Emilie Mantay Notdke

December 1930

mantay family plotThis is an odd one, and from the sparse information I have been able to find, I think there was likely a fairly dramatic backstory.

Emilie Mantay is buried alone with her birth and death dates clearly marked and the inscription memorializing her as a dear sister.

It appears however that she had been married to Gottlieb Nodtke, a man eight years her senior whom she married when she was just 17 years old. They had at least one child together, and this little boy, who died shortly after his birth, is buried with his father just a few feet away.

Emilie’s husband pre-deceased her by a matter of months. Why she isn’t buried with him and her child is unclear. There is space for her name on their headstone, but instead she is buried under her maiden name with her own headstone and identified by her relationship to her birth family.

I suspect that perhaps Gottlieb was not a good husband, and the family wanted to pull her back into their safekeeping after her death. I also think that there probably weren’t any other surviving children (and there were none that I could find records for), so her family would have been able to reclaim her without impacting anyone still living.

At least that is my theory.

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