My Swiss Ancestor

I have written many times here about my distant cousins in Switzerland.  We are related through my mother's paternal grandmother who immigrated to the U.S. with her family when she was nine years old.

A couple days ago, when I was going through a box of mementos, I found an old tintype that I had forgotten that I had.  Here is my link to Switzerland...  Susanna Elisabeth Marti.

Susanna, or Suzie, as she later called herself in the U.S., was born in 1864 in Othmarsingen, Switzerland.  In 1873 she and her parents and siblings moved to Ohio.  It was a time of economic depression in Switzerland.  The family owned a stone quarry on the edge of town, but Suzie's father had heard that the sandstone quarries in Berea, Ohio, were thriving.  They packed their belongings, left the small town that had been the family home for generations, and made the long journey to America.  Suzie's father and her older brothers found work in the quarries of Berea. 

The tintype was probably taken around the time of her marriage at the age of twenty in 1885.  She married my great grandfather, Charles August Plau, the son of a German immigrant who owned a farm in Middleburg Township outside of Berea. 

Suzie and Charles were married for only nine years.  In 1894 Charles died at the age of  forty three.  During their time together, they had five children, including my maternal grandfather.  In 1902 Suzie remarried, but it was an unhappy marriage.  Her second husband had a drinking problem, and in 1917 he abandoned his wife and the two daughters that they had together.  In 1922 Suzie did something that for that era was considered scandalous... she filed for divorce.  Her divorce was granted, and the ex-husband was required to pay child support and give her their house in Berea.  She must have been a very strong-willed and feisty woman to have defied the stigma of a divorced woman.  Nevertheless, in the subsequent census she listed herself as a widow.  Well, it wasn't a lie.  She was the widow of Charles Plau.  

Suzie passed away in 1945 from a heart attack at the age of seventy seven.  My grandfather was the informant of her death certificate.  Fortunately, he provided the name of the town in Switzerland where she was born.  It was that bit of information that enabled me to find my cousins living in Switzerland.  

My mother always spoke fondly of her "Granma".  I wish that I had known her.