Tag: History Mystery

History Mystery: Was Horse Stealing a Capital Crime in Texas?

~ Dr. Matt Luckett ~ 1 Comment

Well, folks, I’m back . . . as in, back on Twitter. You can follow me at @luckettdr. I’m not going to sweat out my follower count too much – I like being able to opine freely, and lately that has been on politics – but I am trying to make an effort to bring more research-relevant content to my timeline. For my purposes, that means searching for tweets about horse stealing.

And after a couple of days doing just that I realized pretty quickly that there is a gaping hole in my upcoming book, Never Caught Twice: Horse Stealing in Western Nebraska, 1850 – 1890. Although I talk at length about horse stealing in Nebraska, including its status in the penal code, I don’t mention similar or comparable laws in Texas. While that makes sense, obviously, given the title, the myth that horse thieves were lawfully hanged in Texas remains strong:

This one is my favorite:

My guess is . . . no, I don’t think anyone should be worried about being hanged for horse stealing. This is not to say that horse stealing is not still a problem (because it is), and the fact that people are bringing up hanging at all when referencing modern horse thieves speaks both to the gravity of the problem and the power of the myth itself. But is it actually a myth, or can horse thieves face the death penalty in Texas still?

Let’s find out!

The first thing we need to do is research what the laws in Texas actually were and read what they said about horse stealing. Since we are looking for a Texas state law, and Texas state laws were published, all we need to do in theory is consult the Texas penal code. The earliest digitized copy of Texas criminal law currently available through the Texas Law Library is the 1879 Penal Code of the State of Texas. Passed by the legislature on February 21, 1879, the code superseded preexisting Texas law and exhaustively laid out what was against the law in Texas, and what the prescribed penalty should be for each offense. Since this is a text-searchable PDF, all we need to do is hit Ctrl-F and search for “horse” until we get to the appropriate law.

If you want to skip the searching, you can find the relevant statute on page 97, in Title XVII, Chapter 11:

“If any person shall steal any horse, ass or mule, he shall be punished by confinement in the penitentiary not less than five nor more than fifteen years.”

Here’s a screenshot of the law:

Notice that the punishment for stealing cattle was two to five years in jail, as opposed to between five and fifteen. Cattle were valuable in Texas, but apart from commodity production and pulling draft they had little utility. The difference in punishment between the two underscores how important horses really were, even if horse thieves did not necessarily face the death penalty for their crimes.

This seems pretty conclusive, right? It would be, except for the fact that the above law is from 1879. Texas established its independence from Mexico over three decades earlier, and the United States annexed it in 1845. Needless to say, a lot of violence occurred in Texas during the preceding thirty years: the Texas Revolution, the Mexican-American War, the Civil War, a generation of warfare against the Comanches, and the explosion of Texas cattle ranching across the Plains. Wouldn’t it be more likely for horse stealing to be a capital crime during this era, as opposed to 1879, when things presumably cooled down a little bit in the Lone Star State?

To check the law even earlier, we will have to exit the Texas State Law Library and head over to the Legislative Reference Library of Texas. This is where we will find a PDF copy of The Penal Code of the State of Texas adopted by the sixth Legislature, passed into law and published in 1856. This volume represents a codification, rather than a revision, of existing laws – meaning that the laws inside were already on the books in one way or another, but had not yet been incorporated into a single body of legal code.

Once again, it does not take long to find out what the punishment for horse stealing was in Texas in 1856:

“Article 765. If any person shall steal any horse, gelding, mare, colt, ass, or mule, he shall be punished, by confinement in the Penitentiary, not less than two, nor more than seven years.” Here is a screenshot of the law from the book itself:

One difference that should immediately stand out is that the punishment for horse stealing was actually more severe in 1879 than it was in 1856. Why was that? There are a lot of reasons for this (I talk about them in the book, of course), but one important factor bears mentioning here: horses were more valuable after the Civil War than before. The massive herds of mustangs were declining or moving north, growing ranches required enormous numbers of horses for their remudas, and urbanization elsewhere pulled horses out of rural markets. There was more competition for horses during the late 1870s, and as demand and prices for horses rose so, too, did their role in society. They were used for transportation, plowing, pulling draft, and countless other applications. This made them more ubiquitous and more essential to everyday life.

