One missing little girl
It goes without saying in genealogy.
You have to read every word.
Every single character, in every single field, in every single document.
It doesn’t matter what the document is.
It doesn’t matter what particular use you’re making of it.
You have got to parse through everything it says.
Case in point: the delayed birth certificate of a second cousin of my father.
Alfred Marks, the certificate reports, was born at home at 3530 West 61st Place, in Chicago, Cook County, Illinois, at 9 o’clock in the morning on the first of August 1916.1
The child was male, legitimate, the son of Herman Marks, a 30-year-old baker born in Germany, and Elisabeth (Graumüller) Marks, a 28-year-old housewife, also born in Germany.2
And — for years — my eyes then skipped down to the signature block where Elisabeth Marks signed the certificate as the mother, listing her address as 5540 South Halsted Street, and then the stamped filing date of 4 October 1934.3 It’s that different address and that date that tells us this was a delayed certificate, filed when Alfred was 18.
Now I believe (at least I hope!) I had noticed line 27 of this certificate — the line that asked about the “number of children of this mother (at moment of this birth and including this child)” — before this week.
And I believe I’d noticed that, under subpart (a), it said Elisabeth had two living children. Alfred had one older brother, Ernest, born in 1914.4
But what, for years, my eyes had skipped right over was the entry under subpart (b) of line 27. The part that asked about those who were “born alive but now dead.”
Until this week, I never consciously noted that there is an entry in that subpart of that line. It is a single digit. The number “1.”
There was another child.
A child I knew nothing about.
A child I went looking for after finally noticing that entry in that subpart of that line.
That single digit that I had never really noticed before.
And her name was Elizabeth.5
She was Herman and Elisabeth’s first-born, and she came into this world in the very early hours of a cold Sunday, the 5th of February 1911.6
Her parents, Herman and Elisabeth, were living at 4839 Bishop Street in Chicago7 — that was then the home address, my family research has taught me, of Elisabeth’s aunt Anna (Graumüller) Nitschke and great uncle and great aunt Frank Schreiner and Auguste (Graumüller) Schreiner.8 It was to that address that the doctor was called in the early hours of Sunday, the 5th of February, 1911.9
But it was a difficult labor, according to Dr. G. R. Landau of South Ashland Street. And the little girl born at 3 a.m. didn’t survive long that cold day.10
We know it was well below freezing when little Elizabeth Marks was born; the high for the day was forecast to just break the freezing mark.11 But the weather turned treacherous that Sunday in February: more than eight inches of snow fell that day — the “worst snow blizzard” so far that year.12
Despite the terrible weather, the undertaker G.E. Kruse came and took that little girl away. She was buried the next day, Monday, February 6th, at Mt. Greenwood Cemetery in Chicago, roughly 12 miles from her home.13
Anna, the baby’s great aunt, had the sad task of serving as the informant on the death certificate. The father, she said, was Herman Marks, born in Germany. The mother, Elisa Graumueller, born in Germany.
And then she gave the information about little Elizabeth. Four questions: how long resident in city; how long in State; how long in US; age at time of death.
All with the same answer: one hour.14
Losing a child is bad enough. And there is nothing my generation can do to ease the pain her parents felt at her loss.
But losing even the memory that she ever existed…?
That, at least, is something my generation can do something about.
As long as we read every single character, in every single field, in every single document.
Her name was Elizabeth.
She was our cousin.
We will remember.
SOURCES
- Cook County, Illinois, delayed birth certificate 54205, Alfred Marks (1916); County Clerk’s Office, Chicago, filed 4 Oct 1934. ↩
- Ibid. ↩
- Ibid. ↩
- See e.g. 1920 U.S. census, Cook County, Illinois, Chicago Ward 29, population schedule, enumeration district (ED) 1789, p.160(A) (stamped), dwelling 25, family 33, Ernest Marks in Herman Marks household; digital image, Ancestry.com (http://www.ancestry.com : accessed 15 Oct 2011); citing National Archive microfilm publication T625, roll 346. ↩
- City of Chicago, Certificate of Death, Physician’s Form, No. 20829 (stamped), Elizabeth Marks (1911); Department of Health, Chicago; FHL microfilm 1239888. ↩
- Ibid. ↩
- Ibid. ↩
- See 1910 U.S. census, Cook County, Illinois, Chicago Ward 29, population schedule, enumeration district (ED) 1272, p. 71(A) (stamped), dwelling 143, families 394-395, “Nitckle,” Graumuller and Schreiner families; digital image, Ancestry.com (http://www.ancestry.com : accessed 14 Oct 20115); citing National Archive microfilm publication T624, roll 1272. ↩
- City of Chicago, Certificate of Death, Physician’s Form, No. 20829, Elizabeth Marks. ↩
- Ibid. ↩
- “Weather Forecast,” Chicago Daily Tribune, 5 Feb 1911, p. 1, col. 2; digital images, Newspapers.com (http://www.newspapers.com : accessed 24 Sep 2015). ↩
- “Blizzard Grips City and West; Traffic Tied Up,” Chicago Daily Tribune, 6 Feb 1911, p. 1, col. 5; digital images, Newspapers.com (http://www.newspapers.com : accessed 24 Sep 2015). ↩
- City of Chicago, Certificate of Death, Physician’s Form, No. 20829, Elizabeth Marks. ↩
- Ibid. ↩
Beautiful, Judy. Just beautiful!
