Category: Everyday Lives
Molly Walovitz
19 September 1904 – 6 September 1922 Molly was the older of David and Sarah Shifrisa Walovitz’s two daughters. Sarah lost two other children prior to 1910. Molly died just two weeks’ shy of her 18th birthday. The family arrived in 1906 or 1907 or possibly both. On the 1910 census, Sarah and Molly are […]
Janovsky Johns Mausoleum
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 […]
Annie Ward Booth
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 […]
Charles and Catherine Trogg
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 […]
The Cummings Family
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 […]
Ernst Johann Lehmann
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 […]
Lucille R. Katz
31 December 1910 – 4 June 1926 Lucille was the middle daughter of three sisters (as well as having one living older brother and another older sibling who had died in infancy), and her headstone marks her as a deeply loved child whose family took special pains to commemorate. The Katz family plot is pretty […]
Galli Mausoleum
Joseph & Adelaide Mazza Galli Joseph (1874 – 1935) was a candymaker in the early decades of 20th Century Chicago. He was from Italy, and Adelaide (1874 – 1939) was born in Chicago to Italian immigrant parents. They married in 1894 and seem to have been partners in business as well as in life. In […]
William Charles Beutel
Victim of the Iroquois Theater Fire February 1869 – 30 December 1903 The Iroquois Theater Fire was and remains the deadliest theater fire and the deadliest single-building fire in US history (though if you count the World Trade Center as a fire, it is of course the deadliest). 602 people lost their lives in the […]