Now that my classes are winding down I’m starting to work on the Grandpa’s Letters project again. But since I’m sure how much longer I’m going to have unfettered access to Ancestrylibrary.com (i.e., institutional access without me having to personally subscribe to it) I’ve been filling out Grandpa’s genealogy on MacFamilyTree. It is a good way to lay out all of the evidence I’ve accumulated, retrace my steps, and document the connections I’ve made.

Some of my grandpa’s genealogy is settled fact. The Lucketts have a long history in North America that dates back to before the Revolutionary War. There is even a “Luckett Hill,” which is a small cemetery plot full of our fore-bearers on a wooden knoll in Lincoln County. However, we know much less about my Elmer’s mother’s line. When I asked my Grandpa during his oral interview whether or not it was true that his mother was German, here was his response:

Yeah, her name was Schroeder, S-C-H-R-O-E-D-E-R, Schroeder. Yeah. Now, Rose Phillippine … And the thing that got me, I later on found that Rose Phillippine was a Saint in the Catholic church. But I kind of wondered whether my mother could have been from a family that was Catholic. But she was born … my mother was born in this country. But her family was from Germany, her mother and dad and her sister. And her mother and dad died, evidently, when she was quite young. And my sister, Frieda … or her sister, Frieda, more or less raised her. She was a few years older than my mother, and they were the only two children there.

Elmer Luckett, Oral Interview

There is a lot to unpack here, but what strikes me the most was his uncertainty about his own mother’s origins. He and his family were close to Aunt Frieda and her kids, and Grandpa wrote them all frequently during his time in the service. However, it was almost as if their family history began Ex nihilo in Saint Louis. Rose, who was born only a couple of years after her parents and sister arrived in the United States, only knew Missouri. And despite being born in Hamburg and having German as her native language, Frieda had few memories of her own of her homeland. Unfortunately, the death of their parents made it nearly impossible for them to learn much else about their origins.

Not surprisingly, circumstances such as these make it difficult to pin down her own family line. After all, Schroeder is a common name, and ship logs and Ellis Island registers are full of Schroeders traveling to America on a one-way trip. But researching a genealogical mystery is like tugging on a sweater thread: the more you pull at it, the more it unravels. With that in mind, the best place to start is not with Rose herself, since she was born in St. Louis, but with her sister Frieda.

Who was Aunt Frieda? She married several times, which makes things a little more complicated, but once we learn what names she has and at what times she had them it is fairly easy to reconstruct her documentary history on Ancestry.com. For instance, when she passed away her full legal name was Frieda Albina Aschenbrenner. With that information in mind we can look up her Social Security application and her death certificate.

Taken together, her Social Security application and her death certificate corroborate one another. They also provide or confirm some vital facts, specifically her birth date (July 6, 1879) and her country of origin (Germany). But while her death certificate lists her parents names as “unknown,” her Social Security application (which she completed herself – she obviously could not fill out her own death certificate!) lists them as Charles Schroeder and Anna “Wonnerrow.”

These documents from near the end of Aunt Frieda’s life tell us much about her, but what about those documents from the beginning? Armed with her full name, her birthdate, and her country of origin, I started to hunt down her birth certificate. Thanks to the magic of Ancestry.com, it did not take me long:

Frieda Schroeder’s birth certificate. From Ancestry.com. Hamburg, Germany, Births, 1874-1901 [database on-line]. Provo, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations, Inc., 2015.

Although the document is in German, Ancestry.com translates the particulars (since these are standard forms there is not a lot of extraneous context that prevents the site from automatically generating translations of these documents). It shows that Frieda Alwine Sofie Johanna Schroeder was born on July 6, 1879, in Hamburg, Germany to Anna and Friedrich Carl Schroeder. This is almost certainly Aunt Frieda’s birth certificate.

So now the question is, who was Anna Schroeder? For that we need to search Ancestry.com’s German language documents for information using both her married name and her maiden name (Wonnerrow, or some variation thereof).

One possible candidate is Anna Christina Elisabeth Wohrenow. She was born on August 19th, 1849, in or near Blücher, a village located about 60 miles southeast of Hamburg in the Mecklenburg region. She was baptized four days later at the Evangelische Kirche Blücher, or the Blücher Evangelistic Lutheran Church. The baptismal document lists her parents as Johann Heinrich Friedrich Reinke and Cathar Elisabeth Wohnerow. The baby received her mother’s family name, however, since the parents were not married. Thus Anna’s birth was categorized by the church as being Uneheliche, or illegitimate.

