Photoessay #431 - Morris and Clara Baumann

Morris and Clara Baumann, my great grandparents. The writing on lower right of this picture looks to be in German. My mother said they went 'back to visit' on their 25th wedding anniversary and the picture was taken there.

Morris was born in 1857 in Schmeiheim Germany, arriving in America in 1883. A biography of him, written in 1918 is at http://www.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~ctnhvbio/Baumann_Morris.html

He married Clara Lederer in 1890. The Lederer family lived in New Jersey, Clara was born in this country. Their 25th anniversary would be in 1915. This could be a 25th anniversary picture. He established a very successful local business, the Baumann Rubber Company in New Haven CN which at its height employed 175 people.

But the business failed in the Depression. I once asked my grandmother Regina Weil Baumann what happened. She sniffed "Too many chiefs, too few indians". Don't know how the business was leveraged. The business failure plunged the whole extended family into poverty. My mother reports that her grandparents 'lost their house about the same time we did. After that they lived in a series of apartments. I used to stay there a lot'. After the business failure, my grandmother went to work, running a small gift shop from her home and later working in a dry goods store. My mother was the baby born in 1924. "That way Nanny didn't have to find a baby sitter, I spent a lot of time in their apartment. I used to eat limburger cheese for breakfast with my grandfather. My grandmother Clara used to get so mad, said it stunk up the house, the refrigerator and 'wasn't good for his innards'. We had a dog Trixi (a black and white short-haird terrier). Grandpa Baumann loved animals but he couldn't have any in the apartment which was only a block away. Every day, he would walk to the corner and whistle for Trixi. Trixi would run there and go walk with him. When they came back to the corner, my grandfather would tell Trixi to go home and she would.'

That business failure and the depression had an immense effect on that entire family. Everything changed for them.

I'm going to try to get my mother to tell more stories about her grandparents. A few years ago, I asked my father for stories about his grandparents and he wouldn't engage at all.