♀Charlotte Mae Walrath

Charlotte Mae Walrath (24 November 1915 – 10 December 2007) was a daughter of a Kandiyohi County, Minnesota, farming family who moved to Chicago as a young woman and married there, at nineteen, a Swedish-born contractor, Gustaf Wilhelm Isakson (1904–1992). She was the elder sister of Ora Emogene Walrath (1925–2014).

Early life

Charlotte was born at Raymond, in Kandiyohi County, Minnesota, on 24 November 1915, as her husband’s naturalization petition of 1941 records, the third of the six children of Clarence Eugene Walrath (1878–1934) and Mary Magdalene Koons (1885–1977), and the first of them born after the family’s move from Clay County, Iowa. Her elder siblings, Glen Eugene (1911–1993) and Lorene Mary (1914–1988), had been born in Iowa; Lorene was born there on 1 June 1914, so the family moved between that date and Charlotte’s birth. Her younger siblings were Elmer Alvin, who died in infancy in 1918, Nicholas Melvin (1922–2015) and Ora Emogene (1925–2014).

She grew up on the family farm at St. Johns Township, near Raymond, in Kandiyohi County, where the censuses of 1920 and 1930 found her in her parents’ household. The 1930 enumeration, taken in April, recorded her as fourteen and single, on a farm her father owned. Her father died on 6 January 1934.

Chicago

By 1935 Charlotte was living in Chicago, and on 11 July 1935, at nineteen, she married Gustaf Wilhelm Isakson there. He was eleven years her senior, born at Ljusdal, Sweden, in 1904, and had arrived in New York in May 1923. The 1940 census found the couple in their own household in Chicago, with Gustaf working as a contractor. Their daughter, Barbara Mae Isacson, was born in Chicago on 22 March 1938; she died at Park Ridge, Illinois, on 1 August 1967, aged twenty-nine.

Charlotte kept a share in the Minnesota land. When the State of Minnesota condemned strips of the Walrath farm for Trunk Highway 40 in early 1950, the published notice named her, as “Charlotte M. Walrath Isacson”, and her husband “Gust Isacson” among the respondents, alongside her mother, her brothers and her sisters. Two family obituaries describe the farm after her father’s death: her brother Glen’s says that he farmed it, and her brother Nick’s says that Nick eventually bought it from their mother.

Death

Gustaf Isakson died in Chicago on 29 December 1992. Charlotte died on 10 December 2007 at Arlington Heights, Cook County, Illinois, aged ninety-two, and was buried at Des Plaines, Illinois. Her brother Nicholas’s obituary in 2015 listed her, as “Charlotte Isacson”, among the siblings who had died before him.

Notes

The 1920 census index gives her birth year as 1916; the 1930 census, which gave her age as fourteen in April of that year, agrees with 24 November 1915. Her husband’s surname is spelled Isakson in the family record and Isacson in the 1950 notice, in her brother’s obituary and for their daughter.