Yet despite their critical role horses were subject to a host of maladies, from epizootics to snake bites to lighting strikes to old age. They were expensive and virtually uninsurable, and people without the funds to buy multiple horses often overused the ones they had, leading them to age rapidly. Thus, of all the possible problems to plague horse owners, horse thieves shouldered much of the burden, as they were easily scapegoated and could presumably be controlled more easily with threats and punishments than lighting strikes or poisonous snakes.

One of the most famous horse theft hanging scenes can be found in the popular miniseries Lonesome Dove (1989). Shows like Lonesome Dove continued to propagate the belief that horse thieves were legally hanged. Although this is clearly a vigilante execution it is also apparent in the series that there will be absolutely no consequences for these actions.

Naturally, one possible punishment for horse stealing was hanging, and the popular mythology around hanging horse thieves was just as strong in the late-1870s as it is now. The question of whether or not vigilantes frequently hanged horse thieves in Texas is a separate question that deserves a separate answer, but if we assume that it was a strong possibility, then the harsher punishment prescription in 1879 makes a lot of sense. Texas levied five to fifteen year prison sentences against horse thieves not only in order to disincentivize the stealing of an incredibly valuable and uniquely indispensable form of property, but also in order to convince would-be vigilantes that the state was serious about punishing horse thieves.

This post just scratches the surface of what I’ve come to believe is a fascinating, multilayered story about horse theft and its vastly unappreciated and misunderstood role in shaping our laws, politics, culture, and history. It is a story I try to tell in my book. And even though my focus is on Nebraska, there are a LOT of parallels here between Texas and Nebraska law with respect to how they contend with horse stealing.

In the meantime, though, it seems as though our mystery is solved: horse stealing is not, and so far as I can tell never was, a hanging offense in the Lone Star State. Case closed.

Now comes the hard part: convincing everyone on Twitter.

Another History Mystery (and a Happy Birthday to the Greatest Great-Grandma in the World)

~ Dr. Matt Luckett ~ Leave a comment

Now that my classes are winding down I’m starting to work on the Grandpa’s Letters project again. But since I’m not 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.

This is the text record of Aunt Frieda’s Social Security application. I photographed the copy I printed out a while back along with the original annotations I made on it. Note the misspelled last name. Despite that discrepancy the rest of the information (birthday, given name, parents’ names, birth country) corresponds with information elsewhere.

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.

Anna Wohrenow’s 1849 baptismal record from Germany.

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).

The original Blücher Evangelistic Church was replaced by this newer building in 1875, about 25 years after Anna Wohrenow’s baptism.

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.

Anna Schroeder’s burial certificate.

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!

My Grandpa Elmer Luckett and my Great-Grandmother Rose out on the town. Shopping maybe?

The Chew Deck Logs (1941)

~ Dr. Matt Luckett ~ Leave a comment

One of my favorite aspects of military history is the availability of documentation.

Militaries are big things, indeed. They have lots of soldiers, lots of vehicles, and lots weapons that vary in size and lethality. They also have support staff, logistical supply chains, doctors, nurses, engineers, ditch diggers, builders, movers, doers, and even dreamers. They are everything a human being needs to be trained and housed and fed and dressed and armed and cared for while in the States, as well as everything needed to ship that person across an ocean and then train, house, feed, dress, arm, and care for that person while on deployment. And that’s just the Army.

In order to make such a large, complicated entity that culturally thrives on exactitude run like clockwork, militaries in general and Navies in particular require a great deal of data collection and record keeping. Today that burden is eased thanks to computers and smart devices, but back during World War II those processes requires lots of paper, pencils, typewriters, and people to jot down all those things that needed to be jotted down.

