I have now written about all of the siblings of my great-grandmother, Hilda Katzenstein Schoenthal, as well as about her parents and some of her aunts, uncles, and cousins. I still have more of the Katzenstein extended family to discuss, but first I want to look back at the life of my great-grandmother. Her story has been covered only in bits and pieces through the stories of her husband and children and through the stories of her parents and siblings. Isn’t that all too often the case with women—that their stories are seen only through the stories of those who surrounded them? Especially since this is Women’s History Month, I wanted to be sure to give my great-grandmother her own page, her own story.
Hilda Katzenstein Schoenthal, my great-grandmother
Hilda was the third daughter and sixth and youngest child of her parents, Gerson Katzenstein and Eva Goldschmidt. She was the third of the six to be born in the United States—in Philadelphia on August 17, 1863.
When Hilda was three years old, her sibling closest in age, Hannah, died at age seven from scarlet fever. Hilda was seven years younger than her brother Perry, who was the second closest to her in age, and so there was a big gap between Hilda and her surviving older siblings. Joe was fifteen years older, Jacob thirteen years older, and Brendena was ten years older than Hilda. My great-grandmother was the baby of the family, and I would imagine that after losing their daughter Hannah, her parents must have been very protective of her.
Gerson Katzenstein and family 1870 census, Year: 1870; Census Place: Philadelphia Ward 16 Dist 48 (2nd Enum), Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; Roll: M593_1429; Page: 708B; Image: 96949; Family History Library Film: 552928
Her sister Brendena married Jacob Schlesinger in 1871 when Hilda was just eight years old. By the time Hilda was ten years old in 1873, her oldest brother Joe had moved to Washington, Pennsylvania, and within a few years after that her other two brothers, Jacob and Perry, had also moved to western Pennsylvania. Thus, Hilda was still quite young when her older siblings left home, leaving her to live with just her parents.
Katzenstein family Year: 1880; Census Place: Philadelphia, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; Roll: 1173; Family History Film: 1255173; Page: 274B; Enumeration District: 219; Image: 0561
But her brother Joe’s move to Washington, Pennsylvania proved fateful for Hilda and for my family as it was there that she met her future husband, my great-grandfather Isidore Schoenthal, who had only arrived in the US a few years earlier from Sielen, Germany.
The Daily Republican
(Monongahela, Pennsylvania)
11 Aug 1887, Thu • Page 4
Hilda married him in 1888 when she was 25 years old and settled with him in Little Washington where he was a china dealer. Their first son, Lester, was born that same year.
Isidore Schoenthal
Then a series of tragic events hit the Katzenstein family. In the spring 1889, Hilda’s brother Jacob lost his wife Ella and both of his sons, one before the Johnstown flood and two as a result of the flood. The following year, my great-grandfather Gerson died at age 75. Hilda named her second child for her father; Gerson Katzenstein Schoenthal was born on January 20, 1892. A year later Hilda lost her mother, Eva Goldschmidt Katzenstein, on September 6, 1893; she was 66.
Hilda did not have another child until August, 1901, when my great-uncle Harold was born—more than nine years after Gerson. Just a few months after Harold’s birth, Hilda’s brother Joe died in December, 1901; just over a year and a half later, her brother Perry died in August, 1903. Hilda was forty years old and had lost her parents and three of her five siblings. Only Jacob and Brendena remained.
In March, 1904, my great-grandmother Hilda gave birth to her last child and only daughter, my grandmother Eva Schoenthal, named for Hilda’s mother Eva Goldschmidt Katzenstein.
My grandmother, Eva Schoenthal
When my grandmother was just a small child, her parents decided to leave Washington, Pennsylvania, and move to Denver, Colorado, believing that the mountain air would be better for their son Gerson, who had developed asthma.
Thus, Hilda packed up her children and belongings and moved far away from her two remaining siblings: Brendena, who was living with her husband Jacob and family in Philadelphia, and Jacob, who by that time had remarried and was living with his second wife Bertha and their children in Johnstown. I don’t believe Hilda or Isidore knew anyone in Denver, but somehow they started their lives over in this city far from their families back east.
They remained in Denver for at least twenty years, raising my grandmother and my great-uncles. During the many years that Hilda lived in Denver, her brother Jacob died, and her sister Brendena lost her husband as well as both of her daughters. It must have been hard to live so far away from all of her family during those painful times.
Isidore, Hilda (Katzenstein), and Eva Schoenthal in Denver
After many years in Denver, Hilda and Isidore moved back east. Their son Harold had gone back east for college, and my grandmother had moved to Philadelphia after she married my grandfather, John Nusbaum Cohen, in 1923. She had met him when, after graduating from high school, she’d gone to visit relatives in Philadelphia, probably Brendena’s family.
My father and aunt were born in the 1920s, and they were my great-grandparents’ only grandchildren at that time. I assume that they were part of the reason that by 1930, my great-grandparents returned to the east and settled in Montclair, New Jersey, where their son Harold lived and not far from my grandmother and my aunt and father.
HIlda (Katzenstein) Schoenthal, Eva (Schoenthal) Cohen, Eva Hilda Cohen, and Harold Schoenthal
Hilda and Isidore lived in Montclair until 1941 when they moved to Philadelphia so that my grandmother could take care of them, both being elderly and in poor health by that time. Hilda died from pneumonia on August 17, 1941, just seven months after the move to Philadelphia; she died on her 78th birthday. Her husband Isidore died eleven months later on July 10, 1942. They were buried at Restland Memorial Park in East Hanover, New Jersey.
