My paternal grandparents were Reinhold and Martha (Staffeldt) Zielke. Both were born in the United States, children of German immigrants. Reinhold had been married previously to Martha's older sister, Louise, who died of pneumonia at childbirth with her 4th child in 1917. Reinhold's surviving children were George (b. 1905), Henry (b. 1908) and Bertha (b.1911). (Aunt Grace, if you read this and I make any errors, please correct me!) As I understand it, Martha went to live with Reinhold after Louisa's death to help care for the children and married him Nov 20, 1918. Reinhold was born May 30, 1880; Martha was born December 18, 1890. Reinhold and Martha had five children: Helen (b. 1919), Raymond, my dad, (b. 1922), Grace (b. 1925), Marjorie (b 1927) and Dorothy (b. 1933). I don't remember too much about my grandfather, as he passed away shortly after my 6th birthday in 1961 after a fall down the basement stairs at my Aunt Marge's house. He had Parkinson's disease and I was always uncomfortable going near him because of his tremors, not understanding that he was ill. Grandma Zielke could be gruff, but she could be fun as well. I remember how she laughed and laughed when she tried to teach me how to hoot like an owl by whistling through a curled tongue. I could curl my tongue just fine, but when I blew, all I got was air. When she came to visit us in Wisconsin, I was expected to help her put on her support hose and to cut her toenails. I think of her now when I cut my own tough toenails and think "thanks a lot for that DNA, Grandma!" She was in a wheelchair the last several years of her life and sometimes on the weekends, grandchildren would go stay with her to make sure she was okay. She wasn't too fond of the late night giggling when my cousin, Beth, and I were the ones to stay there.I remember being fascinated with my parents' wedding portrait that was always on the chest of drawers in her bedroom. That was the only place I had ever seen their wedding picture before their 25th anniversary celebration.Grandma died during my Junior year of high school (a little more than a year after my mother died) in March, 1972.
(The following corrections were provided by Aunt Grace in Dec, 2019. I'm so thankful we still have her to share memories and a familial connection! Thank you, Aunt Grace!
"I was just reading your blog of last May and did note a couple small changes (You've done a great job and can only rely on what you've been told I know). To the best of my knowledge, Mom was living with Dad & Aunt Louisa prior to her death as apparently she had a difficult pregnancy, and Mom always always told me that she had promised Aunt Louisa that she would raise her children. I can't say that she ever fell in love with Dad, but made the best of the situation. That's not a correction - just FYI. Next - Dad fell down the basement stairs at their house (not Aunt Marge's) He was making toast as Uncle Bob was leaving for work and watching out the window. He said the toaster threw some sparks and he headed for the door to try to yell to Uncle Bob and lost his balance and fell down the steps. There were 3 steps before the landing, and from there he rolled and went down the rest of the steps landing at the bottom (in the basement) with a broken neck & back. He was in the hospital then until he died. He fell the morning of March 27th and died April 10, 1961. You're right he had Parkinson's Disease and did shake. I think he may have suffered either light strokes or reacted to medication (pain) as he did a lot of hallucinating during that hospital stay. I remember the nurses had to cover the mirror in his room as he kept seeing things and thought someone was coming out of the mirror. The only other comment, rather than grandchildren coming to stay with Grandma (which they did short term) but it was her step-children and children that cared for her. She was in the wheelchair for 7 years (unable to walk) and we had a schedule for our turns to go and stay, which was primarily on weekends for us as George & Emily and Henry & Emily were retired and could go during the week. We had a caregiver for a short period of time, ,but Mom wasn't the easiest person to please and she caused that to end. We all knew something would happen sooner or later, and you might know I was the unfortunate one to be there when it did. Austin and I were with her that weekend, Austin had just left to go to Yorkville to see his brother and she told me she had to go to the bathroom and didn't want to use the commode in her bedroom, but wanted to go in the bathroom. It was a very small bathroom, neither she nor I were small women and she fell trying to get on the toilet. She suffered greatly all day Sunday before being taken to the hospital by ambulance on Monday (Feb. 25th and she died at Copley Hospital on March 7. Her hip was broken, but they couldn't set it and she suffered terribly all that time as they turned her every few hours to keep from getting bed sores Hope you don't mind my passing this info on. I've always been thankful that neither one of them had Alzheimers and were "with it" to the end. Hope I can stay that way. You're right - they used to call it "hardening of the arteries" and we'd hear of cerebrial hemorrages - today's strokes."
