Emma Wedde Kramp
24 August 1877 (unknown) – 27 February 1905 (Chicago)
Richard Otto Kramp
5 August 1878 (Michrow, Prussia) – May 1964 (Chicago)
Emma L. Giese Raum Kramp
3 August 1877 (Chicago) – 9 December 1935 (Chicago)
This is the kind of discovery I love as a researcher, even though the discovery is pretty much just for me. There do not appear to be any descendants I can share this information with of any of the involved parties, though perhaps someone doing a larger family genealogy will discover that their great aunt or uncle had a more complex life than they’d known about.
It was finding this headstone that cracked this fascinating genealogical mix-up. Honestly I wish these were my relatives just because discovering this would have been such a coup. Hopefully my notes on findagrave.com will come in handy to someone related to them someday.
Richard Otto Kramp and Emma Wedde married in 1903 but had less than two years together before Emma passed away in 1905. About a year and a half later in 1906, Richard remarried to another Emma who was, like him, widowed: Emma Giese Raum. They had almost thirty years together before she too died. By the time of her death, Richard’s parents had passed away, and Emma II was interred with them. Richard joined her there almost another thirty years later, without having remarried for a third time, as far as I can tell.
This headstone sits right on the edge of the Bussert family lot. I don’t think there was any familial connection to the Busserts (whom I recently featured on my Instagram), but perhaps they all knew each other and the Busserts offered a space on their family lot to the grieving widower.
The confusion of the records I’ve seen — both information suggested by ancestry.com’s algorithm and in someone’s family tree (on which Richard and a composite single Emma are a little offshoot) comes I think from the fact that Emma II’s public records have her maiden name (Giese) but her marriage record to Richard has her first husband’s last name. The Raum marriage didn’t come up organically in search because the birthdates of the two Emmas apparently confuse the algorithm and even though the 1903 marriage certificate has the wrong maiden name, based on all other public records for Emma II, it’s easy I think to dismiss this as some kind of transcription error.
Because I had the two headstones, though, I knew there were two Emmas so I went specifically in pursuit of a marriage record for Emma II and Richard with a different last name, working from the theory that since there wasn’t one for Kramp and Giese, she might also have been married before. And that’s how I discovered Emma Giese’s first husband Gustav E. Raum, whom she married in 1896. He passed away in 1904, so when Emma II married Richard, her name on the marriage certificate was Raum.
Richard and Emma II are buried together with Richard’s parents in Section 6. They do not appear to have had any children together or with their first spouses. Emma II’s first husband is buried at Forest Home. Emma I is buried in Section 9 of Concordia.
RIP Emmas and husbands
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