Looking back over my great-grandmother’s life, I have several thoughts. Although she was the baby of the family, she was also the only one who ventured far from where her family lived. Her brothers left Philadelphia, but never left Pennsylvania; her sister lived in Philadelphia for her entire life after arriving as a child from Germany. Hilda moved across the state to marry Isidore Schoenthal, and Hilda was the only Katzenstein sibling to leave the east, moving with her husband and four children all the way to Colorado.
Her life was also marked by many losses, some quite tragic: a sister died as a young child, her parents died before Hilda was thirty years old, and two of her brothers died before Hilda was forty. Several nieces and nephews also died prematurely. Her brother Jacob also predeceased her; she was 52 when he died. So many losses must have had an effect on her perspective on life.
On the other hand, she had a long marriage and four children who grew to adulthood. She lived to see two of her grandchildren, my father and aunt, grow to be teenagers. My father remembers her as a loving, affectionate, and sweet woman; she loved to cook, and when for a period of time he lived near her in Montclair, she would make lunch for him on school days.
Hilda saw more of America than her parents and siblings, and she lived longer than any of them except for her sister Brendena, who survived her. She endured many losses in her life, but the love she received from her family must have outweighed all that sadness, for my father recalls her as a very loving and positive woman.
Brotmanblog: A Family Journey 
It’s the family stories and memories that add heart and soul to the factual story presented by official documents. What your father has shared with you is the breath of life that brings all the findings together in a way just having the documents doesn’t always do.
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I agree. I had no idea what he would say when I asked him what she was like, what his memories were. He was so emotional about her that it really took me by surprise. All these years, and I never knew…
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I also like that little announcement about the social visit. That’s what I mean, these little details along with the memories add so much.
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I know—I love those social commentaries also–Facebook 19th century style! I wonder if 100 years from now anyone will be able to dig up old Facebook posts for genealogy purposes….
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Or Tweets! I think the best way to ensure that is to keep a little handwritten journal or a printout safe and secure on the bookshelf. Too many things can go “poof!” online.
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I loved this piece on your great-grandmother Hilda. A bit more personal than those we have seen for the extended Katzenstein family. It’s wonderful you still have a link to her through your father’s memories.
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Thanks, Cathy. It’s hard to be personal about people I never even knew existed—and whom my father never even knew. It’s one reason I started doing this kind of research—because I didn’t know anything about my background. But talking to my dad about his grandmother was very special.
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I know exactly what you mean about it hard to be personal.
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Your great grandparents were certainly a very handsome couple; I love those photos of them as young people. And the newspaper clipping!!! Oh how wonderful.
I’m finding lots of these kinds of clippings researching the Big T’s family. One branch in particular lived in a rural area and the local newspaper obviously filled the column inches with lots of social news; including such wonderful snippets as when and where people were going on holiday. These days, something like that would be seen as a burglar’s dream come true, but I guess people were more honest — or looked out for their neighbours better — in those days. The other thing I’ve found that I really love is the detailed descriptions of women’s outfits at social events. Not just weddings but parties and dances too. I’m reading about colours and fabrics I never knew existed.
These articles did perform a very similar function to modern social media. I keep thinking I should put my sociologist’s hat on and write a post about it.
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Thanks, Su! I love those pictures also. I wish I’d known them.
Go for it–write about those old clippings. I am always saying just that—that old newspapers were the Facebook of their time. It’s amazing how all the parties and trips and visitors were detailed in the papers.
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Thanks Amy. It is an interesting comparison — the differences as well as the similarities.
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This story really moved me. And I am struck again by her face in the photo: that resolve and also how she looks ahead to things the rest of us can’t see.
You need to be putting in a plug for your book on here btw. Why don’t you have a little sidebar where someone can buy your book? (Just thought of that and will do it myself, but you should DEFINITELY do it!)
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Thanks, Luanne. Her story has been one of my favorites to research—including learning about her parents and siblings.
There actually is a plug for my book in the right column of the blog on the home page. But for some reason this WordPress theme does not show the menus on post pages, only on the home page. I could switch themes, I suppose, but I figure most people land on the home page at some point.
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I usually find your posts by my reader, so no home page for me. I didn’t realize you had to have a certain theme for sidebars to show up on posts, but maybe mine is like that, too!
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I checked my settings, and I don’t see anyway to add the right hand menu to my post pages. Maybe I will contact Support and see if there is a way to do that.
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Let me know what happens!
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Will do!
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I figured out a way to add a link to my book on post pages! It took some doing with the footer menu settings, but I think it worked. It appears in the footer, not a side menu, but at least it’s there. Thanks for making me figure this out! (I didn’t even call support…)
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I was so glad to read that she was loving and positive. Experiencing so much loss can sometimes turn people – bitter or sad. She sounds very brave and adventurous to me. Moving your whole family far away to help your child’s asthma, definitely brave. You have some really lovely pictures! I have never heard the name Brendena before reading of your Brendena. An interesting name.
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I was very happy to learn that about her from my dad. I always had wondered if it had hardened or embittered her.
Brendena was her name in the US; I believe her German name was Braune. I am not sure where they got Brendena from!
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I love the photo of Eva as a baby – what an adorable child! I also love your dad’s sweet memories of his grandmother – definitely something you would never ‘learn’ from records.
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Thanks, Debi. It meant a lot to me to hear him talk about her in such a loving way. He rarely spoke about his childhood until I started doing family history. It’s been a real gift to me (and I hope for him).
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Your blogs are beautifully wrought with insight and feeling and worth preserving.About burglars:
according to my mother, privacy was more relaxed in Denver than in Philadelphia and it was customary, at least in my mother ‘s circle to enter a friend’s house un-announced, a practice she continued when she moved to Philadelphia, dispite being corrected. Keep writing! Love, Daddy
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Thanks, Daddy! Well, certainly I was raised never to even show up at someone’s door without calling first, let alone entering. It must have been the NYC influence.
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