My mother was adopted by Edward and Pearl (Haag) Hill after they had been unable to have children of their own. These were the grandparents who lived 3 blocks away from us at 415 North Ave in Aurora, IL. After they adopted my mother, they were blessed with one daughter of their own, Dorothy (DeeDee) who was born on the same day as my dad's sister Grace. By the time I was in kindergarten, I was allowed to walk to their house to visit sometimes. I never learned much about Grandpa's youth, other than his father Orlando had died and his mother had remarried Charles Watson. I don't know if it was due to his age or circumstances, but I was always of the impression that Grandpa didn't have a good relationship with his stepfather. I met his sister Ida a few times, but that was the whole of his family that I knew anything about. Grandpa loved Chicago Cubs baseball, Blackjack gum and chewing tobacco. There was always a nasty smelling spittoon on the floor next to where he sat on the couch. Grandpa would still occasionally drive his old Chrysler sometimes when I was quite young, but mostly, it just sat in the basement garage. He had diabetes, was on a regimented diet and took insulin shots. My aunt, DeeDee was pretty much his caregiver as long as I can remember. He passed away in November, 1970, just a few months before my mother. She was too ill to make it to his funeral, but they were able to take her to the funeral home the day before so she could say her good-byes.
My Grandma Hill was my favorite, just because she was the one I was closest to and she was the one who would tell me stories about her childhood. I learned how she didn't know how to speak English when she first went to school and how far she had to walk to get there. She'd tell me stories about playing with her cats on the farm when she was young and about how her hair was so long she could sit on it. I must have really loved her stories of the "kitties" on the farm, because one year for Christmas she gave me a hand-embroidered dresser scarf with a gray kitten embroidered on each end. I still own the remnants of that dresser scarf and have always thought I'd like to sew the kittens onto something else to pass on to one of my granddaughters.
As the only daughter of William and Eleanora (Hansing) Haag, she inherited all of the properties that her father built and she worked very hard to keep the yards and the buildings well-maintained. There was another whole lot that butted up against the back of the house lot that was called "the garden." It had flowers and, at one time, I'm sure there were vegetables, but most of all I remember hearing about the drudgery of mowing the garden and seeing the evidence of her legs being chewed up by the chiggers in the process. I imagine that at one time, during my mother's youth maybe even in my brothers' youth, the backyard of the house was beautiful. There was an enormous weeping willow tree and a goldfish pond. Grandma Hill started to get sick shortly after we moved to Wisconsin. Back then, we were told it was "hardening of the arteries." Today, it would be better classified as Alzheimer's. She began to lose her memory, began to hallucinate and live in the past. She became paranoid that people were trying to break in and rob the house. In one fit of paranoia, she took the old Haag family Bible and tore out, and destroyed, all the pages of family history. As I've tried to work on family history,that part is the saddest part for me. At one point, she ran out of the house in the middle of the night in her nightgown and ran down the block to the church. The police had to bring her home. For a little while after that, my parents tried to bring her to Watertown to stay with us on the farm to give DeeDee a little break since she still had to care for Grandpa and maintain the apartment buildings by herself. I was responsible for keeping Grandma company and entertained and feeding her meals when I wasn't in school. It was after that, the doctor suggested they try shock therapy for her and they admitted her to the hospital. As you would expect, shock therapy did nothing to help the disease and after she returned home, she just continued to get worse and worse. I remember feeling heartbroken when I would hear her lying in bed and just crying out for her Mama. It was one of those times that I became rude to my grandfather the only time in my life. Mom, Dad, Bill and I were all in the living room of her house. They had pulled out the studio couch (aka Hide-a-Bed nowadays) for her to lay on which meant Grandpa had to get off of his spot on the couch. Mom was trying to make sure Grandma was comfortable and kept asking her if she was okay, while Grandma just cried. Grandpa gruffly said, "She's fine!" Irritated at my grandpa for being so abrupt and, seemingly, unfeeling for my Grandma, I looked at him and rudely said "How would you know? You can't feel what she's feeling!" At that outburst, I was on the receiving end of a reprimand of my own from Bill for talking to our grandfather so disrespectfully. I suspect I was sent out of the room at that point, as that's the end of my memory, although the rest of it is still vivid. Grandma passed away in April, 1965, just two years after we had begun moving to Wisconsin. Grandma, Grandpa and DeeDee are all buried in the Spring Lake Cemetery in Aurora, Illinois surrounded by other Haag/Hansing relatives.
