Rudolph John Adolph Riep 6 March 1882 – 21 May 1916 (aged 34) Rudolph was born in Chicago to German immigrant parents and was one of only four siblings of ten to survive childhood. His father worked at a lumber yard in the early years after arriving in the US, but eventually he became a […]
12 September 1899 – 24 July 1915 This is the first in what will be an ongoing series of posts documenting the graves of Eastland Disaster victims in Chicago area cemeteries. Ella was a fifteen-year-old telephone inspector working for the Western Electric Company when she was killed in the Eastland Disaster. She’d been employed for […]
15 July 1891 – 25 October 1918 Louis Katzel was the second oldest and oldest surviving child of Franz and Berta (Wendt) Katzel, German immigrants who both arrived in 1881 but who did not marry each other until 1888. Louis grew up as a comfortable, middle-class American boy in Oak Park. His father worked as […]
22 March 1923 – 22 September 2007 I visited Père Lachaise in March of 2008 which was just a few months after M. Marceau had passed away. His headstone was not yet ready, but his grave was covered in flowers and other mementos left by mourners. (In regards to the note in the photo with […]
Edwin J Stubbs 22 April 1867* – 9 April 1934 (at University Hospital in Augusta, Georgia) (The Honorable E.J. Stubbs, Knight of St. Gregory) Alma Piratsky Stubbs 11 January 1876* – 20 January 1959 (date of internment; could not find an exact date of death) The youngest surviving child of a British-born father Robert J. […]
3 November 1905 – 9 May 1919 Charley Pochik was the youngest of three named children of Joseph and Elizabeth (Sebysten) Pochik, immigrants from Austria-Hungary. Joseph immigrated at the age of 31 in 1896 and Elizabeth immigrated at the age of 21 in 1900; the two married two years later in April 1902. They had […]
5 April 1881 – 23 April 1962 Fannie was born in Latvia a few years before the “Russification measure” began in 1887. In January of 1905, Russian army troops opened fire on demonstrators in Riga, killing 73 and injuring another 200 people. A revolution also took place in the Baltic region that same year. It’s […]
11 June 1847 (Aldeburgh, Suffolk) – 5 August 1929 (London) Millicent Garrett Fawcett was a leader in the women’s suffrage movement in England, heading up the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies (NUWSS), but most Americans, at least, won’t have heard of her. I consider myself not a scholar of the UK and US suffragist […]
11 September 1870 – 2 June 1928 The story of John Lavezzorio was fairly easy to discover as his death was written up in the Chicago Tribune, and unfortunately it is a tragic one. Lavezzorio was born in Genoa, Italy, to a family of laborers but was brought to Chicago by his father at the […]
Captain, Chicago Fire Deparment 26 January 1849 – 19 December 1903 This fantastic headstone is in the middle of its section – a tree stump hidden in a forest of headstones — and I didn’t spot it after all these years of visits until just this past week. At first glance, it looks like just […]