DNA Evidence Points to Sophia Donner as our Great x3 Grandmother Schiller

Edyth's older sister, Leonor, put together a Grohndorff family tree in 1969. Here's what she had to say about her father's mother and grandmother:

"Great Grandmother was a Schiller. She married a Smith who died. Later she married an army officer. She came to the U.S. alone with her family of two boys and three girls, brought with her a complete dowry for each of her three daughters. (Grandmother’s linens were beautiful). Her children were Lizette, William, Fred, Caroline and Louise (all Smiths). Caroline Smith, my grandmother was born in Germany, October 20, 1841."

-- Leonor Grohndorff-Kroll, May 1, 1969

It wasn't a lot to go on, so Caroline's parents have appeared in our family tree only as "Smith" and "Schiller" from Germany, and the army officer has appeared simply as "unknown". But last year I had my DNA analyzed and compared against that of others interested in sharing research and getting in touch with estranged relatives. One such estranged relative was a fourth cousin descended from a "Schmidt" who lived in DePere, Wisconsin at the same time as Caroline. Comparing our research, we discovered that our great x2 grandmothers were sisters, and that the army officer their mother had married was Carl Donner.

Below are some subsequent discoveries:

From the manifest of the S.S. Raleigh, arriving in NY 12 June 1854, showing our great x3 grandmother, Sophie Schiller, her children (which includes our great x2 grandmother, Caroline Schmidt), and her second husband, Carl Donner. 

The 1860 U.S. Census for Woodville, Calumet County, Wisconsin, showing the Carl Donner family, which includes our 2nd and 3rd great grandmothers.

Headstone of our great x3 grandmother, Sophie Schiller (10 Jul 1811 - 21 Feb 1882), who died as Sophia Donner and is buried at Cady Cemetery in DePere, Wisconsin

Headstone of Carl Donner (1826-1894), the second husband of our great x3 grandmother. Buried at Cady Cemetery, DePere, Wisconsin

In 1861, Sophie's daughter Caroline married Carl Friedrich Grohndorff, the father of Edyth's father (and our dads' grandfather), William. We have no pictures of Caroline, but we do have pictures of her sister, Sophie (1840-1918), and of Sophie's husband, Joseph Bauer (1835-1910).

Our great x2 grandmother Caroline's sister, Sophie Schmidt Bauer

Sophie Schmidt's husband, Joseph Bauer.

Kathryn Dorothy Frederick, The Quiet Feminst

Katheryn Dorothy Frederick, is a 2nd cousin once removed. She was the daughter of Charles Friedrich's youngest son and Arthur's cousin, Ernst Alexander Friedrich ("the fighting parson" about whom I may be writing later) and his wife, Nina Vivian Hubbell (to whom the famous telescope seems to be distantly, if at all, related).

She's rather famous, which is unusual for our family, and her name appears in several biographical sketches of leaders of the women's rights movement. Considering our family's general anonymity, it's perhaps fitting that she was known as "The Quiet Feminist".

Kathryn Dorothy Frederick's senior class portrait at the University of Wisconsin, 1941

Here's one of her biographies I found online:

Kathryn Clarenbach, women's rights activist and educator, was born Kathryn Dorothy Frederick in Sparta, Wisconsin, on October 7th, 1920. Her father, Alexander Ernst Frederick, a Methodist minister, attorney, and state probation officer, served in the Wisconsin State Assembly from 1913 to 1916.

Her mother, Nina Vivian Hubbell, a high school graduate and a teacher before marriage, became a member of the local school board in the early 1920s. Kathryn Frederick and her three brothers were thus raised by parents who had both served in public office. She graduated from Sparta High School at the age of sixteen as the valedictorian of her class. Although her father urged her to major in education during college, she earned degrees in political science (B.A. 1941, M.A. 1942, Ph.D. 1946) from the University of Wisconsin at Madison, where, as she recalled, there were no female faculty in her department at the time. From 1942 to 1944 she worked in civil service for the War Production Board in Washington, D.C.

In 1946 she married Henry G. Clarenbach, a fellow graduate student in political science, and during the postwar years she focused on raising a family, as did many white middle-class women during that era; yet she was also actively involved in political and civic work. Kathryn Clarenbach first taught at Purdue University but left to join her husband, who was enrolled in a Ph.D. program at Columbia University in New York City, where the couple also worked on the 1948 presidential campaign of the Progressive candidate Henry Wallace. When her husband found full-time teaching positions in Michigan, Missouri, and New York, Clarenbach went with him, often teaching part time and engaging in volunteer work while raising three children born between 1949 and 1957. In Missouri during the 1950s she became a state board member of the League of Women Voters. The family eventually returned to Madison, Wisconsin, where she taught at Edgewood College in 1961 and served on the board of trustees of Alverno College, a Catholic women's college in Milwaukee.

