Survival: The Saga of My Ancestors

By Lynne Gross

This book describes five generations that emanated from Germany and Italy. It is based on research through ancestry.com and other internet sources as well as interviews with relatives and discoveries in long-forgotten closets and scrapbooks. It includes tales of immigration, settling, and dealing with success and failures. The people depicted are hard-working, most of them in steel-related industries in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. In addition to chapters on each of the four branches of the author's heritage, there are chapters that deal with the research process.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Sep 29, 2018
• ISBN: 9780359124954

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Survival: The Saga of My Ancestors

SURVIVAL: THE SAGA OF MY ANCESTORS

By

Lynne Schafer Gross

Copyright © 2017 Lynne Schafer Gross

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or retransmitted in any form by any means, electronic or mechanical, including but not limited to photo copying, recording, scanning, or any information storage or retrieval system without the expressed written permission of the author. Exceptions are made for brief excerpts used in published reviews.

ISBN: 978-0-359-12495-4

First Edition

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Summary: Survival: The Saga of My Ancestors describes five generations that emanated from Germany and Italy. It is based on research through ancestry.com and other internet sources as well as interviews with relatives and discoveries in long-forgotten closets and scrapbooks. It includes tales of immigration, settling, and dealing with successes and failures. The people depicted are hard-working, most of them in the steel related industries of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. In addition to chapters on each of the four branches of the author’s heritage, there are chapters that deal with the research process.

Preface

I must begin by thanking four people in particular for their contributions. Without the example and urging of my German shirt-tail cousin, Jürgen Kaiser, this book would never have been possible. Jürgen, who I did not know existed until 2009, created an ancestry.com page for my father’s mother’s side of the family that piqued my interest in researching other sides of my family. He is a marvelous researcher and often bailed me out when I thought I had run up against a blank wall by finding obscure documents related to other branches of my family.

Two of my cousins, Diane DeRusha Cappella and Carole Melcher Ruppel, helped enormously by telling me family anecdotes they remembered and by providing many of the photos in this book.

And then there was Mildred. Mildred Casey Coll was my mother’s first cousin and the only member of the family to live to be over 100. Diane was the one who told me she was still alive and of very sound mind, so I called her and had numerous conversations that were extremely valuable in putting together my mother’s side of the family. I also visited her in Pittsburgh and Diane and I threw her a little 100th birthday party. She was a true gem who told it like it was.

Ancestor research can go on forever because, in the end, we are probably all related. But to limit myself, I chose to research primarily straight-line ancestors and their siblings. Of course, spouses, children, and friends play into their stories, but by choosing the main characters, I feel I have presented a representative picture of each generation.

There is more repetition and more detail in this book than in other books I have written. I wanted to include enough repetition that someone interested in only a few of my ancestors could obtain adequate information. Although detail can be tedious, I have found in my own research that it is often a seemingly inconsequential detail that leads to a major discovery. Perhaps some future generations can use some of the details to explain unanswered questions.

Spellings of names present big problems when doing ancestor research. Sometimes people intentionally changed their names, often census takers or immigration officials didn’t write the names correctly, and sometimes I chose one spelling over another just to distinguish between people, e.g. Franz Wietzke--Frank Wietzke, Anthony Pessagno--Antony Pessagno. In general, I’ve chosen spellings that seemed to be used most commonly and occasionally indicated other spellings in the index. Also, I have indexed women by both their maiden and married names, to the extent I knew both.

Although I felt by 2017 that I had enough information to write a book about my ancestors, I still have many unanswered questions. I will continue to pursue ancestor research and hope that I have some significant revisions of this book.

Lastly, I must give a shout out to ancestry.com. It is an amazing help for ancestor research. The site is kept up to date and new material is added frequently. The hints that they give to all their researchers are a major help for finding significant facts.

Lynne Schafer Gross

Chapter 1--Introduction

Prior to November 2009 I knew very little about my ancestors. Within a few months I knew a great deal. It was a mind-swirling journey through handwritten census records, steam ship passenger lists, something called the Miracode Index, Google, ancestry.com, the Mormons’ genealogy records, ZabaSearch, Wikipedia, draft card registrations, the social security death index, my cousins’ scrapbooks, and a wonderful family tree constructed by a shirt-tail cousin in Germany who contacted me via email on November 26, 2009.

