Lene, two years prior
Back of the photo
Lene ("M," for Magdelene or Madeline), sporting what was apparently a popular hair style
Once we had all the letters that were written to and from my grandfather in chronological order and read them through a few times, and then examined his diary, the difference between my grandfather's experiences and that of his family back home became incredibly stark. From my grandpa comes a picture that includes hiking all night through the forest with a heavy pack, nonstop bombardment, burning towns and captured prisoners. And then comes a letter to him from his sister Frances describing in detail a scrumptious roasted chicken dinner she made for her girl friends. How his mouth must have watered reading that one, while dug in the cold, muddy trenches. As my grandfather is risking his neck on the front lines, life goes on at home, with references in letters from his siblings that include a couple of major historical moments.
We’re still working on scanning the letters but one thing I’ve noticed is that my grandfather wasn’t able to save all letters sent from friends and family. In his letters around this period – September and October, 1918 – he at times references letters that he’s received from his siblings that I don’t think I have. Remember that he writes at one point that he had to leave behind a bunch of “souvenirs” in the trenches and I wonder if some letters were among the treasures he wasn’t able to hang on to. There are many more letters from home dated later in the year and into 1919 and you’ll see there’s probably good reason he was able to save those.
Another thing that I’m pretty sure of at this point having read all the letters if not scanned them all is that I don’t think there are any from my grandfather’s parents. My wild guess is that having grown up on farms in Germany and learning to write in Kurrent, the German script that’s different than ours, perhaps they weren’t great writers. I asked AI about literacy rates in the region they came from (Baden Wurttemberg) around the time they grew up and it indicates that literacy rates were quite high. Still, with English as a second language and the different script, it’s possible they weren’t great writers.
My grandfather’s siblings had plenty of fun and interesting stories to tell though (A reminder that if you get confused, you can check out the limited family tree.). In a newsy Oct. 20 letter, my grandfather’s sister Magdelene – who he fondly calls Lene and who later became Sister Marie Bernard, my dad’s aunt who my sisters and I thought was super cool – wrote about some headline news. “Sunday was the funniest Sunday we ever met. All the churches were closed on account of an epidemic of influenza here, commonly the ‘Spanish Flu.’ All the shows and schools are closed too and no meetings are allowed to be held anywhere. Of course we don’t miss the show and we’re a kind of glad to have a little vacation.” How’s that for a familiar story, after living through COVID! She said the policy was to be in effect until around Nov. 3 – two weeks – and that a lot of people were dying from the flu in Cleveland.
The rabbits! My best guess is that's Catherine in the middle, with Peter and Clem
Peter, at some later date
More rabbits! The back of this one says "John Griesmer's boys."
The young ones again
I think this is Franz and Mary, my great grandparents, and Catherine
Despite going on to become a nun, Lene wasn’t exactly a model citizen, although that may have been out of necessity. “I’m going to work anyway,” she writes. She’d gotten a job at Higbee’s department store doing “office work,” and was supposed to go in just Saturdays – for $1.25 -- but was working every day since she wasn’t going to school because of the pandemic. The teachers gave them enough homework to do four hours a day but our Lene hadn’t cracked a book after a week because she was working.
My sisters and I grew up browsing Higbee’s downtown on special occasions. Its fancy flagship was at the Terminal Tower in downtown Cleveland and is now, sadly, a casino. Fans of the movie "A Christmas Story" might like to know that the scene with Santa in the department store was filmed at the Higbee's flagship. At the time Lene wrote her letter, however, the store was a few blocks away in Playhouse Square.
She also tells my grandfather about a large forest fire in Mississippi that killed around 800 people. I googled that and found reports about a terrible fire in Minnesota at the time that killed 435 people so perhaps she mistakenly wrote Mississippi.
Lene’s just a kid really -- she'd have been about a sophomore in high school -- and clearly wants her brother to come home (“Take good care of yourself and don’t forget we’re waiting for you to come back as we hope and pray you will”) but I don't think she can really quite understand how bad it must be to be in the front lines. She casually asks him to let her know when he’s sent “over the top and into no man’s land,” and then the next paragraph complains that a big party planned by a club she belongs to had to be cancelled because of the flu. “Luck, isn’t it?” she writes. Tough to feel sympathy for her missed party given his position.
My grandfather’s brother Leonard apparently acquires a camera around this time and Lene says she encloses a couple of pictures of Chagrin Falls, which I don’t think I have. In another letter Leonard finally sends photos of the family, responding to a request that my grandfather has made many times. To put some names to faces, I’ve added some pictures here, including of the young ones with Peter’s rabbits (Lene reports that he just sold a pair of them the day before she wrote) and Lene two years earlier during her eighth grade graduation. Frances also sent along a couple of glamor shots at some point. There's a shot of another group of boys from our relatives from the Griesmer family also clutching rabbits (James wants to know what the middle kid is crying for since he's got a rabbit, unlike the poor sap on the left.)
Frances on the right
My great grandmother Mary Wald and Frances (I think)
A Frances glamor shot
Skipping forward a bit, out of nowhere in the middle of a November letter Frances asks: “What do you think of Ohio going dry.” Fun fact that I never knew: On May 27, 1919, Ohio went dry, about a half a year before the rest of the country -- prohibition came into effect nationwide on January 17, 1920. In one of the later letters that my grandfather wrote to one of his brothers, he asks him to buy and hide a couple of bottles for him, for medicinal purposes. Uh hu…
Frances is the oldest kid in the family and at the time of the war she was living on her own. She writes often and you can sense a real fondness for her brother. In addition to describing the full menu for her roasted chicken dinner party, a few times she also references Bernard, a random soldier she'd been writing to just like Olive Kinnarney wrote to my grandfather. Bernard just happened to be from Cleveland too, Frances reports. It would be fun to imagine Frances and Bernard getting together but if they did, nothing came of it because she ultimately married a guy named Fred.
Next up, I hope to write a bit about what’s happening on the home front in Germany for the family of our Heinrich, in the POW camp. Here’s a hint: not as good as for my grandfather’s family in Cleveland. I'll also share some photos of Heinrich and Rosa that I recently identified because it's kinda fun to put names to faces. I'd also like to give you all a bit of an update on our research into the German folks, since my cousin and I have hit a bit of a wall.
Sign up for updates. Share this post on the socials.