Martha Sonntag

From the Busse autograph collection.

Here we go again with the green leaves upon the pine.


(Click on image to enlarge)
Image courtesy of the Hobart Historical Society.

Martha was living in Hobart Township when she signed Lena's album, but she had once lived "near Ainsworth," in the words of the Gazette, and the 1900 census also shows the family somewhere roughly south of the Ainsworth-Deep River area (if I can judge correctly by their neighbors), farming rented land. The family then consisted of William and Alvina Sonntag and their seven children, who ranged in age from late teens* down to the five-year-old Martha — the baby of the family, and the only one not born in Germany.

In February 1903, the Sonntags moved to Hobart Township, to rent the "Christian Heck farm," which lay approximately where Tenth Street meets S. Decatur Street (aka Clay, aka Arizona). By 1908 they had moved to "the Oliver Hayward farm southwest of town," and in 1910 (judging by their neighbors in the census), they were still living there, or near there, although in the spring of 1908 they had bought the "Geo. Stoeckert thirty-four acres southeast of town." (I don't know. Look at the 1908 Plat Map and drawn your own conclusions.) By 1920, it appears that William and Alvina had retired from farming and moved to a home on Lake Street; of all their children, only Martha remained with them, single and employed as a saleslady at some unspecified department store. And beyond that, I lose track of her.

Well, I don't have a picture of Martha, so how about a story about her father's horse accident at Ainsworth?


(Click on image to enlarge)

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*The census is almost illegible on that point. I'm not sure it's possible for Selma to be "4," as Ancestry.com has it, because someone named Selma Sonntag married in 1906. (See "Local Drifts," Hobart Gazette 26 Oct. 1906.)


Sources:
♦ 1891 Plat Book.
♦ 1900 Census.
♦ 1908 Plat Map.
♦ 1910 Census.
♦ 1920 Census.
♦ 1926 Plat Book.
♦ "General News Items." Hobart Gazette 7 Aug. 1903; 3 Apr. 1908.
♦ "Local Drifts." Hobart Gazette 13 Feb. 1903.