Discovering Emily

Marie Emilie Meyer Repschlaeger

18 Jan 1871 – 09 Apr 1942

Emily Meyer Repschlaeger is my great grandmother - mother of my "Paw", William E. Repschleger, and grandmother of my mother. For most of my life, the only stories I heard about Emily were not flattering. When I thought of her, I thought of the ultimate grouch. The grouch story came from everywhere - my mother, grandmother, and aunts.

Mother was in college when her grandmother passed away, but her dad did not call with news of her death until after the funeral, saying that there was no need to come since Mother never visited her grandmother when she was alive. Mother told that story a number of times.

Christine, my Granny and Emily's daughter-in-law, told me how difficult it was living with her in-laws when she and Paw were first married. She said a disagreement with her mother-in-law about how to properly prepare one of Paw's favorite dishes was the impetus for her and Paw to find their own place. Granny told me about washing the butter dish before her mother-in-law's visits to avoid receiving a blistering critique of her housekeeping prowess. She told me that Emily was a quilter, but was so finicky that she ripped out quilting that her friends contributed during visits because their quilting did not measure up to her impossible standards.

I also heard that Emily was divorced from well-loved William C. Repschlaeger (with the implication that this saint of a man could not live with such a difficult woman).

Then I found pieces of her life that made me question this story. First was her obituary - Death Claims Pioneer Here: Mrs. Emily Repschlaeger, 71, to Be Buried Today. Then was the description of the elaborate party she hosted in her home when her youngest daughter, my great Aunt Clara, was a bride. There was the quilt that she made that is now in my cedar chest, given to me by my Granny. This is a beautiful applique quilt made of pastel silk fabrics, with the design created with the tiniest, most precise hand stitching, suggesting that she had a wonderful ability to put colors together, and was indeed a very fine seamstress.

And, finally, the details of her life story that began to unfold through discoveries as I was doing genealogical research on the internet.

I learned that she was born in Round Top, a little town in Washington County, Texas, the oldest child of German immigrant Hermann Meyer and his young American-born wife, Marie Becker Meyer. Emily was baptized in Round Top's Bethlehem Lutheran Church. Hermann immigrated from Hannover, Germany, when he was in his twenties, arriving in Galveston before heading on to Indianola further down the Texas coast. Her mother was born in Yorktown, Texas, and met Hermann in Houston. It appears that the Meyer family - Emily, her parents, younger brother Herman Jr. and sister Clara - moved frequently when she was growing up, with one of those moves bringing her to Breslau in Lavaca County, where she met another German immigrant, William Carl Repschlaeger, and married when she was only 16.

Emily's family must have struggled through her growing up years. Family stories say that Hermann was an accountant and a teacher. Records indicate that he served for a time as postmaster in Cistern, Texas. It appears that he and Marie were never land-owners or farmed. Their transitory life makes sense if you think of a new immigrant with a young family trying to make his way, doing what he could find to do and moving the family where he saw opportunity to make a living. This could be a Little House on the Prairie story, except that Hermann died in his forties when Emily was a young teenager - with no record that I can find of where he was buried or what caused his death. After his death, however, Emily's mother was left to care for the family when pensions, social security and other types of safety nets did not exist. Life must have been hard. Perhaps Emily married so young because that's what young girls did and she was in love. Perhaps as the oldest child in a struggling family, she saw getting married and starting her old family was a way out of a bad situation and a way to help her mother and siblings.

Emily became a mother when she was only 17, giving birth to my grandfather in Sweethome - possibly at her grandmother Becker's home. After my grandfather, she bore four other children - all together, two boys and three girls.

Through my research and a beautiful baptismal certificate that my mother found after her parents died, I discovered a mystery about one of those girls. The 1900 census showed the Repschlaeger family to be composed of parents Will and Emily, and four children, Willie (my Paw), Mary, Hilda, and Lydia. The 1910 census no longer listed daughters Hilda and Lydia. I had heard the tragic story of Hilda many times - drowned in 1908 when she was only 15 in the canal in Port Arthur in a scandalous accident that involved two Port Arthur boys from upstanding families. I had never even heard of Lydia or what happened to her. When I asked my mother about Lydia, she said that the census must have been mistaken - that her father had no sister named Lydia. Mother had no doubt in her mind that Lydia Repschlaeger never existed.

After Mother and Dad died and I was sorting through the things in their home, I took a close look at the baptismal certificate hanging in Mother's sewing room. She had showed it to be before, commenting on the beautiful script and German language. The name on the baptismal certificate is Lydia Hermine Hulda Clara Repschlaeger, daughter of William and Emily Repschlaeger, born on December 13, 1897. Mother said this was Hilda, the daughter who drowned. But the 1900 census indicated that Hilda was born in 1894 and Lydia was born in 1897. Lydia did indeed exist.

Now doubly curious, I began to dig into research about Lydia on Ancestry and there I found evidence of Lydia's death in November of 1900 when she was not quite three years old - just months after the census was taken. The evidence was a notation in the pastor's diary from the Lutheran church in the area about Lydia's death and burial. The pastor's notes say that she died in Sweethome - where I surmise Emily's mother or grandmother lived at the time. The scribbled notes are in pencil and many are not legible, but I imagine they contain clues to the circumstances of her death. How curious it is that she was never mentioned, not even to close family members? I wonder if she was born with a birth defect or a malady that was deemed to be shameful at the time and was kept as a family secret.

Learning about Lydia and putting a timeline together via my Ancestry research led me to think about Emily with new eyes. That first decade of the twentieth century must have been a time of gut-wrenching change and grief for Emily. How many changes in such a such time? What if Lydia was a child that was born with challenges that were certain to result in an early death? What was it like for Emily to mind her young family while knowing her baby was not thriving and would die? Imagine the work involved of moving her young family two hundred miles and starting over. Think about the shock of learning that your teenage daughter drown on a summer day, and that the two boys who were with her survived? Imagine having another baby just a few months later, and then while that baby was still toddling, welcoming your oldest son and his new bride into your home to live while they saved enough money to make it on their own. Think about the paralyzing grief that came with losing two daughters tragically, and how that grief must have affected her marriage - and yes, even her outlook on life. Imagine going through all of that in times when counseling was not socially acceptable and your German family's culture characterized showing emotions as weakness?

And imagine finding yourself in the same spot as your mother in her later years. This time, however, before your husband dies, your marriage dissolves and your husband moves out. I'm not sure if there was a legal divorce or just a separation, but I do know that some time in the 1920's, William and Emily separated and Will moved to a house in Port Neches while Emily stayed in the family home, making money renting an apartment (or maybe rooms in her home) and possibly making quilts.

William Repschleger died in 1928 when he had not yet reached retirement age and was still working for Gulf Oil. He died one afternoon after work, sitting on his front porch. He is buried next to his estranged wife and their daughter Hilda in Greenlawn Cemetery in Port Arthur. Emily died of heart disease in 1942 at the age of 71.

My search for Emily is not over. I have a few snapshots and see a woman with a sad expression and a harsh hairstyle. She is using a crutch in one photo and her husband Will is standing nearby. If I could speak to her, standing there with her crutch, I would say I'm sorry for attaching the word "grouch" to her for so many years. I feel compassion for her now and sorrow for what she experienced and how alone she may have felt. I am curious to know if I have her smile, if her eyes were blue like mine, and what stories she could have shared if our lives had overlapped. I want her to be remembered as Emily Meyer Repschlaeger, Port Arthur pioneer, elegant party-giver, talented quilter, resourceful money manager - and strong woman who persevered.