Deck logs were indispensable record-keeping devices for ships. They recorded all sorts of things, from the windspeed at different times of day to the ship’s location and speed. They also contained a narrative of the day’s events. Most of these were mundane – who boarded and left the ship, details about food and fuel deliveries, inspection reports, etc.

This is a page from the Chew deck log on January 1st, 1941. (National Archives – College Park)

The food deliveries are especially interesting, since they give us a sense what (and how much) all those sailors ate (they sure loved their potatoes):

The logs provide additional threads to pull, which reveal about not only the ship and its crew, but the wider community that surrounded and interacted with them. For instance, the Chun Hoon Company supplied many of the ship’s vegetables and fruits. The company’s namesake founder immigrated to Oahu in 1887 at the age of 14, and after starting out as a vegetable peddler Chun Hoon became increasingly successful as a vendor and then later as a grocer. Although he passed away in 1935 his sons took over the business, and in 1939 they opened a brand new supermarket at the corner of Nuuanu and School Streets in Honolulu. By 1940 the Chun Hoon Company was a major player in local business and a substantial benefactor for several local schools and charities.

More broadly, Chinese-Americans found and took advantage of the opportunities they found in Hawaii, which offered a space of relative refuge from persecution when compared to the post-Chinese Exclusion Act United States mainland. Of course, Hawaii itself was not annexed by the United States until 1898, by which time nearly 50,000 Chinese immigrants had relocated to Oahu. But by that time, Chinese-Hawaiians were already well-integrated into the island’s economy, and immigrants like Chun Hoon continued to thrive despite the changing of the flag. His company was an institution by 1940, and while the Chew and the United States Navy were important customers for the business, they were by no means the only ones.

I had no idea about the Chun Hoon Company before looking at this specific page in the Deck Log. I have several hundred more pages to go. What other secrets do they hold? What other connections do they suggest? What was the weather like at 7:30am on December 7th, 1941? Where was the ship located the next morning at 9am? Deck Logs can help us answer these questions and more . . .

To find Deck Logs for other ships, you will need to do one of two things: you can go directly to the Archives II NARA reading room in College Park, Maryland and request them, or you can hire an independent researcher in the area to scan the ones you want. You will have to wait until NARA facilities reopen after the COVID quarantines lift, and once that happens there will likely be a considerable backlog of folks like me who are clamoring to begin or continue ongoing research projects. But the staff there is very helpful, and the materials themselves are easy to access.

History Mystery: Where did my Great-Grandmother Go to Church?

~ Dr. Matt Luckett ~ 3 Comments

Some of you might already know the answer to this question, but when it’s 10 in the evening and you find a reference that needs chasing, you don’t wait around for people to wake up. I spent at least an hour trying to figure this out, and the next morning I realized that this would be a great opportunity to shed a bit of light on one of my favorite parts of the job: finding out difficult to track pieces of information and unveiling whole new worlds in the past.

Yet this is also one of the least appreciated aspects of researching and writing history. In my forthcoming horse stealing book there are countless little questions like this one, each of which required hours and in some cases days of research and oftentimes a special trip to a library or archive. Sometimes all I have to show for it in the final product is a single sentence or endnote. It could be said that a history book is less of a rabbit hole and more of a warren excavated out of many overlapping and knotted-together rabbit holes.

The Question: Where did Rose Luckett (my great-grandmother) go to church?

The Context: in his December 6th letter to his mother, Elmer mentioned that “Reverend Stock” of the “Trinity Church” sent him a New Testament Bible. He was not, by his own admission, much of a church-goer himself, but he greatly appreciated the gesture. As it happened, he wrote this letter the day before the air raid on Pearl Harbor and was topside mailing it when the bombs began to fall. Considering that he was not strafed by a Zero during these opening moments of the war, some greater force was certainly looking out for him.

