A few weeks ago, I wrote about finally discovering the death date and burial location of my 2nd g-grandmother, Maria Magdalena Vierling Schaefer. I wrote to the Most Holy Trinity cemetery in Brooklyn to inquire about her burial plot, and received a reply that her grave is in block 073, row 009, and grave 005. The cemetery reports that two others are buried in the same grave:
- Louis Schaffer, interred 7 Jun 1893 at 22 years old
- Frank Schaffer, interred 22 Dec 1890 at 8 years old.
We knew about Maria's son Louis (also called Ludwig, see my blog post Obituary) because he had shown up in census records both in Iowa and New York. But we didn't know about Frank. We knew that Maria had given birth to an unnamed male in Iowa in 1882, per a birth record found there, but we never knew that child's name or if he survived. Apparently Frank was that child. He died of pneumonia.
I'm not sure where the name Frank might have come from but I suspect it was on the Vierling side as Maria's sister, Catherine, had the middle name Franciszka. I can only think that Maria's brother, Adam Vierling, helped Maria to buy the burial plot for her sons since upon her return to NY she was newly widowed and with small children. Adam Vierling and his family are also buried at MHT -- a grave I visited when last in NY in hopes that I would find Maria had been buried in his plot, but alas not. In fact, Maria outlived all her siblings, only to die in the charitable care of Catholic nuns. Thankfully, her faith gave her a resting place with two of her sons.
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