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So the big fuss about the Budweiser commercial showing Adolphus Busch coming to St. Louis, overcoming all manner of trials and tribulations, got me thinking again about our prior genealogical research. \u00a0Here\u2019s what we\u2019ve got so far:<\/p>\n
Emilie Schwarz was born in Germany in 1858, but came to the U.S. in 1870, landed in St. Louis, and married Wilhelm Witkoetter in 1885. \u00a0Unfortunately, he died of tuberculosis in 1887, after her first child, Theresa, was born in 1886. \u00a0Her second child, Annie, was born just two months after Wilhelm died. \u00a0She remarried, and had two more children, another Emilie, in 1890 and Lillie in 1892, as well, plus two girls, both named Rosa, who died in infancy, Her second husband, Edward Debush, died of TB as well, in 1897, and the 1900 census finds the family making a living by taking in laundry, with the older two girls having dropped out of school to work as well.<\/p>\n
What happened to Annie and Lillie we don\u2019t quite know, but the younger Emilie (also called Amelia) was my great-grandmother. \u00a0She worked as a servant for a time, then married an Irishman (by way of Canada) who moved up to St. Louis from the south along with his widowed father, Richard Stapleton Jr. and Sr.; and her older sister married his father. \u00a0The younger Richard later died in a motorcycle accident when my grandmother was a baby, and Amelia remarried, and her husband, my grandmother\u2019s stepfather, who my mother remembers as a rather grumpy old man, was a mechanic at a factory according to census records. \u00a0When we started doing this research and made the connection that my grandmother\u2019s grandfather\u2019s second wife was also her aunt, my mom said, \u201cI guess that explains why we always had to go visit her!\u201d<\/p>\n
Of the Stapletons we know a reasonable amount, both due to census records and birth records here and in Canada, and due to connecting with an Ancestry.com family tree that extended what we knew. \u00a0Well, OK, Richard Sr.\u2019s first wife is a mystery \u2014 all we know is that her name was Elmina and she was born in Georgia.<\/p>\n
But back to our story: \u00a0there\u2019s one bit that doesn\u2019t fit. \u00a0According to family history, Amelia called herself Amelia Witkoetter, not Amelia Debush. \u00a0My mom only vaguely recognized the name \u201cDebush\u201d from gravestones she\u2019d seen, nothing else. \u00a0But she was born several years after Wilhelm Witkoetter died. \u00a0Was she illegitimate, and Edward Debush came on the scene only afterwards? \u00a0Was there some family conflict that led Amelia to reject the Debush name?<\/p>\n
And besides which, Emilie Schwarz would have been 12 years old when she came from Germany. \u00a0Who were her family, and what was their story?<\/p>\n