The Relevance: I am writing a chapter about Grandpa’s neighborhood during the 1920s and 1930s and, more broadly, community life during that era. I am hoping to paint a vibrant picture of what these neighborhoods were like.

It is difficult to imagine in 2020 how important community churches were a hundred years ago. With megachurches on one end of the scale and an increasingly non-religious population on the other, it is easy to forget that churches were once centers of neighborhood activity. They were not simply places of worship: they provided social programs, charity, language instruction, opportunities for neighbors and congregants to bond, and sometimes even schooling and child care. They also gave their neighborhoods a strong sense of identity. Therefore, Rose Luckett’s church could tell us a lot about her, about Elmer, and about their little corner of the city.

The Rabbit Hole: Historians (myself included) often romanticize the dustier places where we do our work. Some of my favorite horse stealing research stories involve traveling to remote courthouses in Nebraska and digging through back rooms, attics, and in one case a storage shed for 140-year old documents. However, the advent of the Internet, personal computing, and research databases have revolutionized historical work, making it possible to find out much more in much less time. So, instead of flying to Saint Louis and pulling out a bunch of local city directories, I went to Newspapers.com (where I have an account) and started searching. One of the reasons why I had to start here: St. Louis has a LOT of Trinity Churches.

There are several “Trinity” churches in Saint Louis, including seven within a five-mile radius of Grandpa’s address in 1941.

It did not take long to find an article containing both the name of the church and a “Reverend Stock.”

“Missouri Valley Synod Urges Protection of Civil Liberties,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 25 Apr 1953

“Paul R. Stock of Trinity Church.” Now we are getting somewhere. But during this first pass I missed an important detail: this church belonged to the Missouri Valley Synod of the Evangelical and Reformed Church. We’ll come back to that in a bit.

After some more full-text searching through the Saint Louis Post-Dispatch, I found an address for our church, and confirmed that Paul Stock was the Reverend there. It was located at 4700 South Grand Boulevard. That’s less than a mile away from Elmer’s home. Is that same building still there? Yes . . .

4700 South Grand Avenue, Saint Louis, MO. Taken from Google Maps Streetview.

But now it is a Mosque:

The sign out in front of 4700 South Grand Blvd. Taken from Google Maps Streetview.

There is some good news and some bad news. Obviously the bad news is that the church is no longer there. But the good news is that we can tie Rose Luckett’s church to a more recent historical narrative and connect it to the neighborhood’s ongoing evolution. In the early 1990s the Bosnian War displaced hundreds of thousands of refugees, and over 40,000 Bosnians moved to Saint Louis to start new lives in the American Midwest. I was in school in South Saint Louis County at the time, and I remember getting dozens of new Bosnian classmates over the next few years. This influx of migrants shifted the region’s demographics and reshaped its religious landscape, adding on top of what had already been a diverse array of churches and synagogues a layer of new mosques. Some built new facilities, while others took over older buildings vacated by aging congregations.

This recently-opened corner market in Affton, located only a few blocks from where I grew up, demonstrates how the Bosnian migration of the mid-1990s continues to shape South St. Louis. When I was 12 I used to ride my bike to this building, which at the time was a memorabilia shop. I bought hundreds of baseball cards there. Given the collapse of the baseball card market in the late-1990s a Bosnian market seems like a more prescient and successful choice for the area. Taken from Google Maps Streetview.

The decline of mainline Protestantism over the past several decades suggests that this is what likely happened here: the Trinity Church lost congregants and transplanted itself elsewhere, while this mosque moved into the larger building on Grand later. But that begs the question: whatever happened to the original church? This is where I realized I made a mistake easier by not understanding initially what the above article meant by the “Evangelical and Reformed Church.” I assumed (as someone who does virtually no church history) that this simply referred to an organization of Evangelical churches. Not so.

