Wilhelm Zietzke: A Not-Quite-Ordinary Life

Some people are just “characters.”  Wilhelm Zietzke (1830-1913) falls into that category.  (I’ve written about Wilhelm’s son Emiel in another post—he was a character, also!)

According to his death certificate, Wilhelm was born in “Misslowitz, Deutsch Poland” in 1830.  Myslowitz is the German name of this town, but “Mysłowice” is the Polish name, and it’s now a part of Poland; this is one of those areas that has been part of a number of different countries over the years.  He gives his birthplace as “Poland” in 1885 and “Germany” in 1910; his son gives his father’s birthplace as “Poland” in 1920 and as “Prussia” in 1930.  Suffice it to say that, from what I can see online, Hitler was not kind to Myslowitz...   But Wilhelm left for America in 1861. 

The Museum of the Rockies provided me with a biographical sketch of Wilhelm published in 1885.  This told me that he went first to Cincinnati, Ohio; then to St. Joseph, Missouri; then onwards to the Wild West frontier  town of Helena, Montana Territory by 1865.  He was a prospector and then a carpenter there.  By 1868 he had relocated to Bozeman, Montana.  His first job there was building a log house for General Willson, and the biography concludes by saying that he is a successful building contractor. 

Eventually Wilhelm gave up carpentering and by 1900 had opened a cigar and confectionery store in Bozeman, and a photo survives.

But Wilhelm was more than a prospector, a carpenter, and a shopkeeper.  He was also very clever.  On the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office website (http://www.uspto.gov) I found out that he held a number of patents for some very useful things.  Here is the patent drawing for one of them—an early can opener.  He also held patents for an early sash window, a butter churn, and a “combination tool.”  Genius must run in the family; his son held patents as well, and two of his grandsons. 

Wilhelm married Emilie Prebe in 1883, when he was 52 and she was just 23.  If he was married before that time, I don’t know about it—but I wouldn’t be surprised to find out that he was!  (In the spirit of “the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree,” see my post on his son Emiel.)  They had three children.  Not a happy marriage, apparently, as evidenced by the fact that in the 1910 census, they had separated.  He had moved to nearby Sheds Bridge, Montana, where he opened a small store.

In his later years, Wilhelm had a ‘peg leg.’  A picture exists of him standing outside of his store, peg leg and all.  Wilhelm’s 1913 obituary quite contradictingly says this about it:  “He had to have his right leg amputated some five or six years ago after a long illness.  He learned to be quite active again, but was more or less of an invalid from the time of his loss of a limb until his death.”  

Many people of his generation were born, grew up, married young, worked a farm, had children, and died…  But then there are those like Wilhelm, who added a few extra twists.

Mystery Monday: The Brides of Emiel Zietzke

 Sometimes you think you know a person… especially if that person is your father. 

I’ve been researching the paternal line of one of my clients. He thought he knew his father, Emiel Zietzke, pretty well—it was his grandfather, Wilhelm Zietzke, who was the main object of his curiosity. But his father’s life has had some unexpected twists and turns that my client didn’t know about!

Emiel August Zietzke (1885-1956) was born in Bozeman, Montana. In his young adulthood, he helped his father Wilhelm run his confectionary store there. Emiel first married in 1911 at age 25, to Florence Henrietta Saunders. They homesteaded in the Wilsall, Montana area and had three children (all now deceased). But the marriage wasn’t a very long one; Flora died in 1924.

The years went by… Emiel remarried in 1938, after his three children were grown. His new wife was Lila DesRosier, whom he married when he was 53 and she was 31. They soon had two children—one died many years ago in a car accident, and the other is my client. The marriage certificate said that Emiel was a widower, but that was only partially true. What my client never knew was that his father had at least two more marriages between Florence and Lila, between 1924 and 1938, both apparently ending in divorce. 

The mystery is, who were those two wives, and what went wrong? And—were there more? 

I first discovered Ida Mason Benson when ancestry.com added some new Washington marriage records to their collections last fall. And there it was—a marriage in Spokane, Washington in 1930 between Emiel A. Zietzke of Bozeman, Montana and Ida Benson. A little more digging told me that Ida was a widow whose maiden name was Mason; her first husband was William C. Benson, and she had a son by that marriage named Albert. Emiel and Ida must not have been married long, as a number of Montana newspaper clippings show her reverting back to the last name “Benson” by the 1950s. My questions: When and why did Emiel and Ida split up? What happened to their marriage? 

Then a few weeks ago, after subscribing to newspaperarchive.com, I stumbled upon this clipping, from the Montana Standard, September 5, 1929:

Yet another marriage! So Emiel wasn’t a widower very long after his first wife Flora died. Some more digging produced a marriage certificate that told me that Emiel married Margaret Dell in Green River, Sweetwater, Wyoming in 1925. The article said that she left him after only two months, but a divorce wasn’t granted until 1929. My questions: Who was Margaret Dell? How did Emiel meet her? And what happened to their marriage?

 

Let’s reconstruct this roster of brides:

• Florence Saunders: 1911-1924
• Margaret Dell: 1925-1929
• Ida Mason Benson: 1930-??
• Lila DesRosier: 1938-1956, when Emiel died

That leaves one more question unanswered: Ida went back to the name “Benson.” Perhaps they weren’t married long. Did Emiel marry one more time, between then and 1938? Wouldn’t I like to know!