♀Bernice Reinette Schulz

Bernice Reinette Schulz (29 November 1905 – 5 June 1993) was a Chicago-born wife and mother, known in the family as “Meme.” She was the mother of Frederic Roger Curtis (1928–2007).

Early life

Bernice was born in Chicago on 29 November 1905, the only child of Frank Frederick William Schulz (1882–1961), a Chicago-born son of Rudolph Schulz and Mary Adams, and Christine Magdalena Thomsen (1883–1961), whose own grandmother had come from the village of Jejsing, then under the Danish crown. On the 1910 census her mother’s own answer for children born and living was recorded as one and one — Bernice would have no brothers or sisters. She was still single and living with her parents in the 1910 and 1920 census returns. Her parents later moved to Florida and died within months of each other in 1961, at Vero Beach.

Marriage and family

She married Frederic Arthur Curtis (1903–1990) on 30 August 1924, in Chicago. Like her own mother, she had only one child, a son, Frederic Roger Curtis, born in 1928. The family settled at 9517 Bell Avenue, in Chicago’s 19th Ward, an address the household still held in 1950, and where their son was still giving his address on his 1946 draft card. The 1940 census recorded Bernice keeping house; by 1950, at 44, the enumerator instead marked her as neither working nor keeping house, with no job and none sought that week — a distinction the record leaves unexplained.

Death

She died on 5 June 1993 in Barrington, Lake County, Illinois, and was buried at Evergreen Cemetery in Barrington. A compiled family chart instead gives her death as 6 June 1993, at Barrington Hills, in Cook County; the two accounts disagree on both the day and the county, and the discrepancy has not been resolved beyond noting it. Her husband, Frederic Arthur Curtis, had died three years earlier, on 7 May 1990, also at Barrington.