Tante Frieda may seem like an odd choice for the second of my 52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks.  With Frieda, I am already choosing someone who is technically not an ancestor.  Tante is German for “aunt.”  Until last week, I did not even know Tante Frieda’s last name.  My immediate family is not large.  My mother had just one sister, Marian, who is now 92 years old and as sharp as a tack.  She has always been a wealth of knowledge about my maternal side of the family, so I enjoy having long phone conversations with her as time allows.  I seem to recall that it was during one of these conversations that she asked me if I had ever come across anything about Tante Frieda.  I said, no, I had not.  I asked her who Tante Frieda was.  Aunt Marian said that she was not sure, but that Frieda lived with her family for a while when they were kids.  She had come from Germany to Cincinnati and worked as a cook for the Schott family.  Aunt Marian thought she was a relative, but couldn’t be certain that she was really an aunt.  She had no idea what her last name was.  Eventually, Frieda returned to Germany.

My mom was still alive when I first heard about Frieda, so I asked her what she remembered.  No, mom did not know how Frieda was related.  She remembered that eventually she returned to Germany, either to the town of Buchholz or to marry a man named Buchholz.

It seemed likely that Frieda arrived at Ellis Island.  If she were truly an aunt, she might have one of these surnames: Lindner, Kessler, or maybe Maier.  During my initial search on the Ellis Island website, I tried those surnames and a few more, but did not get any likely hits.  Because I did not have enough information, I never even created an entry for Frieda in my family tree.  Frieda remained a mystery.

When my mom passed away three years ago, some of my Grandfather Lindner’s old photos came to me.  It took until 2014 (and a new scanner) for me to begin to look at these photos with any degree of seriousness.   I came across a page torn from a family album.  It had three postcards on it.  Printed in white across the black paper it said “Tante Frieda’s Home Town. 1937.” The photos on the cards were of Buchholz in Erzgebirge.  This brought back a childhood memory of being with my Grandpa Otto and laughing over the name “Erzgebirge.”  It was fun to pronounce and we laughed and laughed.  This may have been why Erzgebirge was on the tip of our tongues – it was where Tante Frieda had lived.  In this same collection of photos, I encountered a smiling Frieda in several of them.  She was a stout woman with a cane.

Armed with the knowledge that Frieda was from Buchholz in Saxony, I decided to take another look for her.  Once again, I tried the Ellis Island website, but I still had no last name and I couldn’t search without at least two letters of the surname.  I remembered that there might be a different way to search Ellis Island records.  A Google search brought me to what I needed.  Steve Morse has a one-step search form: http://stevemorse.org/ellis2/ellisgold.html.  I was able to search using Frieda and the town of Buchholz.  There were only five names returned and I immediately recognized our  Tante Frieda as Frieda Pueschel.  Pueschel was the surname of my two times great grandmother, Christiane Charlotte Pueschel, the wife of Emil Heinrich Max Lindner.

The Steve Morse search results had a link that took me directly to the ship’s manifest.  After logging in to the Ellis Island site I learned that Frieda arrived on December 9, 1922, and was joining her cousin, Gustave Lindner in Cincinnati, Ohio. She was born in 1882; Her physical description says she was five feet, four inches tall, had black hair and blue eyes. The other piece of new information was that Frieda’s marital status was “divorced.”  Yesterday, I told Aunt Marian about my find.  She was not surprised that Frieda’s name was Pueschel, but she never knew that Tante Frieda was divorced.  Aunt Marian commented, “That must have been quite a scandal in those days.”  We speculated that Frieda may have left Buchholz because of the divorce.  And, did she return to marry her sweetheart as the family story goes?  Right now, I don’t know the answer.

Frieda did work for a Schott family.  Aunt Marian said she was a cook, but three Cincinnati city directories list her as a maid.  By cross-referencing the address, I learned that she lived and worked in the household of Katherine Schott, widow of Colon Schott.  They were from Germany and Colon Schott has been an attorney.  He apparently had done well for himself.  The 1930 census shows that his home was valued at $37,000 – quite pricey for the time.  The 1920 census shows a German maid living with the Schott family.  They have just one domestic living in their household, so Frieda probably replaced this woman.  She probably cooked and cleaned, hence her description of her job as “cook.”  Aunt Marian said that the Schott’s were very good to Frieda.  She received gifts of fur collars from them and other nice things.  In 1930, after Frieda returned home to Germany, the Schott family was without live-in help.  Aunt Marian has always wondered if this was the Schott family that eventually owned the Cincinnati Reds baseball team.  From what I can tell, it was not.

I also don’t know exactly who Frieda’s parents were.  That will be the next phase of my quest.  She is probably the niece of Christiane Charlotte Pueschel, which would make her Gustave Lindner’s cousin, since Charlotte was his mother.