The truly crazy, interesting part of the story of my grandparents has begun to unfold since 2013. My mother had always wanted to find her birth parents, but never wanted to look while her parents were still living. At one point, she started to write a novel beginning with her vague memory of the orphanage she lived in. She was told the following about her pre-adoptive life:
- She had a twin brother who passed away of whooping cough in the orphanage
- She had several older brothers and sisters
- Her father was a traveling minister who died trying to catch a train to go to his second parish on a Sunday between services
- She and her twin were put in the orphanage to be cared for while their mother worked to be able to better care for her family
- When the orphanage informed her mother of the boy's death, they told the mother that they had both died
- Every year, Grandma Hill took Mom on the train into Chicago to visit "a lady" until the day she asked who that lady was. They never went again, but she had a book of Cinderella that was given to her by the lady that was signed "Virginia."
- She was actually a year older than she had been told her whole life up to the time she married my father and had to get a copy of her birth certificate!
Some of that is truth. Other parts are false. Since 2013, Josh, Brooks and I have been working whenever we can to try to unravel pieces of my mother's past. Here's what we've learned
- Mom was indeed a twin; the second born; Baby #5 of 5 born to Alice Gustafson Voorhees. Her twin brother, Elmer, died on his 2nd birthday (according to Illinois Deaths and Stillbirths Record) and was buried in Arlington Cemetery.
- There were 3 older siblings. Eleanor (Johnson) appears to have been born out of wedlock to Alice and was listed in census records as a border. (Not an uncommon thing for illegitimate children, I've been told). After Alice married Ted Victor Voorhees, she had 2 more children before the twins on May 1, 1921. The twins' birth certificates have only Voorhees and the word "Deceased" for the father's name.
- Ted had varying occupations in census records, one being a minister. We have a photo of a newspaper article about Rev. Ted Voorhees and I have a copy of a book he wrote. He used magic to teach about God...quite a different take on religion!
- Using census and selective service records, Ted was still living in the east until he died in the 60s. He had a second marriage and on that marriage license he claimed his first marriage ended in divorce in March of 1920.
- No divorce records have been located. Were they really divorced and accurate records weren't kept? Did Ted walk out on Alice in 1920 and consider that his divorce? Did Alice get so upset with Ted when he left that he was "dead" to her? Did Ted come back and have a final fling with Alice five or six months after he left? Or, did Alice produce two more illegitimate offspring, give them Ted's last name and put them up for adoption? I know Alice is my true grandmother, but is Ted my true grandfather???
- A man named Bernard Ward reached out to me after finding that I had Ted Voorhees in my family tree on MyHeritage.com . Ted was his grandfather and told me that there were family rumors that he had a first marriage, but the family never spoke of it. His mother had passed away, but her two sisters were still living, but he refused to give me any contact information for them, as he said they are elderly and it would be too upsetting for them.Census record!s show Ted having three daughters (Virginia, Jolinda and Marilyn) which fits the information Bernard gave me. Time to try to track down the sisters myself!
Family History. Such a fascinating topic with so many different directions to take to learn about ancestors. In addition to the confusion with the Voorhees line, there is much to learn about the Staffeldts, the Zielkes, the Hansings and the Haags with their eastern European connections; and then what of Orlando Hill? What was his story? So much to learn and it doesn't seem like there's ever enough time to dedicate to it! When I was younger, I wondered how "old people" could spend so much time on their genealogy! Now, I know!!!
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