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Stayed Home

I've written about my maternal grandparents, Inez and Shug, and about my paternal grandfather, Erwin Sr. This week's "52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks" prompt of "This ancestor stayed home" has all along seemed perfect to write about my father's mother, Helen.


The problem is that I don't know anything about her.


When you're doing genealogical research, the problem is usually more one of theorizing ahead of facts. You come across bits and pieces -- a turn of phrase in a will, an overly-dramatized mention in a newspaper, the florid biography, even particular items of clothing or jewelry in photographs -- that all shape your impressions about an individual; it can be hard not to feel like you know more about them than you actually do, because that's the way our brains work, trying to make sense out of things (bless their little pink lobes). With Helen, however, the problem is just the opposite -- there's just no "there" there... I just can't seem to find the person amongst the artefacts.


In 1904, Helen Sturn was the firstborn child of French-Canadian Myrtle St. Peter and German George Sturn. The couple shared the Catholic religion and both came from large families, yet Helen's only sibling was her brother, Jamie, who was five years younger. Helen was a tiny baby and diminutive adult, yet I never heard a hint that she was delicate or sickly. Growing up, she wouldn't have wanted for anything and would have been familiar to (and likely related to) just about anyone she encountered.


She attended St. Michael's Parochial school and then St. Mary's Academy, which were considered college classes, although she did not achieve a degree. When she turned 18, in 1922, she accepted the marriage proposal of Erwin Feltz, the adopted son of an elderly, well-to-do Monroe widow. They married in 1923 in an early morning church ceremony followed by a wedding breakfast. A year later, my father, Erwin Jr., was born.


From city directories, my grandparents lived most of their adult lives at 12 W Noble in Monroe, a house that Erwin Sr.'s adoptive mother almost certainly bought for them. It is a single story, the smallest house on a block that mostly features sprawling Victorians. In old pictures and as I remember it, the foundation was thickly hidden by shrubberies and the windows mostly concealed by big metal awnings; the house was dark. All of the interior photos are even underexposed. I have a picture that is presumably of my Dad's baptism, and then some of a birthday party for him that was held at the home of Helen's parents, a few houses down the block. There are some candid shots of Helen and Erwin around the house, probably taken by my Dad, and a few from what seem to have been a fishing trip, likely to nearby Lake Erie, perhaps using a cabin owned by one of Helen's many relatives.

Dad, Helen and Terry, my half-brother. Presumably, Terry's mother was standing to Dad's right.

I can tell you about my Dad's induction into the army, his entry to Michigan State University under the GI Bill, his sad first marriage, his graduation with a degree in Bacteriology and his divorce, but all I know of Helen during that time is from three pictures of her, including one that is very oddly framed, evidently cropping Jacquelene, Dad's first wife, out of the picture. I can tell you about the places where my grandfather worked, but, although I'm sure money was tight, Helen never worked outside the home.


And, although the chilly relationship between the two women undoubtedly colored her perception, as far as my mother was concerned, Helen never worked within the home, either. As Mom told it, Erwin Jr and Erwin Sr both were so used to seeing to Helen's every need first that they didn't even think about it or realize they were doing it. They did all the housework and cooking and most of the shopping. Mom said that Helen seemed capable of all those things, she just didn't do them (which sounds like a great gig if you can get it). The thing is, she also didn't seem to have any other interests, enthusiasms or pursuits. She didn't read, knit, sew or have any hobbies. She belonged to some church committees, as was expected, and occasionally visited her relatives, but wasn't socially active, and that went for her and Erwin as a couple, also. No one to whom I've spoken remembers her as a sad or depressed person, a nasty or angry person, an ignorant or stupid person or even just someone of whom "less said the better." Everyone has agreed on one thing, however: Helen and Erwin were devoted to one another and kept everyone else at arm's length. No one felt that they knew either of them well -- or possibly at all.


A few months after my father died, Helen and Erwin came to visit, staying with us in the tiny house that Mom had just inherited following the sudden death of my maternal grandmother, Inez. Still reeling from the dual losses and wondering how she was going to keep the household afloat with one child still in arms and no marketable skills, Mom was incandescent to learn that the reason for their visit was to request that my father's body be moved from Woodward to Monroe. She refused. After that, any relationship we had with Helen and Erwin was strictly on behalf of Patrick and me. I was eleven when my grandfather died, less than two years after my father. I don't know how Mom found the money, but she and I flew to Michigan for his funeral. Helen was distraught and had to be held back as she threatened to throw herself into the grave after him.


I didn't see Helen again until I was old enough to drive. A high school friend and Patrick and I borrowed Mom's car and made a brave road-trip to Michigan to visit her in her condo overlooking K-Mart. She drove us to lunch in a very large Cadillac, in which she could barely see over the wheel, and gave us rather random gifts that seemed to have been K-Mart impulse buys. She said that she was very glad to see us but it was an awkward visit; she didn't know much about us and I was eager to avoid a meltdown like the one she'd had at the funeral. It would have been the perfect time to ask her about my father, my grandfather and especially about herself, but I was seventeen and... I didn't.


Two years later, someone from the state social services called to say Helen had been found unconscious on the floor of her home and she had been hospitalized with severe dehydration. I was in college and my first car had been totalled by a drunk driver, so once again, Mom came to my rescue and we drove to Michigan together while Patrick stayed with a friend. Helen wasn't particularly lucid and it was clear she wasn't able to care for herself any longer (if she ever really had been). We had to return to Iowa before she was released from the hospital and a cousin had the unenviable task of taking her to the nursing home. He also boxed up and otherwise disposed of all her things, very kindly sending me her wedding ring, which he said the nursing home did not want her to keep with her, and an enormous amount of Bavarian place settings and serving pieces that were apparently a wedding gift to Helen and Erwin from her German grandfather. I had never seen the china before.




I went to see Helen in the nursing home most summers, but they were brief visits as, by then, she didn't remember Patrick or me at all. Her cousin and then her cousin's daughter would write in response to letters I sent. Their well-intentioned assertions of affection and care were sweet but I had no illusions that they actually reflected Helen's emotions in any way.


Helen died in 1994 at the age of 91. She remains a cypher and an enigma to me. I can make some guesses -- that perhaps as such a small baby, she was coddled and considered fragile; that she met a man who had nursed his own mother before her death left him an orphan at age 11 and who was looking for someone else to care for as one often does in the face of such childhood trauma. Maybe they wanted to make sure no one knew the details of Erwin's insalubrious childhood or maybe they just were so entranced with one another that no one else mattered. Helen was raised in a time when to be a woman meant being a wife and a good wife's identify was subsumed into that of her husband. Yet, when I research emigrant and pioneer wives, there is almost always something that I learn about them as individuals, but not so with Helen.


I just wish I knew who she was.


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