Lizzie Singelmann, a.k.a. Catherine Mauer

According to my father, his grandmother Catherine was a very unpleasant woman. He wouldn't be surprised if she'd run her husband Charles into the grave, and he also felt like the reason his mother died early was that she not only lived there but also completely dominated the household. She had a feud with his Uncle Roy, a doctor, and as a result Roy could not come over and give reasonable medical advice to his sister, my dad's mother. Verna passed away early, before I was born.

But not Catherine; she lived to be 92 and didn't die until after they had moved to Des Moines. By then she had actually sued Roy. My dad says that their feud was over handling of Union Pacific stock, but there's no telling what the lawsuit was about. The lawsuit was in 1943, before they moved to DM, while what happened to the Union Pacific was no doubt much earlier, possibly 1932 when a UP dividend made national news but teased them into thinking the depression was over, when in fact it had just barely begun.

So I went into studying her life with the questions of what made her so unhappy? Or why would she at least appear this way to my dad? There are some clues in her life and I invite the reader to help me sort them out.

She grew up in a household of two parents and four sisters; she was the third. Second was Ida Louise, first was Lucinda Ana, and the last one was Mattie, somewhat of an enigma. Having two names and using the middle one more was somewhat common and that could be the only reason that Elizabeth Catherine came to prefer Catherine after a lifetime of being known as Lizzie, but more about that later. She and Louise were close in age, but Louise was slightly older, while Mattie was a good bit younger and only appeared in one census, 1880, at which time she was 4. I found no death notice, no trace of her after that.

This was on an Illinois farm just outside of Rockford, in a rich valley along the Rock River, a very pretty part of the state. Her parents, John and Kate Geishart Singelmann, were both German immigrants but had married there in Ogle County. John (1832) was older than Kate (1841) and both are hard to find in various records. There is a ship passage for John, who seems to have come througn New York in June 1858, and identified himself as from Altona, Holstein. Kate was from Saxmingian (sp?) and was also known as Yershiert. If they married in Ogle County, does that mean they met there? And if so, is there any evidence of Kate's family or a group that she could have come over with?

What I found was that Ogle County was not a huge overly-German place. They had a small plot in a thoroughly mixed valley and there were other Germans around, but there was not a predominance of Germans or a large group from one area.

Somehow the whole crowd, with the exception of Mattie, who disappeared, ended up out in Minden, Iowa, out by Council Bluffs. I have found no clue about how or when they moved, or why. All three of the older girls married in Minden, with Louise marrying first in 1889, Lizzie marrying Charles Mauer in 1891, and Ana marrying a Young in 1893. The parents, John and Kate, died in the Council Bluffs area but I could not find whether they had brought the three girls west (or Mattie too?) or whether they only came later, after everyone had settled.

Louise married a kind of go-getter guy, had six children (three of each) with one going to Univ. of Iowa law school and moving off to Washington DC to work for the feds. She died wealthy after her husband, Louis Mischler, passed away. Perhaps Lizzie was jealous of her. Perhaps they knew something about what had happened to Mattie.

Catherine married Charles Mauer, and he was somewhat tragic. He had worked at a hardware store, in a partnership, for many years, but in 1921 became a pioneer in what he called a "checkless store," where customers checked themselves out and saved money. It was a radical idea, now being implemented by ALDI, but at the time it didn't go over so well. By 1926 he was a traveling something-or-other for Ney Manufacturing, and died while he was on the road, in Watertown S.D., at the age of 59. It's possible that Elizabeth (Catherine) had driven him into the grave but if so, she was just coming into a depression in which people really needed each other. My father was born in 1927, the following year, so never met him. If I had known this before today I would have told everyone self-checkout was doomed from the start and my great grandfather proved it (in his own small way, in Council Bluffs).

Ultimately she moved in with Verna, but not right away, I don't think. The depression was horrible and lasted from 1929 to about 1940, by which time my father was thirteen, still too young to join up. They were by 1943 in Des Moines,

Why did my father have such a negative view of her? I'm not sure. It shows me that some families have trauma in them that you might never know without being there, and still might never know. It is not easy to find information about this crowd, the German immigrants in Iowa. For one thing, they seemed to get their names spelled differently every time they opened their mouth. And there were several or a half-dozen legitimate ways to spell each name. And this goes for Singelmann, Mauer, and Catherine.

Speaking of her name change, though, she had a right to use it, since it was her middle name, and her mother's before her mother died. But there was another Catherine Mauer in the valley. That one had married Charles' older brother Calvin, and had several kids, including twins, and had stayed in Minden. Was she competitively trying to own a name that was hers? It seems to me it would have been easier to stick with Lizzie.

More to come later. These are still open questions, and with poorly-functioning computers I may never be able to answer them all. My good fast computer has broken a-key, s-key, z-key, 1-key, it's not recovered from some spill a ways back. This one has all the keys but keeps shutting off, overloaded and ancient. I can't win. I've stopped chatting on them or even writing reviews, and instead spend my days researching the German farmers in the family.

Living through two wars with Germany I'm sure wasn't easy. Then to have a huge depression heaped on top of that, in between, would be very difficult. It's hard not to hold it against her, suing her own son and not letting him with his medical advice into the house. He, Uncle Roy, was somewhat of a specialist in vericose veins and had taken up with the Creighton medical school. But he was also prickly himself; once his wife sued him for divorce, because he'd told her she would "either go back to work or starve." Who knows what that was all about, but hey, it was the depression. Could have been anything.

My father wouldn't know, because he never got to meet his Uncle Roy.