What I learned was not pretty. I certainly do not come from a strong lineage of notable people. Most of my ancestors were poor laborers or farmers. Some that I traced back to the early 1800s were most likely serfs. Laws were passed in the 1830s to allow serfs to obtain land—if they had the money to buy it. Of course, being serfs, they had no money. Eventually structures were established to loan them money, but it took a good two generations before any of my ancestors were landholders. The land they did obtain was poor and they had to work very hard to sustain themselves.

The majority of my ancestors came from Germany to America in the mid to late 1800s and settled in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. It is easy to see the pattern of one person coming over, working for a while, and then helping to bring another family member over. Their journeys to the New World consisted of six weeks or more on a sailing ship in the early to mid-1800s or two weeks or more on steamships later in the century. All the ships were unsanitary with unsavory dormitory-style conditions. Once here, they lived near each other and interdependently helped each other through life’s crises—suicide, spousal abuse, death during childbirth, accidents, illness, widowhood, bouts of poverty.

Three-fourths of my ancestors are of German descent but my grandmother on my mother’s side is Italian. These Italians, too, seemed poor and interdependent, but they were in Baltimore. Only a small part of that group wound up in Pittsburgh.

When the industrial revolution occurred toward the end of the 1800s, my male ancestors were the laborers, working the lowest rung of unhealthy jobs in Pittsburgh’s steel industry. Some of them rose to semi-supervisory roles, such as foreman, but general laborer is the most common job description that they gave themselves. There was no OSHA to protect them and the grimy soot, which I remember well from my childhood, filled their lungs. I always thought all my ancestors died young, so I was pleased to find during my research that some of them actually lived into their 80s—but not among those who worked in the steel mills.

As for the women, they were baby-producing machines. The sequence, as seen in the birth dates of their children, is obvious—get pregnant, give birth, nurse; get pregnant, give birth, nurse. Usually there was at least one still born child or one who died within a year in each family. Many of the women became widows and their main source of income seemed to be taking in borders. Between family members and boarders there would sometimes be ten or twelve people living in what were small houses.

I don’t think any of my straight-line ancestors rose from the lower-middle class to the middle class. My father as a banker, was on his way, but his early death at 44 stopped that progress. If there are heroic stories in my family, they came from people who took chances. My Great Great Aunt Augusta Wietzke was the first of her side of the family to immigrate to America, doing so alone when she was 19 years old. My Great Grandfather Ludwig Keefer came to the United States in the mid-1800s and fought as a private for the North in the Civil War of a country he barely knew. Some of my venturesome Italian ancestors apparently left their homes in the 1840s for the purpose of finding gold in California. After being widowed at a fairly young age, my Great Grandmother Barbara Schlegel became an active force in an organization that provided what we would now call life insurance money for widows. Some of my ancestors made the trek from home to ship to port to welcoming relative with a large number of very young children—something I wouldn’t have wanted to do.

World War I brought particular anguish to my German ancestors. They were, by then, loyal Americans, but some of them had brothers in Germany fighting for the Kaiser. Even though he was staunchly anti-Kaiser, my Great Great Uncle Herman Wietzke writes of fear that his farm will be taken and he will be cast into prison because he is German.

The Depression of the 1930s was particularly hard on these people who were hanging on by their fingernails. Families wound up living with each other and my father didn’t have enough money to get an operation to remove his tonsils—something that eventually led to his death. World War II brought more anxiety to people of German background. Some of my husband’s relatives changed their name from Gross to Grass because of fear of retribution against people with German names.

Although all this sounds rather grim, one thing I remember about the ancestors I knew as a child is that they smiled and laughed a lot (despite their deteriorating teeth). The ones that survived seemed happy with themselves, each other, and the lives they led.

I do not have any famous ancestors. I do not have any rich ancestors. I do not have any college-educated ancestors. I do not have any outstandingly good-looking ancestors. And yet, I am proud of these people and I’m VERY THANKFUL they came to the United States of America.

Chapter 2--Research

Genealogical research is not for the faint-hearted. It takes a great deal of time and patience and often yields nothing. It would be so much better if we could raise ancestors from the dead and ask them to tell their stories. Everyone who researches ancestors will have his or her own story, not only about the ancestors but also about the process of finding the information. Here is my story.

