Karel Vaclav Janovsky (1876 – 1962) emigrated from Bohemia at the age of 14. He used “Johns” as an Anglicized surname but over time (and likely due to finding the tight-knit Bohemian community in Chicago) used both names to the point that he hyphenated them on the family mausoleum. He married first wife Mary Theresa […]
10 November 1895 – 24 July 1915 The Eastland, one of five chartered excursion boats meant to ferry employees, their families and friends from Chicago over to the Michigan City shore for the annual Western Electric Company picnic, keeled over into the Chicago River while still at dock, trapping hundreds inside its hull and leading […]
15 May 1895 – 26 September 1918 As his headstone says, Alex was killed in action in the Argonne Forest. Devastatingly, the headstone says, “in World War,” his parents who’d had this inscription made unaware that they would both live to see a second one. Don and Bessie married in 1881 in Odessa – the […]
1 July 1864 – 21 February 1924 Annie was a teacher which is really the most surprising thing that I found in my research – that per early-century census records (and a couple other references in school-related documents at the time, mostly in lists), she had a husband, a child, and an occupation that she […]
This stunner was hard to get good shots of the day I was there just due to the time of day and angle of the sun, so I tried to get a lot of detail photos to make up for it. Peter Schoenhofen was a German immigrant who started a brewery in Chicago that became […]
3 September 1856 – 14 April 1924 Sullivan was a massively influential architect whose work was foundational in both the birth of the skyscraper and in the Chicago School of architecture. He was a mentor of Frank Lloyd Wright and inspired many of the architects who would later be known collectively as the Prairie School. […]
As it says over the door, the Balaban Mausoleum was built “In Memoriam to Ida Balaban Katz,” the sister of the founders of Balaban and Katz, the iconic movie palace moguls. The mausoleum was designed by Rapp and Rapp, the same architects who designed the Chicago Theater which still stands as a highly recognizable icon […]
Charles Walter Trogg 17 February 1869 – 24 July 1915 Catherine “Kate” Serowka Trogg 17 July 1884 – 24 Jul 1915 The Eastland, one of five chartered excursion boats meant to ferry employees, their families and friends from Chicago over to the Michigan City shore for the annual Western Electric Company picnic, keeled over into […]
This stunning monument marks the Cummings family plot in the Fairlawn section at Graceland. Patriarch Columbus R. Cummings (1834 – 1897) — another of the Gilded Age tycoons whose monuments dot the cemetery’s landscape — came to Chicago from New York as a young man and went to work for Potter Palmer (whose spectacular monument […]
27 February 1849 – 5 January 1900 Ernst is another one of those Victorian rags-to-riches stories that are inescapable in American folklore. He was born in Germany to poor parents who immigrated to hte US when he was a toddler. They first lived in Wisconsin and then moved to Chicago. His father made baskets and […]