indecipherable, the stone originally read, “AUGUSTA, Wife of Albert Bishop, Died Dec. 25, 1878, Aged 38 years.” The marker is unadorned, the message simple and straightforward. But here’s the first tug at my heartstrings: she died on Christmas Day. At 38 years old.

Augusta married Albert F. Bishop on February 23, 1859, in Portage County, Ohio. Her maiden name on the certificate appears as Augusta Dyke. Her death record says she was born in Shalersville in Portage County. I haven’t been able to identify her parents or find a Dyke family with a daughter Augusta in the 1850 census, so her origins are still a mystery. Could she possibly be the 10-year-old Augusta Dyler or Dyke living in the household of Nathan Severance in Shalersville? If so, why? Was she orphaned? Chalk one up for the questions.

I like to think the first couple of years of Albert and Augusta’s marriage were happy ones. The 1860 census of Freedom Township in Portage County shows them with their three-month-old son, Theodore. Albert, age 21, was working as a laborer, and Augusta was 19. But the good times did not last. Albert fell ill with consumption, and died in January 1865, shortly before their sixth anniversary. (You can read Albert’s story here.)

Finding herself a widow at age 24, with a five-year-old son, must have been difficult for Augusta. It appears she was unable to keep her son, for by 1870 ten-year-old Theodore Bishop was living as a servant in the household of Watson and Eunice Allen in Hiram. My efforts to locate Augusta in 1870 have proven fruitless so far. A search of the guardians’ dockets in Portage County does not show any entry for Theodore, nor is there any mention of the Allens. Was Theodore apprenticed to Watson Allen? If so, where was Augusta? More questions.

Augusta died of consumption—the same illness that claimed her husband—that Christmas in 1878. At the time of her death, she was living in Hiram and working as a housekeeper. Her only living relatives were her son, Theodore, now 18, and her mother-in-law, Sarah Ann Bishop. One of them must have arranged for her to be buried beside Albert in the Bishop family plot in Freedom West Cemetery.

As I write this, I realize Augusta’s life reads largely like a tragedy. Possibly living apart from her parents by 10 years old, widowed and a single mother by 24, separated from her young son, and dead at 38—that’s not exactly a life of ease and contentment. But through her has come a strong line of Bishop descendants. I find I want to know more, to dig deeper and find the answers to my questions, if I can. In a way, the unknowns of Augusta’s life are creating their own bonds, pulling me toward discovering her story.

Robert Bishop (my father-in-law) with the markers of his great-grandparents,
Albert and Augusta Bishop, in Freedom West Cemetery in Freedom, Ohio

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Walter F. Bishop, Aged 20 yrs.