Renate
Thanks for the kind words.
Judy,
Wouldn’t Elizabeth also show up in later censuses, where number of children, living and dead, were asked for? That would have lead you, sleuth that you are, to go hunting as well, and find her, just as Albert’s delayed birth certificate finally did. I love, however you finally found her, that she was named for her mother. You write these stories of loss and sadness so well.
Doris
But that question was only asked in the 1900 and 1910 censuses. This child was born in 1911
Yep, true.
It wasn’t asked every time, Doris. I wish it had been!
Oh Judy. This is such an important lesson. I am still searching for a sibling for my maternal grandmother. However, my mother, on the other hand, always told me her father had only one sibling, a sister who lived and had children. However, Woodmere Cemetery, Detroit, Michigan records told me another story. there was a young son, a sibling to my grandfather who died at birth (I have found both birth and death records). AND, there was another sister. Little Etta, born 1887 died 1890. Both of these children had been completely forgotten by family. They don’t even have headstones. But, they are NOT forgotten now.
Good for you for not letting them be forgotten!
Here is a similar story of one tiny character, this on a death cert. Story was that back in the 40’s husband’s great grandmother had been receiving some tiny pension only a few dollars a month, but no one knew what or why, or if this was even true.
On her death certificate, in the space for if she was a widow, where there should have been a check mark, there was a hand-written mark, that easily could have skimmed over as a check mark. Upon paying attention to this mark, clearly was a handwritten numeral ‘2’!
She had married great grandfather after the Civil War… leading to the probable conclusion that she had married earlier to some man who had died in the Civil War, and after the ‘death’ of her second husband, (the great grandfather), she probably received a Civil War widow’s pension from the first husband.
(However the ‘deceased’ second husband actually was still hale and hearty, living in another state. When she abandoned her 2nd husband, I guess she figured that by moving across a state line, she could claim he was dead and she’d never get caught; and she was right!)
Great sleuthing to find that story!
An important lesson, to be sure. But also thank you, Judy, for posting this during September, It is horrifying how many infants still die — an hour, a day, a month after being born, even in the US.
So many losses, for sure, and I hope to ensure that all of them I can find in my family get remembered.
Yes, it does still happen. My wife and I are the parents of four children. Only two are living. The first two were twins that were born extremely premature and lived for only about two hours. The SSDI shows the same dates of birth and death for both Burke Chad Milliner and Nora Kathleen Milliner.
RIP.
So very sorry for your loss, Chad. I can’t imagine the pain.
I had a lost sibling. He was found through two aunts long before I became interested in genealogy. But I had no real data about him until I found his death certificate. They didn’t ask about living and dead children in the 1930 and 1940 census queries, so I wouldn’t have found him there.
The death certificate was found only through a wide search, a surname only search. My mother never, ever talked about him. Finding out about him from my aunts and finding the death certificate answered puzzling memories from my early childhood which would have been answered in no other way.
My mother buried her second child in silence as well as in fact. But genealogy has found him and her descendants remember him.
So glad he hasn’t been forgotten. What a powerful statement, that he was buried in silence…
This post sums up beautifully why I study family history — to learn about and understand the events in our families’ lives that were too painful for the older generations to talk about.
Thank you, Judy.
And to tell the stories, so they cannot be forgotten, ever again.
Such a sad story! I happened upon something similar recently. A woman was widowed and claimed as the unwed mother of another child born almost year and a half later. But then a letter from the cemetery listing all the burials in a particular lot arrived in the mail. Lo and behold, a “Baby XYZ” was born and buried 8 1/2 months after the father died. The child lived for 12 hours. That mother could not have gotten pregnant and given birth to another child exactly 8 months later. So not only do you have to read every word in a document, you have to find every document.
Every clue, every document, everywhere.
In some jurisdictions (England) perimortem deaths could be recorded as just a birth or just a death, so you need to search both.
Furthermore, it was often the case in hospitals that the dead baby was taken away for burial in an unmarked common grave before the mother could see the child. Even where individual burial occurred, gravestone inscriptions can be rare.
These days particularly with marriage and first pregnancy coming later in life, the loss of a child can strike particularly hard. People I know have gone on to have healthy families, but there is a recurring storyline used in books and TV shows of this causing a marital split. If older women could tell of their overcoming such a tragedy, perhaps it would be easier for affected young couples.
Good reminder, thanks.
Nitschke by marriage and therefore not a direct ancestor. I have scads from either side of where the Mark of Brandenburg meets northern Silesia at the Oder River. Another (Latin) form of the patronymic [from Nicholas] in the same area was Nicolai. Was your Anna’s husband from the same area?
I’m afraid that I just don’t know about Anna’s first husband, Christopher. They were only briefly married before his death and I have yet to locate the marriage or death certificate.
Don’t overlook photos either. I was researching a family and found the gold mine of a book that traced the family from the immigrant ancestor to the 1900s. 7 Generations. Found one man with three wives. He was the particular link I needed to modern records. It listed all the wives and all the children, clarifying who went with which wife. Then the photo page for his family showed several tombstones with clear names and dates. Wife number two was buried with two little infants, twins, a boy and a girl. One lived only a day. The other lived a month. Mother died in between the two time frames. But neither child was mentioned at all in the text.
The real lesson here is not to overlook anything, no matter how small or insignificant it seems.