Emma Shirley
Emma Schroerlucke was born at Louisville, Kentucky, on 24 July 1868. Schroerlucke is a name from Westphalia, in Prussia, and English-speaking clerks never managed it: her own marriage was written Sherley, her son Charles's death certificate wrote Shirley, and his marriage license wrote Shrellakes.
In June 1870 she was two, living in the fifth ward of Louisville in the house of Herman Schroerlucke, forty four, a laborer in a foundry, born in Prussia. With them were his wife Mary, forty seven, also from Prussia, Maggie, twenty, born in Maryland, and Henry, eighteen, who worked in a lumber yard. Herman had come to America in 1849 and Mary in 1852.
Who her parents were is a question the records leave open. In 1900 Herman and Mary were living with Emma and called the father-in-law and mother-in-law of her husband, which makes them her parents in the census taker's eyes. But that same sheet gives Emma's mother's birthplace as Maryland, where Maggie was born, and Mary, who was born in Germany, said that only one of her four children was still alive. When Emma died, her death certificate named her mother as Margaret Schrelucke of Louisville and her father as unknown.
On 22 July 1886, two days before her eighteenth birthday, she married Harry K. Finley at Louisville. Their son George was born that August. Clarabel followed in 1890, Kellum in 1893, Charles on 2 March 1894, Margaret in 1896 and Emma in 1899. All six were alive in 1900. Harry was a plumber, and that year they rented a house in the eleventh ward, with Herman and Mary under their roof. Herman, by then a tobacconist, died in February 1901 and Mary in May 1904; both were buried in Eastern Cemetery without a stone.
In 1916 her son Charles married at Jeffersonville, Indiana, and in the early 1920s he moved his family to Sandusky, Ohio. Harry died at the City Hospital in 1922. In 1940 Emma was seventy one and living in Louisville with her son George.
She died at home at 1131 Cecil Avenue at six in the morning of 4 December 1940, a month after the onset of a coronary occlusion, aged seventy two. Her death notice called her the "beloved mother of George, Charles and Kellum Finley, Mrs. Clara Eddleman, Mrs. Margaret Watkins," with twenty one grandchildren and four great-grandchildren. The funeral was held at the house on 6 December, and she was buried in Evergreen Cemetery under a small granite stone reading EMMA FINLEY 1868 1940.
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Cite: Heirology, "Emma Shirley (1868-1940)", https://heirology.com/ancestors/emma-shirley-1868-1940-a0c605.