♂Frank Frederick William Schulz

Frank Frederick William Schulz (10 June 1882 – 17 August 1961) was a Chicago working man who spent his life in a string of city jobs, from messenger and motorman to clerk, porter and shipping clerk, and who at the 1950 census was still working a 48-hour week as a shipping clerk at the age of 67. He was the grandfather of Frederic Roger Curtis (1928–2007), through his daughter Bernice Reinette Schulz (1905–1993).

Early life

Frank was born in Chicago on 10 June 1882, the son of Rudolph Schulz and Mary Adams, a German-born woman who had come to the United States as a child in 1854. The 1900 census recorded his mother as the mother of four children, only two of them still living: Frank and his elder sister Elizabeth Frances. The two who died are not otherwise known. By June 1900 his father was dead, and Mary, a widow, headed a rented household in the Town of Lake district of Chicago’s 30th Ward, where her daughter worked as a factory hand and Frank, aged 17, as a messenger. His father’s date and place of death have not been found. By 1910 his mother had remarried, to Charles Mielke.

Marriage and family

On 1 June 1904, in Chicago, Frank married Christine Magdalena Thomsen (1883–1961), the Chicago-born daughter of Anders Hansen Thomsen and Bothilda Catharina Jensen. Bothilda had been born at Jejsing, in Hostrup parish near Tønder in Schleswig (then under the Danish crown, German from 1864, and since 1920 in Denmark), and came to Chicago at 21. Frank and Christine’s only child, Bernice, was born in November 1905; the 1910 census records the couple as having had one child, still living.

The family kept Christine’s parents close for twenty years. In 1910 the Schulzes, with Frank now a motorman, lived on East 33rd Street in the 3rd Ward in the same building as the elder Thomsens, enumerated as two separate households in one dwelling. By 1920, when Frank was working as a clerk in the 32nd Ward, Anders and Bothilda were living inside the Schulz home as his father-in-law and mother-in-law, and Anders, then 72, was still at work as a barn boss for a tea company. In 1930, after Bernice had married Frederic Arthur Curtis in 1924, the widowed Anders was still living with Frank and Christine in the 19th Ward, where Frank was a shipping clerk.

Later life and death

In 1940 Frank was a porter for a rubber company, a wage earner who had worked all 52 weeks of the previous year for $733; the household rented its home at 7317 Chappel Avenue for $32 a month. Registering for the draft in 1942, as men of his age were required to do, he gave his full name as Frank Frederick William Schulz, signed himself “Frank F. W. Schulz”, and gave the same address and named his employer as Van-Cleet Bros., of 7800 Woodlawn Avenue. The 1950 census found him, at 67, a shipping clerk for a manufacturing concern, working 48 hours a week.

Frank and Christine later left Chicago for Vero Beach, in Indian River County, Florida. Christine died there on 6 May 1961, and Frank followed about three months later, on 17 August 1961. He was buried at Vero Beach.

Notes

A family account compiled in 1994 spells his middle names Frederic Wilhelm. The 1942 draft card, the only record from his lifetime that writes them out, has Frederick William; every other record gives only the initials F. W.