According to Wikipedia, “The Evangelical and Reformed Church (E&R) was a Protestant Christian denomination in the United States. It was formed in 1934 by the merger of the Reformed Church in the United States (RCUS) with the Evangelical Synod of North America (ESNA) . . . In 1957, the Evangelical and Reformed Church merged with the majority of the Congregational Christian Churches (CC) to form the United Church of Christ (UCC).”

The Trinity Church on South Grand Boulevard belonged to this larger denomination. But what organizations had merged to create it in 1934?

Again we go to Wikipedia, which can on occasion be a historian’s best friend. The Evangelical Synod of North America was “centered in the Midwest, the denomination was made of German Protestant congregations of mixed Lutheran and Reformed heritage, reflecting the 1817 union of those traditions in Prussia (and subsequently in other areas of Germany).” As for the Reformed Church in the United States, we get a similar story: “Originally known as the German Reformed Church, the RCUS was organized in 1725 thanks largely to the efforts of John Philip Boehm, who immigrated in 1720. He organized the first congregation of German Reformed believers near Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, some of them descendants and German immigrants from the turn of the century.”

What does all of this mean?

The Answer: First, some background information: Rose Luckett was German. Her parents immigrated to the United States in approximately 1888, and Rose was born shortly thereafter. Rose’s sister, Frieda (Aunt Frieda in the letters) was actually born in Germany. But their parents died not long after immigrating here, and Frieda ultimately helped raise her younger sister.*

By the 1930s, Rose and her family lived in Carondelet, a largely German neighborhood at that time. Given the origins of the denomination and the neighborhood itself, we can start to make some suppositions about Trinity Church and the role it played in Rose’s life. For instance, according to grandpa his mother spoke at least some German, and presumably the church also claimed as members other folks within the German-speaking community. All this suggests that the institution played a central role in the Carondelet German community’s everyday life, and that Rose was a part of it.

Unfortunately, to confirm this we need more information about the church, which I do not yet have. So now we need to move in the other direction: did the Trinity Church close its doors, or did it move? If it closed then it would be very difficult to gather information on it. The church’s records might have ended up in an archive someplace, in someone’s basement, or, regrettably, in the trash. However, if it moved then we may be in luck. Protestant churches generally do a fantastic job of curating their own histories. While they might not always have tranches of archival documents, they often create anniversary brochures, yearbooks, commemorative histories, and other documents. So if the church moved, then the new location may have all of these materials on hand. To answer this question I went back to the original Wikipedia article: “In 1957, the Evangelical and Reformed Church merged with the majority of the Congregational Christian Churches (CC) to form the United Church of Christ (UCC).”

Is there a Trinity United Church of Christ in South Saint Louis? As it turns out, there is:

From http://www.trinityuccstl.org

This church has the same name, is over 120 years old, was once located on South Grand, has moved in recent years, belongs to the appropriate denomination . . . this must be it! The best part, at least for me, is that the church relocated to my hometown, Affton, a suburb just outside of St. Louis City proper and less than five miles away from where Grandpa grew up (it was one of the seven “Trinity”-named churches I pointed out earlier as existing within a five-mile radius of Eiler Street). In fact the building is located less than a block from where my fourth-grade babysitter, Sharon, lived. I grew up a mile and a half away.

The Follow-Up: This is not the end of the story, but the beginning of a new rabbit hole. I need to contact the church and get a hold of any historical documents, pamphlets, brochures, yearbooks, or anything else it might have, and I will need to delve back into the newspapers and some other potential repositories to flush this story out. At one point after Pearl Harbor Rose gave a speech at this church – what did she say? How many people attended? I’d love to have this information. But in the meantime, we have a promising lead, and a little more insight into not only Grandpa’s world at the time the war started, but also my own.

I enjoy writing, and teaching is always a lot of fun. But the best part of it all is the detective work. No doubt this project will have many more twists and turns as it develops, and I will try to write about some of them. Stay turned.

* I think this is what happened, but I’m not sure. I’d love for someone in the family to clarify this.

Next Entry:
January 1942: Adjusting to a New Reality

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