♂Rudolph Schulz

Rudolph Schulz (15 April 1837 – between 1882 and 1900) was a German-born packing-house worker of the town of Lake, in Cook County, Illinois, who married Marie Adams at Chicago in 1873. He was the great-grandfather of Frederic Roger Curtis (1928–2007), through his son Frank Frederick William Schulz (1882–1961) and Frank’s daughter Bernice Reinette Schulz (1905–1993).

Life

Almost everything known about his origins comes from one record: the marriage register of First Immanuel Lutheran Church in Chicago. It records that “Rudolf Schulz”, born on 15 April 1837 at “Gierswalde, Preussen”, married Marie Adams there on 15 June 1873. The witnesses were Friederike Adams and a Christian Hühner or Kühner. The only place of that name in the standard gazetteer of the German Empire is a village near Uslar, which was part of the Kingdom of Hanover^W when he was born and became Prussian when Prussia annexed Hanover in 1866; a register written in 1873 would therefore call it Prussia. When and how he reached the United States is not known.

In June 1880 the census found the family in the town of Lake, which Chicago annexed in 1889. The household was entered under the spelling “Schultz”. Rudolph, aged 43 and born in Prussia, as were both his parents, “works packing house”; Mary was 30, and their daughter Elizabeth was six months old. Rudolph and Mary had four children, of whom two lived to adulthood: Elizabeth Frances, born in December 1879, and Frank, born at Chicago on 10 June 1882. Rudolph died between 1882 and 1900: by June 1900 Mary was a widow, heading her own household in the same district, by then Chicago’s 30th Ward. No record of his death or burial has been found in the Cook County and Illinois death indexes or on Find a Grave.

Notes

His parents are not known. The 1873 register has no column for parents. Prussian baptism records name many boys called Rudolph Schulz born between 1835 and 1839, but none on 15 April 1837 and none at Gierswalde; all of them came from the eastern provinces of Prussia, far from Uslar.

Two other men of the same name have been ruled out. A Rudolph Schulz who sailed from Hamburg to New York in 1858, bound for Illinois, gave his home as Marotschin, not Gierswalde. A different Rudolph Schulz, also with a wife named Mary, lived in Wheeling Township, Cook County, in 1880; the Lake household is the one that belongs to the subject of this page.