(Click on image to enlarge)
Image courtesy of the Hobart Historical Society and Tom Rainford.
As an adventurous teenager, Augusta had come to the United States in 1871,* leaving her parents in Germany (to follow some years later). Augusta was trained as a seamstress and planned to earn her own wages. She stayed with relatives in Chicago.
In As It Was Told to Me, Minnie Rossow Harms tells us that the marriage of Augusta's parents, Peter Stolp and Caroline Junke, had been more or less arranged. Peter, a widower with grown children, was a friend of Caroline's father, and the two men decided between themselves that such a marriage would suit both of them. So Caroline, as a young woman, became the wife of a man some 20 years her senior, and they shared a home with her father. The marriage was polite rather than passionate. Caroline hoped for better things for Augusta: a freer choice, perhaps a love match with some handsome young man.
We can't know what motivated Augusta, at about 16 years of age, to marry Henry Rossow. He was not a young man; he was a forty-something widower with three sons ranging in age from toddler to schoolboy. But this was the New World, not the Old Country; Augusta, being neither timid nor dependent, presumably made a free choice. And perhaps it was a love match, after all.
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*1910 Census.
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