♀Anna Lucy Bosler

Anna Lucy Bosler (22 May 1860 – 28 October 1910) was a Kentucky-born farmer of DeWitt County, Illinois, and Clay County, Iowa, who, widowed at thirty-four, ran a general farm in her own name, recorded by the 1910 census as an employer. She was the grandmother of Ora Emogene Walrath (1925–2014), through her son Clarence Eugene Walrath (1878–1934).

Early life

Anna was born at Louisville, Kentucky, the daughter of Louis Oliver Bosler and Marie Viktor, who had married there in 1849; her obituary calls her the fifth of eight children. Her father signed his marriage bond “Alois Basler”, and the birth register of Rheinweiler, in Baden^W, records an Aloys, son of Aloys Basler and Magdalena Zähringer, born and baptized on 7 April 1825, the very day his obituary gives as his birth. In 1864 the family moved to DeWitt County, Illinois, near Farmer City. The 1870 census found Anna, aged ten, in DeWitt Township, in the household of her father, Louis Oliver Bosler, whom the census enters as Lewis Bosler, aged forty-five, a cabinet maker (his line closes one page and his wife and children follow on the next), with her mother and four of her brothers; fourteen dwellings away on the same enumerator’s round lived the Walrath family, including Nicholas Walrath, then twenty.

Marriage and widowhood

On 6 February 1877, in DeWitt County, Anna married Nicholas Walrath (1850–1895). The couple had eight children, born between 1878 and 1894, and lived in DeWitt County, where the household appears at DeWitt in 1880. Nicholas died on 5 February 1895, leaving Anna with eight children, the youngest a baby. The 1900 census recorded her at Creek Township, DeWitt County, as head of the household, farming and owning the farm, with four of her children at home.

Iowa

A local newspaper placed her still at Weldon, in DeWitt County, in January 1902, when her sister-in-law Mrs. Minnie Salisbury of Urbana spent several days visiting her. Some time after that she moved to northwest Iowa; by 1910 her eldest son Clarence and her daughter Jennie Mae were living at Linn Grove, and she was farming near Peterson, Clay County. The census that April listed her as a farmer on a general farm she owned, working as an employer, with four sons working the home farm as laborers and her youngest daughter, Nellie Ola, as its cook.

Death

According to her obituary, Anna had suffered from stomach and heart trouble for about three and a half years. On 22 October 1910 she signed her will at Storm Lake, Iowa, where her daughter Mrs. Meredith lived. She left a quarter share of the remainder each to her sons Stanford Pearl and Augustus Leroy, small sums to Clarence and to Elsie May, and $150 and “the organ now at my home” to Jennie Mae; the rest was divided among the three youngest. Her household goods went to the five children still at home, on condition that they “shall still be continuing to live together” when the estate was settled; otherwise the goods were to be divided among all eight. The clause described her household as it was: the census six months earlier shows exactly those five children living with her.

On 27 October she traveled to Chicago with her daughter Mrs. Koons. She was operated on there the next day and died at 5:45 that afternoon, 28 October 1910, at the age of fifty. Her daughter and her brother George Bosler took her body back to Farmer City, and she was buried on 30 October in McCord Cemetery beside her husband, under a joint headstone that gives both their dates. Her will was proved in Clay County on 24 January 1911, with W. C. Edson as executor.

The family

Augustus Leroy Walrath (1882–1986) married for the first time on 17 September 1958 in Martin County, Minnesota, at the age of seventy-six. His bride was Leona A. Eads, who was born in 1909.

Notes

Her obituary says she moved to Iowa in 1901, but the January 1902 newspaper notice has her still living in DeWitt County, so the move came later than the obituary states. The Cook County death index describes her as a married housewife; both the 1900 and 1910 censuses record her as a widow and a farmer. Her Illinois marriage appears in the indexes under “Anna J. Bosler”; her obituary opens with “L. Anna Bosler”, and the J is probably a misreading of an L. Her daughter Elsie May is named “Elsie Marie Meredith” in the will and “Mrs. Daisy G. Meredith” in the obituary; both documents list the same eight children. The censuses give her mother’s birthplace variously as France, Prussia, Pennsylvania and Germany.