Madame Anna Ozioni

The one thing I can say about our Schaefer family is that just when you think you know their story, there's still more to tell. As we know, there has been alot to discover in the last several years. First we find our home village in Germany where there are still living relations, then we find out there were FOUR Schaefer siblings who came to America: not just our Peter, and not just his brother Philip who also migrated to Iowa, but another brother, Joseph, as well as a sister Anna. We've been able to track the brothers, mostly, but the one and only trace of sister Anna was the 1880 census where her newly-arrived brother Joseph was staying with her. Anna was, at that point, a widow with a surname of something like Bisell, and she was a teacher. I've tried and tried to figure out what happened to Anna, but to no avail. Until familysearch started indexing death certificates from the NYC Municipal Archives. Just for fun, go to familysearch, do not enter any name, but click on Parents and for the Father, type "Joh*" "Schafer" and for the Mother, type "Marg*" "Gipp", then click Search.  Curiously, up pops three of the four siblings who emigrated from Udenhausen to NY (I have no idea why the marriage record for our Peter is not matching, but it should show up there as well bcs he was married to Maria Vierling on the same day that Philip married Therese Etringer).

OK, so the surprise this time around is Anna. OZIONI?? If she was a widow of the name Bissel in 1880, then she remarried. And with a name like Ozioni, it didn't take long to find her in the NY City directories, wife of Ernesto. But then sadly, he also died prematurely in 1891. So there was Anna, alone again, and apparently without children. And what was she doing? Running an Art Embroidery shop on Columbus Ave. It was a fancy place, but from what I can tell, Anna was probably having trouble making ends meet. There is a newspaper article about how she pulled a revolver on a customer who refused to pay, and then a month later there is an ad about her shop being auctioned. Apparently, however, she continued to make her living by teaching art embroidery - which is the last occupation we see for her in the 1910 census, the year she died at the age of 69. She is buried at St. John's cemetery, where her brother Joseph and her nephew, our g-grandfather, Charles, are also buried.

But here's what strikes me as funny. Ernesto Ozioni was Austrian, and who was the witness on his American naturalization? Joseph Schaefer. But that's not the funny part. And where was Ernesto residing before sailing to America? Trieste, Italy, where my sister and I visited in 2011. But that's still not the funny part. All newspaper accounts I find pertaining to Anna and her embroidery shop call her "Mme. Ozioni" and they even imagine her threatenting conversation with her cheap-skate customer at gunpoint with French accent: "Oh ze gran' ladie will not pay, eh? Zen she will not leave ze store until she do pay, eh?"  omg, too too funny. Anna could not have been more German, and yet because she was trained as a teacher, it's likely that she did study French. Perhaps her merchant-husband and she decided that presenting the shop as having a French proprietor would help sales? I can only imagine.  But maybe now you can see what I mean when I say you can never underestimate the interesting lives of our Schaefer clan.