♀Marie Viktor

Marie Viktor (18 March 1826 – 25 November 1888) was a German-born woman, raised in Pennsylvania from the age of five, who married at Louisville, Kentucky, in 1849, raised a family there and, from 1864, in DeWitt County, Illinois, near Farmer City. She was the great-grandmother of Ora Emogene Walrath (1925–2014), through her daughter Anna Lucy Bosler (1860–1910) and Anna’s son Clarence Eugene Walrath (1878–1934).

Early life and marriage

Her obituary in The Clinton Public states that she was born in Germany on 18 March 1826 and came to Pennsylvania with her parents when she was five years old, about 1831; the same date follows from the age at death on her gravestone. The 1880 census gives both her parents as born in Prussia; their names are not known. At the age of eighteen, the obituary adds, she joined the Methodist Episcopal Church.

On 7 July 1849 a marriage bond was taken out in Jefferson County, Kentucky, for her marriage to Louis Oliver Bosler, a German-speaking immigrant who signed the bond “Alois Basler”. His fellow bondsman, Henry Bauer, swore that the bride was of full age. A FamilySearch compiled record places the wedding the same day at St. John’s Evangelical Church in Louisville; the church register itself has not been examined.

Louisville and Illinois

The couple lived in Louisville for the first fifteen years of the marriage. The census of 1850 found them there as Oliver and Mary Basler: he a carpenter, born in Switzerland and given as thirty-five, she twenty-four and born in Bavaria, with an infant daughter Mary a month old, a child who does not appear in later records under that name. In July 1860 the census found them in the city’s Second Ward, among neighbors from Baden, with Louis working as a carpenter and five children at home. They had nine children, born between 1850 and about 1871. In 1864 the family moved to DeWitt County, Illinois, settling near Farmer City. The census of August 1870 found her in DeWitt Township, keeping house, in the dwelling headed by her husband, entered as Lewis Bosler, aged forty-five, a cabinet maker, with five of her children. Her two youngest, John A. and Maggie May, died in 1871 and 1872 and were buried at McCord Cemetery. By 1880 she and her husband were living in the Town of DeWitt, with their married daughter Anna’s household one dwelling away.

Death

She died on 25 November 1888, aged 62 years, 8 months and 7 days, after eleven days of illness; her obituary records that her funeral was held at the Fullerton Church. She was buried in McCord Cemetery, Farmer City. Her gravestone is inscribed “Maria Vicktor, wife of Luis Basler”, giving both her own surname and the spelling the family still used for his. Her husband survived her by more than twenty years and was probably buried in the same cemetery in 1909.

Notes

Her maiden name is recorded in two forms. Her gravestone reads Vicktor, and the 1857 Louisville birth register of her son George gives the mother’s maiden name as Victor, as do several later records of her children. The 1849 marriage bond, the only record made while she still bore the name, appears to begin the bride’s surname with an F, and the Jefferson County marriage records index it as Fichtor. Since German pronounces V as F, the two forms may be one name written down by different clerks; the records do not settle it.

Her birthplace is given differently in almost every record: Bavaria in the 1850 census, France in 1860, Prussia in 1870, Pennsylvania in 1880 (with both parents born in Prussia, and the same answer given for her in her daughter Anna’s household), and Germany in her daughter’s later censuses. Some family trees place her birth in Baden^W, the homeland her husband’s obituary gives for him; no record found gives Baden for her. The censuses were no more consistent about her husband. Her obituary of 1888 accounts for most of the confusion: born in Germany, she grew up in Pennsylvania, which is what the 1880 enumerator recorded.

The Illinois statewide death index lists her as “Mamie Bosler”, dying on 26 November 1888 in DeWitt County at the age of 66; the gravestone gives 25 November and an age that places her birth in 1826. Her husband’s 1909 obituary speaks of eight children, seven then living.

The 1870 household runs across a page break in the census: Lewis Bosler is the last line of one page, and Mary and the children open the next, under the same dwelling and family numbers.

Her husband’s burial

The 1909 obituary of Louis Oliver Bosler says only that “interment will be in the McCord cemetery.” That states where he was to be buried, not where the burial took place, so the burial in McCord Cemetery is a compiled statement, not one backed by a record of the grave itself.