By 1962 Clarenbach was hired to develop a program in continuing education for women at the University of Wisconsin-Extension, and it was then that she began to fully dedicate herself to feminist goals. She initiated extension courses for women who sought higher education and employment outside the home during an era when women's roles were still highly restricted. At a 1963 conference on professional opportunities for women, she met Esther Peterson, the director of the Women's Bureau in the U.S. Department of Labor, who had helped convince John F. Kennedy to establish the President's Commission on the Status of Women in 1961. Clarenbach then worked with Peterson and state women's organizations to persuade Governor John Reynolds to authorize, by 1964, the Wisconsin Commission on the Status of Women, which became the twenty-fifth of fifty such state commissions created during the 1960s. Clarenbach was appointed as the first chair of Wisconsin's commission, a position she held from 1964 to 1969 and again from 1971 to 1979. As chair, Clarenbach helped strengthen a network of activists--including women from labor unions, the professions, women's clubs, and civil rights organizations--in the effort to change state laws that discriminated based on sex. Under her leadership the commission eventually influenced new legislation in areas such as marital property, sexual assault, divorce, and pay equity.

Building on her early state-level experience, Clarenbach soon played a leading role in the emergence of a national women's movement. At the third national conference of state commissions on the status of women in 1966, Clarenbach and other conference attendees protested the failure of the federal government to enforce Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, specifically its provisions against sex discrimination in employment. When their concerns were dismissed Clarenbach and many other activists, including the writer Betty Friedan, the attorney Pauli Murray, and the labor organizer Dorothy Haener, formed the National Organization for Women (NOW) in 1966 as an independent advocacy group, which successfully launched significant legal challenges to gender bias.

Kathryn Frederick Clarenbach (left) was a founding member of the National Organization of Women (NOW)

As the chair of NOW's board, Clarenbach's skills in organizing and coalition building were instrumental, although Friedan, as NOW's president, attracted more media attention due to her celebrity as the author of The Feminine Mystique. Clarenbach recalled that her interactions with other NOW members convinced her to formally support the legalization of abortion, which NOW advocated beginning in 1967. Clarenbach and other members initially resisted including lesbian rights as part of NOW's agenda, and the organization did not officially endorse the issue until 1971, after she had stepped down as chair, although she eventually expressed support. She chaired NOW's board from 1966 to 1970 and later served as president of NOW's Legal Defense and Education Fund.

Clarenbach made other significant contributions to the national-level women's movement. In 1971 she was a founding organizer of the National Women's Political Caucus, along with the journalist Gloria Steinem and the congresswomen Bella Abzug and Shirley Chisholm, in the effort to increase the number of women in elected and appointed office. From 1970 to 1972 Clarenbach served as the first president of the National Association of Commissions for Women and helped prepare a handbook for commission members across the country, including advice on influencing the legislative process. She also served as deputy coordinator of the National Women's Conference in Houston, Texas, in 1977 in observance of International Women's Year.

Despite a growing backlash against the women's movement by the late 1970s, Clarenbach maintained her optimism and activism in the ongoing struggle for women's rights. After Governor Lee Dreyfus disbanded the Wisconsin Commission on the Status of Women in 1979, Clarenbach helped lead efforts to establish the Wisconsin Women's Council, a government entity that continued the work of the prior state commission beginning in 1983. She was an appointed member of that council for the rest of the decade and a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Extension until her retirement in 1988.

Kathryn Clarenbach, Professor of political science, University of Wisconsin

The U.S. senator Russell Feingold, who had served as a state senator with Clarenbach on the Wisconsin Women's Council, later declared regarding her long history of activism: "[In] the fight for women's equality she was a pioneer, an architect, a leader, and an inspiration to thousands" (Congressional Record, 10 March 1994). Clarenbach's efforts to create change through commission work, NOW, and the women's movement as a whole helped American women make effective strides toward equality. She died in Madison, Wisconsin, on March 4th, 1994

Clarenbach's papers are housed in the archives of the University of Wisconsin at Madison, where her extensive oral history is also available online. Clarenbach contributed to several publications that grew out of state commission studies, such as Wisconsin Women and the Law (1989). She co-edited, with Edward L. Kamarck, The Green Stubborn Bud: Women's Culture at Century's Close (1987), which includes an introduction by Betty Friedan. Accounts of Clarenbach's activism at both the state and national level can be found in Gerda Lerner, Living with History/Making Social Change (2009), and Ruth Rosen, The World Split Open: How the Modern Women's Movement Changed America (2000). Clarenbach's early efforts on behalf of women's rights and her later influence on the women's movement are explored by Kathleen Laughlin, "Kathryn Clarenbach and the Wisconsin Commission on the Status of Women," Women and Social Movements in the United States 13, no. 2 (Sept. 2009). An obituary appeared in the New York Times, 10 Mar. 1994.

