A few years ago, a kind soul reached out to me through Find A Grave, asking if I was interested in the death notice for my ancestor’s second husband, Frederick Kunz. I was putting together an extensive report on this branch of the family, so the timing was great. What was especially lovely was that he offered to translate the obituary from Fraktur German into English, which I’ve done before, but it is a laborious process for me, so this was a huge help. I haven’t even begun to try to find these ancestors in the German newspapers they most likely read.

Fred was a native of Switzerland, born in 1840, and immigrated to St. Louis, Missouri, about 1870. The following year he married Eleonore (Wissig) Roth, a widow with three children. They had four girls over the following 10 years. Fred had lots of different jobs over the years, working as a watchman, as a grocer, and a water proof oiler, among other things.

His obituary provides interesting details about his life and death. On the day of his death, he was attending evening services at his church on Montgomery Street. The congregation was in the middle of singing “Nearer, My God to Thee” when Fred, singing in his “good baritone voice,” “suddenly fell over and lay motionless.” At first the others in the congregation thought he had fainted. Once the doctor arrived, he “could only confirm that life had escaped.” Fred died a couple months before his 63rd birthday on 7 June 1903.

The other bit of information is that Fred appears to have been married before he came to America, which wasn’t known before. Those surviving him included his “widow, two children from his first marriage and three children from his second marriage, but he was predeceased by “four children from his first marriage and one from his second marriage.” Not included in the obituary were Eleonore’s two living daughters and a son who died about 10 years earlier. These children were between 6 and 12 when their mother married Fred and may have been the only father the younger children knew.

The funeral was held the following Thursday so there was time for his children to arrive in St. Louis. Fred’s three daughters from his second marriage were still living in St. Louis in 1903. Since all his surviving daughters from his second marriage were in St. Louis in 1903, this seems to indicate that some of Fred’s children from his first marriage were also in the United States.

Sources:
“Sudden Death in a Church,” Westliche Post, 9 June 1903, p. 7, col. 5; image copy, Newspapers (https://www.newspapers.com/image/640929159); translation by Find A Grave contributor John Stoutimore.
Flake, MLIS, CG, “Eleonore, Auguste, and Eleanor: A Matrilineal Descent from Germany to the United States,” Kinship Determination Project, p. 11-17; held by the author.