Ancestors

Mary Schulte

Mary Schulte, written Maria in the censuses, was born in Germany in the early months of 1852; the 1900 census says March, her Illinois death certificate says January 18, and her memorial gives March 9. Her father was John Schulte, born Germany, named on the certificate by her son Frank; her mother's name the son did not know. She married Casper Hemker, a German immigrant six years her senior, and by 1876 the couple were in St. Louis, where their four known children were born: Frank in 1876, Henry in 1879, Conrad in 1881 and Marie in 1885. The censuses of 1880, 1900 and 1910 carry the household through the south side of the city.

Her last decade was a widow's, and a hard one. Casper died in September 1917. Thirteen months later her son Henry, a St. Louis police officer, died at thirty-nine in the influenza of October 1918. In February 1920 her daughter Marie Starnes died at thirty-four in a St. Louis hospital. Of her four children, two were left.

In the spring of 1925 she was taken across the river to St. Vincent's hospital at Belleville, Illinois, paralyzed on one side by a stroke; the certificate counts her three months there. She died on the afternoon of Wednesday, June 10, 1925, aged seventy-three. Her body came back over the river to the Gebken chapel on Meramec Street, the undertaker who had buried her husband, her son and her daughter, and after a funeral at St. Anthony of Padua she was laid at Sts. Peter and Paul Cemetery beside Casper. The death notice in the St. Louis Star asked the papers of Fort Smith, Arkansas and Quincy, Illinois to copy.

If Mary Schulte is in your family, start your own tree.

Cite: Heirology, "Mary Schulte (1852-1925)", https://heirology.com/ancestors/mary-schulte-1852-1925-54ecf5.