Carol F. Cini
http://www.anb.org/articles/15/15-01353.html;
American National Biography Online April 2014.
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Edyth's Houses Part 3 - 7712 Golden Given Road

The 1949 Tacoma City Directory has Arthur and Edyth living at 7011 McKinley Avenue, a short distance from the large lot they'd recently purchased on Golden Given Road. Construction may have already started on Edyth's third, and final, house, and the only one which we, the grandchildren, ever experienced first hand.

From the 1949 Tacoma City Directory

In the 1951 Tacoma City Directory, we find all three of the boys married and with places of their own. Richard & Kathleen are in the Hilltop neighborhood, Walker & Fern (aka "Andy") are over by Wright's Park, and David & Jeanette are back in the neighborhood they'd all grown up in, near the CPS campus where Arthur was still working. And, Arthur and Edyth have moved into their new home at 7712 Golden Given Road.

From the 1951 Tacoma City Directory

Edyth was looking for land, and plenty of it, for her third house. The house they were currently living in, at 3219 N 33rd, sat on an unusually large lot with plenty of room for gardening. But the house was absurdly large, especially now that their tenant had been evicted (the Russian carpenter, about whom there will, perhaps, be more later), and the boys were all grown. It sat on a steep slope with a northern exposure which provided too little sun for Edyth's tomatoes and sweet peas. Besides, she hadn't yet exhausted her architectural ambitions.

There were undeveloped lots south and east of the Tacoma city limits that were large enough -- 125 feet wide and as much as 1000 feet deep -- in an unincorporated part of Pierce County lying between Tacoma and Puyallup. The area known as Midland (so named for being roughly the midpoint of the trolley line that used to run between Tacoma and Puyallup) claims Ezra and Oliver Meeker as its founding fathers. The lot that Arthur and Edyth purchased lies a little to the northwest of their combined claims which were staked out in 1855. Ezra Meeker is one of the Northwest's most celebrated pioneers, having been largely responsible for gaining national recognition of the Oregon Trail, which he'd followed as a young man west from Iowa. Memorials now line the route he (and thousands more) followed from Council Bluffs to Portland and Puget Sound.

Ezra Meeker, Midland's most celebrated resident

Midland, Washington, showing Arthur and Edyth's property and the original Meeker claims

The property is a long and narrow trapezoid, 125 feet wide and 725 feet deep on its longest edge, and extends from Golden Given Road west to the railroad tracks.

Arial view of 7712 Golden Given Road

I was always curious where the tracks led. Tracing their path on a map, I found that they run from downtown Tacoma south to their terminus in Morton. It would be scenic ride, meandering through the foothills of Mt Rainier National Park, skirting Lake Kapowsin and the northern shore of Alder Lake as it winds its way to Morton, just east of Mossy Rock on Highway 12. In fact, The Mt. Rainier Scenic Railroad currently leases the line from Eatonville to Morton, and runs excursions between Elbe and a locomotive and logging museum at Mineral. A century ago, the Tacoma Eastern was running two trains daily from downtown Tacoma to Mt. Rainier on the same tracks.

Early 20th century ad for the Tacoma Eastern. The Paradise Valley Route ran on the tracks behind the house.

The Milwaukee Road purchased the line from The Tacoma Eastern Railroad in 1910 and ran passenger service between Chicago and Tacoma until 1961. I remember the old brick building (long since demolished) on the south side of Interstate 5 in Fife, isolated on a long stretch of track, advertising "The Milwaukee Road" in red neon. It made me want to travel, to see the world, and it's nice to know that its tracks ran through the woods behind grandma's house.

The Milwaukee Road owned the tracks from 1910 to 1961. Tacoma Rail and Sound Transit now operate on the same tracks. 

For her third house, Edyth switched from American Colonial to Craftsman. It was built of stacked timbers, much like a log house, but rather than using full logs or square timbers, she chose a combination of half-sawn logs and dimensional lumber. The uprights, spaced every eight feet, probably provided additional stability.

