First, a little background. My third great grandparents were Mathias Schulien (1790-1868) and Elizabeth Jung, from Germany. They had 10 children, as was common in those days. While they stayed in Germany, three of their sons came to America. The sons were Mathias (my second great grandfather), Michael and Johann Adam. Johann Adam is the patriarch of the Chicago Schuliens who ran the famous Schulien's restaurant in Chicago for many years. Michael (1813-1883)also settled in Chicago, married and had 7 children, as I learned from records. And he spelled his name Shulgen instead of Schulien.
Michael's oldest son was Mathias or Matthew (1840-1913), and I had no exact dates for his birth or death, and no dates at all for his wife, Anna Maria Schneider. He came over to America a few years after his parents (in 1867) and younger siblings, and I do not know if he married in Germany or America. But I did have information that he and his wife had 3 children: Mary, Regina and John. I had dates for John, but not for Mary and Regina, so I began searching in other databases to see what I could find.
The first thing I found was an 1880 census that had Mathias, now a widower, living with his sister, Elizabeth Schulgen Berresheim and her 7 children. But there was no sign of his children. Obviously, I wondered what had happened to them. So I looked in other 1880 census records for other Schulgens, and I found a Regina Schulgen living with Dionysius (Dennis) Schulgen and his wife and their 2 very young children. Dennis is the younger brother of Mathias. Regina is listed as their daughter, but since she was born several years before Dennis's marriage, it seemed likely she was either adopted by Dennis and his wife or was just living with them. Then I found the other two children, Mary and John, living with their grandparents, Michael and Anna Schulgen, also in the 1880 census.
There is no 1890 census, so I could not figure out where the children went after that, and I also could not answer the question why the children were split up, and why Mathias wasn't living with any of them. So all I can do (unless some descendant of this branch of the family contacts me) is to speculate about what might have happened. Here's my guess:
Mathias's wife may have died in childbirth when she had John, the youngest, leaving him without anyone to care for him adequately. Or she could have died a few years later. Back in the 1880s, fathers simply didn't take care of their motherless children, especially when they were very young. Family always stepped in to help. Sometimes an unmarried sister or aunt moved in to care for the children, and sometimes the children moved in with relatives. Caring for children in those days was a full time job, as it is today, but without any of today's conveniences and support systems. There was no day care, no nannies, no convenience foods or microwave ovens to cook meals. There were no washing machines or dishwashers, so children whose mothers died had to go where there was an available woman to care for them and do the cooking and washing and rearing.
But this still doesn't answer the question of why Mathias didn't move in with his parents or his brother, who were watching over his children, or why he moved in by himself with his sister. So I went back to the census records and found something interesting. Dennis Schulgen and his father lived next door to each other in 1880. So the children would have not really been separated. I'm sure they went back and forth between houses all the time. But that still doesn't explain Mathias living with his sister. They did not live next door. The census tells me that Dennis, Michael and all the children lived in enumeration district 67, while Mathias lived in enumeration district 73. Chicago is a big place, so I don't know how close they were, but it's possible Mathias stayed with his sister because it was closer to his work. In any case, it doesn't seem like it would be too far away to at least see his children on the weekends. On the other hand, he could have been having a very hard time accepting the death of his wife, and maybe he needed some separation time.
Maybe some day a descendant of the Michael Schulgen family will have more information for me. Until then, I feel satisfied that I have solved one mystery. Now I would like to see if I can find out what happened to the children as they got older.
No comments:
Post a Comment