Henry Stackle
Henry Stackle was born May 17, 1850 at Zell, the German Catholic hamlet a few miles west of Ste. Genevieve, Missouri, the son of John Stoeckle and Magdalena, both born in Germany; his 1940 death certificate renders them John Stackley and Magdalena Raehm. He was fourteen when his father died in November 1864. The will, signed for the dying man by a neighbor's hand, named Henry third among the four children, Joseph, Francis, Henry and Catherine, with everything going first to their mother for her lifetime.
The land came down in undivided fourths, and Henry's signatures on the family deeds mark his coming of age: at twenty he took a share of his brother Francis's quarter, at twenty-one he joined in selling to his brother Joseph, and at thirty-three he and his wife signed with the surviving siblings one last time. In the fall of 1875 he married Mary Schmidt, both of them single, the certificate signed by Jos. Theod. Stein, the priest at New Offenburg, and filed with the county recorder that October. The 1880 census found them farming in Union Township, the township of the German villages, with four children under five in the house.
Nine of their children are known, born between 1876 and 1893: Joseph, Helen, Henry John, Mary Lee, Andrew, Sophia, Edward, Leo and August. Mary died sometime between 1893 and June 1900, when the census enumerated Henry a widower with eight children still in the house; Helen, the eldest daughter, had already married Andrew J. Operle at the town church in 1898.
He later married a second wife, Catherine, herself born a Schmidt in the county on July 4, 1850, and the censuses of 1920 and 1930 record the two of them keeping their own house in the town of Ste. Genevieve into old age. Catherine died of heat prostration in the furnace of early July 1931, two days short of her eighty-first birthday. Henry lived nearly nine years more, and died January 29, 1940 of chronic myocarditis, aged eighty-nine years, eight months and twelve days. The certificate answers the question of how long he had lived in the community with one word: life.
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Cite: Heirology, "Henry Stackle (1850-1940)", https://heirology.com/ancestors/henry-stackle-1850-1940-6d4866.