There were four bedrooms (Edyth had designated a bedroom for each of her fully-grown boys), two bathrooms, 2500 square feet of floor space, a 500 square-foot detached garage for the car Arthur would need to get to work and back, and a 200 square-foot tool & garden shed. The southern exposure and the low sloping roof of its front porch kept it shaded in the summer and dry in the winter -- which couldn't be said of the colonnaded porch of her previous house with its 30 foot-high roof and northern exposure onto Commencement Bay.

The half-floor upstairs under the dormer was meant to be Richard's and David's rooms, but it was left unfinished. 

On the back of this photo, Edyth has written that the two doors opened onto Walker's room and "the old man's". Walker's room, on the left, eventually became Edyth's.

Construction was largely finished by the summer of 1950. Arthur and Edyth's first grandson, Steven Richard, was born in September.

Edyth and Kathleen, summer 1950. Kathleen is pregnant with Edyth's first grandson, Steven Richard.

The large sandstone fireplace in the living room had a stepped hearth and bench with a recessed niche for drying wet boots. The hardwood floors were made of broad, oak boards of various widths and pegged to the sub-floor with walnut dowels. The walls and ceiling were tongue-and-groove knotty-pine, the the exposed roof joists and rafters were finished and held together with strong iron brackets.

There was no better place for Christmas. Steve and Kathleen, 1952

Edyth, me, and my other grandma, summer 1956.

Edyth, Steve, Karlin and Mike, watching TV, about 1957.

Christmas 1961 with the cousins.

Summer 1961, Steve, Mike, Greg and Jennifer on grandma's bench swing

Summer 1963. Mike.

Summer 1963. Steve, Grandma's favorite, on the split rail fence.

Carl Ludwig Grohndorff's Wives

Recently I came across a passenger list from 1882 that apparently has our third great grandfather Grohndorff returning from Hamburg (via Glasgow) with his third wife and step daughter, Wilhelmine and Martha Stezner. I'm reasonably certain it's them. There aren't many Carl Ludwig Grohndorffs in the world, and fewer still who were living in Appleton, Wisconsin. The German purser heard the name as "Abliton, America", but that's close enough for me.

Passenger list for the 22 April 1882 sailing of the North Star out of Hamburg, with Carl Ludwig, Wilhelmine and Martha Grohndorff

It's an intriguing artifact. A transatlantic crossing was an arduous undertaking, even for a young man, and Carl was in his 80's at the time. Wilhelmina was about 40, and I'm guessing she had family business to attend to -- perhaps a dying parent or an estate to settle. I may learn more from their passport applications or emigration papers, if they ever turn up.

We know very little about Wilhelmina, other than that she was born in 1836 to Gottlieb and Eva Mahn, probably in Germany, and that she married a man named Stezner who died sometime before she and Carl Ludwig Grohndorff married in 1876. It's from great aunt Leonor Grohndorff that we learn she was widowed, and that she had a daughter who used to visit at her grandmother's house. That the daughter's name was Martha we get from this passenger list, and the rest we get from Wilhelmina and Carl's marriage record.

Carl Ludwig's first wife, by the way, was our third great grandmother. She died before he emigrated with his his second wife, Caroline Johanne Meyer, and their son, Carl Friedrich (our great-great grandfather) in 1854. Carl Friedrich's emigration papers give his name as Carl Friedrich Wagner/Grohndorff, so I've assumed that his mother's maiden name was Wagner. But it's also possible that Wagner was her name from a previous marriage, which could mean that our second great grandfather was a Wagner by birth and that Carl Ludwig Grohndorff was his stepfather. If that hunch leads me anywhere, I'll be sure to post it.

Carl Ludwig's second wife, Caroline Johanne Meyer, might be related to the Meiers of Zorndorf, which could make for some interesting tangles in our family tree. Currently, I know only that she was born about 1800, that she emigrated with Carl from Cocceji-Neudorf in 1854, and that she died in Wisconsin in 1875. Meyer could be a married name. If she had children by that marriage, and any of her children emigrated, I may be able to learn more from their records.

Carl Ludwig died in 1887, just five years after returning from Hamburg. He was 87. I don't know what became of Wilhelmina and her daughter. Presumably she remarried. Martha, we know, kept in touch with her step-brother, but she, like her mother, hasn't left an obvious paper trail.

I'm still searching.

