♂Augustus Leroy Walrath

Augustus Leroy Walrath (4 July 1882 – 2 April 1986) was an Illinois-born farm hand who moved with his widowed mother to Clay County, Iowa, where her will left the household goods to him and the three brothers and one sister keeping house with him, on condition that they went on living together, and who spent his later years at Spirit Lake, Iowa. He was the uncle of Ora Emogene Walrath (1925–2014), a younger brother of her father, Clarence Eugene Walrath (1878–1934).

Early life

Augustus was born on 4 July 1882 at Fullerton, DeWitt County, Illinois, the third of the eight children of Nicholas Walrath (1850–1895) and Anna Lucy Bosler (1860–1910). His father died in February 1895, when Augustus was twelve. The census of June 1900 found him, as “August L.”, aged seventeen, in his widowed mother’s household in Creek Township, DeWitt County, where she was farming land she owned, with three of his younger brothers and sisters.

Iowa

Some time after 1902 his mother moved the family to northwest Iowa. The census of April 1910 recorded Augustus, then twenty-seven and single, on her general farm near Peterson, Clay County, one of four sons working the home farm as laborers, with their youngest sister Nellie as its cook. His mother signed her will at Storm Lake on 22 October 1910 and died six days later in Chicago. She left a quarter share of the remainder of her estate each to Augustus and his elder brother Stanford Pearl, and her household goods to the five children still at home, Augustus among them, provided they “shall still be continuing to live together” when the estate was settled. Her obituary lists him among those at home as “Augusta”.

He was still at Peterson in 1915 and at Lincoln, in Clay County, in 1920. By 1930 he was at Spirit Lake, Dickinson County, where a FamilySearch index of that year’s census lists him, as “Gus”, as the head of a household that included a housekeeper, Clara Fox, her four children and a hired man; he was still there at the census of 1940. An Iowa old-age assistance file, in a collection of records covering 1934 to 1958, names him as “Gus Leroy Walrath”, son of Nicholas; the online memorial for his parents’ grave also lists him as Gus.

He married for the first time at the age of seventy-six: on 17 September 1958, in Martin County, Minnesota, he married Leona A. Eads, born in 1909 and so some twenty-seven years his junior. A family tree online gives her maiden name as Miller and her death as 2000, at Fresno, California; that rests on the tree alone.

Death

A Find a Grave index gives his death as 2 April 1986 at Spirit Lake, and his burial there.

Notes

The death date and the burial rest on a single Find a Grave index entry and have not been confirmed by a death record; the date would make him 103 years old. His birth date and birthplace come from the same Find a Grave index; the censuses of 1900 and 1910 agree with the month and year.