Frieda’s documents virtually prove that Anna Schroeder was her mother. For one, Frieda’s Social Security application lists “Anna Wonnerrow” as her mother, Germany as her country of origin, and July 6th, 1879 as her birthdate. These details can also be found on her German birth certificate from Hamburg, which also includes her father’s full name in German (Friedrich Carl Heinrich Johann Schroeder).

As for her sister (and my great-grandmother) Rose, we can also cross-reference her Missouri birth registry record with her death certificate, which both state that she was born in St. Louis on July 24, 1887. The former document also lists Anna Schroeder as her mother, although curiously the death certificate lacks any information about her parents at all (was Forrest Luckett too distraught to provide this information, or was it possible that he didn’t know?)

Now that we’ve tracked down Anna Schroeder, we can fill in some of the missing pieces and prove that she was Rose and Frieda’s mother, that she was the same Anna Wohnerow born in Germany, and that she did not live long after her youngest daughter’s birth. To do that, we can look at her death certificate. It contains several important pieces of corroborating information: she was born in Germany, had lived in St. Louis for ten years (which suggests she arrived in 1885), and resided at 2430 Lemp Ave. It also reveals a somewhat morbid fact: she was 45 years, eight months, and one day old when she passed away. Since the death certificate states that Schroeder died on Saturday, April 20, 1895, where would 45 years, eight months, and a day place her birthday? August 19, 1849.

That’s the same date listed on her baptismal record.

There is still much to learn about Rose’s little family. Who was Charles (or Carl, or Friedrich) Schroeder? When did they come to America? What happened to Rose and Frieda between 1895 (when their mom died) and 1898 (when Frieda married Max Meinelt and established a new household that included young Rose)? So far the answers are elusive, at least on Ancestry.com. Once the COVID-19 emergency lifts and we’re all able to freely travel again, I think the next step would be to go to St. Louis and do some detective work there. One place I would like to visit is Anna Schroeder’s grave in St. Matthews Cemetery, just off Morganford Road. Are there any other Schroeders buried nearby? The cemetery isn’t mapped, so I will need to visit the place myself (or perhaps get a family member to do it? . . .)

I don’t really know how much of this will go into the book. What I do know, though, is that I did not learn about the Schroeders growing up. Nor did my dad, so far as I can tell. I don’t even think my grandpa knew all that much about his mother’s family. Yet when Anna Wohrenow came to the United States with her daughter, it was surely a fresh start. She would no longer be an Uneheliche in Mecklenberg, a notoriously conservative corner of the reich, and her children would go on to live comfortable, productive, and successful lives.

However, most of the family history stories I heard growing up revolved around Seneca Luckett, my great-great grandfather, and his ancestors in Missouri, Kentucky, and Virginia. We would even make the occasional family pilgrimage to Luckett Hill. It was great to learn about these ancestors who tilled the soil under our feet and whose early wanderings across the continent followed Daniel Boone across the Cumberland Gap over 240 years ago. But now that I know that six of my great-great grandparents were born in Germany, I am curious to learn more about them as well. I’m even thinking about flying to Hamburg so that I can visit Anna’s birthplace, and lay my eyes on the foundations of the church where she was baptized some 170 years ago.

That trip will have to wait, though, just like all the other ones I plan to take (thanks, COVID-19!) In the meantime, I’ll continue tumbling down Ancestry.com’s endless warren of genealogical rabbit holes searching for more distant German relatives.

Of course, there is one last piece of business: today is my Great-Grandmother Rose’s birthday. She was born 133 years ago. And while it would be unrealistic to expect that she would still be around after all that time to celebrate, her death on March 7, 1946 at the age of 58 ensured that she would not be alive to meet Elmer’s children. In fact, Elmer had only been home from the war for five months when his mother fell ill and died of a pulmonary embolism. Sadly, it is clear from his letters that he thought the world of his mother, and losing her after being gone for nearly five years while serving in the Navy must have been a crushing blow.

Anyway, as Elmer might say, happy birthday to the greatest Great-Grandma in the world!