Next family history destination: Zion Lutheran Church

Last updated on: February 12, 2017 at 10:00 pm by Jane the Actuary

Next family history destination: Zion Lutheran Church 2017-02-12T22:00:29-06:00 Jane the Actuary

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So the big fuss about the Budweiser commercial showing Adolphus Busch coming to St. Louis, overcoming all manner of trials and tribulations, got me thinking again about our prior genealogical research. Here’s what we’ve got so far:

Emilie Schwarz was born in Germany in 1858, but came to the U.S. in 1870, landed in St. Louis, and married Wilhelm Witkoetter in 1885. Unfortunately, he died of tuberculosis in 1887, after her first child, Theresa, was born in 1886. Her second child, Annie, was born just two months after Wilhelm died. She remarried, and had two more children, another Emilie, in 1890 and Lillie in 1892, as well, plus two girls, both named Rosa, who died in infancy, Her second husband, Edward Debush, died of TB as well, in 1897, and the 1900 census finds the family making a living by taking in laundry, with the older two girls having dropped out of school to work as well.

What happened to Annie and Lillie we don’t quite know, but the younger Emilie (also called Amelia) was my great-grandmother. She worked as a servant for a time, then married an Irishman (by way of Canada) who moved up to St. Louis from the south along with his widowed father, Richard Stapleton Jr. and Sr.; and her older sister married his father. The younger Richard later died in a motorcycle accident when my grandmother was a baby, and Amelia remarried, and her husband, my grandmother’s stepfather, who my mother remembers as a rather grumpy old man, was a mechanic at a factory according to census records. When we started doing this research and made the connection that my grandmother’s grandfather’s second wife was also her aunt, my mom said, “I guess that explains why we always had to go visit her!”

Of the Stapletons we know a reasonable amount, both due to census records and birth records here and in Canada, and due to connecting with an Ancestry.com family tree that extended what we knew. Well, OK, Richard Sr.’s first wife is a mystery — all we know is that her name was Elmina and she was born in Georgia.

But back to our story: there’s one bit that doesn’t fit. According to family history, Amelia called herself Amelia Witkoetter, not Amelia Debush. My mom only vaguely recognized the name “Debush” from gravestones she’d seen, nothing else. But she was born several years after Wilhelm Witkoetter died. Was she illegitimate, and Edward Debush came on the scene only afterwards? Was there some family conflict that led Amelia to reject the Debush name?

And besides which, Emilie Schwarz would have been 12 years old when she came from Germany. Who were her family, and what was their story?

That’s where Zion Lutheran Church comes in. It’s the church where all these generations of Witkoetters, Schwarzes and Debushes would have been baptized, confirmed, married, and on the membership rolls, and in my digging earlier this week I found out that the St. Louis library has on microfilm its records from exactly the time period in question. So now all I need to do is make my way to St. Louis and see what I can find. Are there membership rolls where Amelia is listed with her family when she was young? Baptismal records for the children? A marriage record or two?

Anyway, I’m all very curious about this. Anyone care to go to the St. Louis library for me?

Image: not a picture of Amelia. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3AEllis_island_1902.jpg; See page for author [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

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