Edyth's Houses Part 2 - 3219 N 32nd St

At the end of the alley behind their house at 3202 N 33rd Street in Tacoma was a large wooded lot that Edyth had probably had her eye on since she and Arthur moved there in 1936. They had no doubt seen the property while they were still in the market, and may have even considered building there instead. The trees would have appealed to Edyth, and the steep ravine of Puget Creek was already a city park and unlikely to ever be developed. In fact, the adjacent land west and north of the property has since become a protected natural area, which would have made Edyth very happy.

Having a skilled carpenter (William Zaytzef) as a lodger probably factored into their decision to start building again, and no doubt the improvements they'd made to their current property enabled them to borrow what they needed to get started. It was a lot of land, twice as big as their current lot, though the northern half was steep terrain and unsuitable for building. Two adjacent parcels on the western edge were undeveloped and were likely to remain so. With Puget Park and what would become the Puget Creek Natural Area to the north and west, the property appears almost boundless.

Satellite view of Edyth's first house, at 3202 N 33rd Street (left), and the large wooded lot at 3219 N 32nd where her second house was built in 1941

Topographic and street plats of the properties at 3202 N 33rd and 3219 N 32nd, Tacoma

The lot wasn't empty when Arthur and Edyth purchased it, and the original house, really nothing more than a tar paper shack, turns up in a few of the construction photos.

The simple house that had originally occupied the property was left standing through most of the construction. This is the best view we have of it. Our vantage is northward from what will become the grand, colonnaded porch.

Unlike the house at 3202 N 33rd, we do have several pictures of this house's construction. It was a major undertaking. The house is enormous, nearly 5000 square feet, with seven bedrooms and three bathrooms. It was big enough for everyone, including Arthur, to have rooms of their own, with two additional bedrooms for guests and lodgers (or perhaps a footman and an upstairs maid). It's hard to know what Arthur's role in all this was. He was, to me, a man of few needs. He seemed happy with a small room that contained only his bed, his writing desk, his books, his tennis racket (thanks to cousin Heidi for that detail) and, later, a small black & white television set. The boys would have been happy with the tar paper shack the house replaced, and would be spending most of their time in the woods leading down to Puget Creek, and (if the stories are true) skinny-dipping from the piers and pilings of the Dickman Mill.

David and Richard (and an unknown but a very clean carpenter) by the east foundation wall

Framing of the first floor, looking south from the N 33rd St side.

Construction of second floor, looking east. The house at 3202 N 33rd would, if visible, be in the upper left.

The roof line of the original house is visible through the opening, looking north from the side of the house that faces N 32nd Street. The opening on the left will be a recessed porch.

The western wall with the second story framed up. Note the old clothesline from the original house in lower left.

N 32nd Street side, looking northwest.

N 33rd Street side, looking southeast.

The architect, Edyth Grohndorff, apparently happy with the progress.

Construction was completed in 1941, and the 1942 Tacoma City Directory has the family at their new address: 3219 North 32nd Street. One day I'll work up the ambition to pay the current owners a visit and see the house for myself. I should also try to dig up the construction documents, if they were archived, as well as the sales contracts, tax records, etc. We were told that the house even got a write-up in the Tacoma News Tribune, and one day I'll have to make the necessary trip to the Tacoma Public Library to find it.

But for now, all I have is what I've been able to gather online, some old pictures, and the one memory my mother had of the house: that Richard's bedroom was under the dormer on the third level -- information which she was quick to add had come to her second-hand.



The house before the yard was landscaped

Some landscaping was still being done in 1946.

The colonnaded porch

Edyth held nothing back. The ceiling in the entry is as high as the columns on the front porch or, more accurately, the back porch; the street address is on N 32nd, on level with the roof line, and the colonnaded porch looks out in the direction of N 33rd, some 50 feet below. Access is from the alley between N 32nd and N 33rd and the house sits inconspicuously at its dead end, hidden behind trees, which seems a shame. Its grandeur was, I suppose, an affirmation of Edyth's ego, her need leave some sort of legacy. Her father was the only son of an only son, and Edyth's siblings were all girls with no interest in raising families of their own. If the Grohndorffs of De Pere, Wisconsin were to leave a mark, Edyth may have found herself alone with the means, and the talent, to achieve it.

The boys all grew to be men in this house, and by the time Edyth began work her third and final house in 1949, they'd all left pretty much left home.

Richard, on the slope leading down to the house from N 32nd Street.

Richard and Walker

Edyth

Richard in the alley  which leads to the house  between N 32nd and N 33rd Streets.

Richard, kicking up some dust. I think each of the boys had their own motorcycles for a awhile. 

The alley, as it looks today (2016)

The house, as it looks today (2016)