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Wednesday, March 11, 2015

(Not-So-) Wordless Wedding Wednesday: More on Frederick Massmann's Second Wife

It was bugging me that I couldn't find any more information about my paternal great-grandfather Frederick Henry Massmann's second wife, Ruth L. Metculf, who he married seven months before he died in 1948. So, I spent $16.75 to download the marriage record from the Cook County (Illinois) Clerk's Office Genealogy Online site:

As I'd hoped, this gave me a little more information.  Her name was, according to this, Ruth L. Metcalf, and she was (supposedly) 49 when the marriage was issued.  Both the county clerk and the priest who married them (at Our Lady of Lourdes [Catholic] Church at 4640 N. Ashland in Chicago, on March 30) list her as "Miss," indicating she's never been married.

So, with that data, I did some searching in Ancestry.com, FamilySearch.org, and FindAGrave.com, and was able to piece together this biography in just a couple hours:

Ruth Luella Metcalf was born August 31, 1898, in Des Moines County, Iowa (probably in Burlington), the second and last child and only daughter of Iowa natives James Edward "Ed" Metcalf and Louise/Louisa Lofstrom.

Ruth shows up in the 1900, 1910, 1920, and 1930 U.S. Censuses (and the 1915 and 1925 Iowa state censuses) in her parents' home at 1522 Grove Street in Burlington, Iowa.  The 1915 record says she is a Methodist.  In 1920, she is working as a saleslady in a hotel.  The 1925 record shows she attended college for one year.  The 1930 Census shows she is working as a saleslady in a retail drug store.

Sometime between 1930 and 1935, Ruth moved to Chicago.  On the 1940 Census, she is a lodger at 932 W. Cullom Avenue.  She had been unemployed for 13 weeks at the time the census was taken, but had previously worked as a typist at a department store.  That census also showed she was living in the same place (Chicago, but not the same address) on April 1, 1935.

Based on her older brother Raymond's obituary in the Burlington Hawkeye on December 17, 1965, she was still living in Chicago at that time, and had not remarried after my great-grandfather's death.  The Social Security death index says she died in July 1975.  She is buried in Aspen Grove Cemetery in Burlington, Ohio, in the same plot as her parents and Lofstrom grandparents, aunts, and uncles.


© Amanda Pape - 2015 - click here to e-mail me.

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