Pre-Existing Conditions

My ancestor research started in 2009. Prior to that I knew very little about my ancestors--in fact, I didn’t even know my grandmothers’ names. I guess I could blame this on the fact that my parents died young--my father, Elmer Frank Schafer, at age 44 when I was 13 and my mother, Irene Mabel Keefer Schafer, at 55 when I was 27. However, I never asked either of them any questions about their parents or other relatives.

Not knowing much about my ancestors rarely seemed like a problem. Occasionally, my children had class assignments where they were to write something about ancestors, but the parents of my husband, Paul, were alive, so we could fulfill the assignments from that side of the family.

I do remember feeling flat-footed when, sometime in the late 1970s, our middle son, Owen, asked me what my parents were like and I couldn’t think of what to say. I also remember, sometime in the 1980s, our youngest son, Brian, saying, Mother, if you don’t find out something about your family, I’m going to have to do it. I figured if there were skeletons in my family closet, I’d rather find out about them myself, so I gave some thought to doing ancestor research. Back then, the best way to do research was to go to Salt Lake City and plow through data the Mormons had collected. Brian and I talked about going there together but never got around to it.

In addition, I was busy working and raising three children. And I lived in California, far from my Pittsburgh roots where I might have been more inclined to spend an afternoon in the courthouse finding documents. Excuses, excuses. In 2007 I retired and one of the items I placed on my to do in retirement list was ancestor, research but it would be another two years before I made that a serious project.

Visiting Diane

In 2009, I decided to visit my first cousin, Diane DeRusha Cappella, in Florida. Part of my reason for going was to catch up with Diane because I had not seen her for years, but I also thought she and I might be able to piece together some ancestral facts related to my mother’s side of the family.

In October 2009, I spent about a week in Florida visiting with Diane and looking through photos handed down from her mother, Grace, who was my mother’s sister. Diane seemed to know more about our grandmother, Elvira Pesagno Keefer, than I did, mainly from things her mother had told her. It was Diane who told me our grandmother was Italian; I had always assumed she was German. Diane is 12 years younger than me so she never knew this grandmother and, although I have a vivid memory of being the only person with her when she died in 1938, I was only 18 months old then. I did remember our grandfather, Louis Keefer, because he didn’t die until I was six.

I had heard about an internet site called ancestry.com that was supposed to have some information on it helpful to ancestor research. Diane and I tried it by inputting our grandparents’ names, but we got nothing on Elvira and only got some sketchy information I already knew about Louis. We concluded that ancestry.com was fairly useless.

When I came back to Los Angeles after visiting Diane, I went to a local Mormon Church that had an internet connection to some of the Salt Lake City data that had been digitized. I, again, input our grandparents’ names and found nothing about Elvira and only a few already-known facts about Louis. I concluded I couldn’t do any more research until the Mormons digitized more of their information. My ancestor research came to a stop until-------

Jürgen

On November 26, 2009 (Thanksgiving Day) I received an email out of the blue from Hans Jürgen Kaiser that said, in broken English, If you are the daughter of Elmer Schafer, our great grandfathers were brothers. I have information on ancestry.com about our family that maybe you want to see. Yes, I wanted to see it, so Jürgen sent me an invitation to visit his site.

What an abundance of information. Jürgen and I are related through my paternal grandmother, Elizabeth Wietzke Schafer, and given that I knew hardly anything about her, I was fascinated to find I had all these relatives that Jürgen had posted on his sight. Most of them had emigrated from Pomerania, which is now in Poland but was formerly part of Germany. Only Jürgen’s branch of the family stayed in Europe and eventually settled in northern Germany.

Something puzzled me, however. Jürgen seemed to have found much of this material from the files on ancestry.com. Why had Diane and I had such a poor experience with the site? Just to see what would happen, I input Elvira Pesagno into Jürgen’s site--and got nothing. Ancestry.com knew I was Jürgen’s guest and suggested I pay to start my own site. The cost was less than $300 a year, so I decided it was worth the investment and started my own site. Once I was a paying customer, I had access to a great deal more information.

Ancestry.com Addiction