Bertha's Second Marriage: It Was Bad

Even today I still think, sometimes, of that strange and touching poem written (I'm guessing) by Bertha Mueller Bodamer in memory of her husband, Benjamin, who died in 1917. To judge by the emotions that poem conveys, one would think their marriage was very happy.

After Ben's death, Bertha and her sons, Harry, Ralph, and Carlton, continued farming their 35 acres (more or less[1]) on S. Hobart Rd., marked with "BB" on the plat map from the 1926 Plat Book:


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As I mentioned in an earlier post, this map fails to show the 34-acre farm of Bertha's brother-in-law, John, bordering on the south side of her land.

In 1928, Ralph married Florence Wyant and set up a separate household close to his mother's; the following year Carlton married Helen Hardesty and moved to Hobart. The 1930 Census records only Bertha's unmarried eldest son, Harry, still under her roof.

By then, Bertha had been widowed over a decade. With her nest emptying, I suppose she was feeling lonely, and perhaps wishing for a pleasant and helpful companion, such as Ben had been. Anyway, somewhere she saw an advertisement by a man seeking a wife, and she answered it. The man was Fred Reuter, a widower living in West Virginia, about whom I know almost nothing. Fred came to Indiana, where he met Bertha. Evidently they liked each other.

Bertha's sons were not happy about this development. I wish I knew why! — did they object to a stranger moving in on what they viewed as their inheritance, or was there something about Fred in particular that they didn't like?

Around this time, possibly in February 1931,[2] Bertha's eldest son, Harry, married Ida Hollett[3] of Valparaiso.

Bertha soon went ahead with her own marriage. In April of 1931, she became Mrs. Fred Reuter (Indiana Marriage Collection). Shortly before the marriage, Fred lent her $2,000 to make improvements on her farm, with Bertha giving him a mortgage on property she owned in Porter County known as the "old Bodamer homestead," shown here on a 1938 plat map:


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Image from https://www.inportercounty.org/Data/Maps/1938Plats/Union-1938.gif.

If there was a honeymoon period, it was short. Everything soon started to fall apart. In December 1932, Bertha suffered a personal loss when her son, Harry, died at only 32 years of age, leaving a widow and no children. Fred Reuter failed to provide the companionship and help Bertha wanted; in fact, he left the home (or was thrown out by Bertha's sons) and went to Idaho. Bertha filed for divorce. Fred came back and began proceedings to foreclose on the mortgage he held. The unpleasant details started appearing in local papers in the autumn of 1934.


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Vidette-Messenger (Valparaiso, Ind.), 19 Oct. 1934.


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Vidette-Messenger (Valparaiso, Ind.), 26 Apr. 1935.


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Vidette-Messenger (Valparaiso, Ind.), 28 May 1935.

I can't find any follow-up articles beyond this. But it appears that Fred lost his mortgage case, if the 1938 plat map, above, can be relied on. The local papers soon went back to calling Bertha "Mrs. Ben Bodamer"[4] (notwithstanding the 1938 plat map).

The 1940 Census records a widow, Bertha Bodamer, living with her widowed daughter-in-law, Ida, on the farm. Her son, Carlton, had moved back to her neighborhood with his wife and three daughters, not farming but employed as a truck driver with the WPA. Her other son, Ralph, lived with his family and several relatives in Hobart Township and worked in a steel mill.

Both sons were back in the farm neighborhood for the 1950 Census, both working in steel mills. Bertha, 81 years of age, lived in Ralph's household. Ida was nowhere to be found.

Bertha died the following year — August 16, 1951 (Indiana Death Certificates). She was buried beside her pleasant and helpful companion, Ben, in the Woodvale Cemetery.

I still don't know what became of Ida, whose name is next to her husband's on the family grave marker without a death date.


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[1] The size varies slightly from one plat map to another.
[2] I'm getting the date from a family tree on Ancestry.com that does not cite a source. I cannot find a record of the marriage, nor any mention of it in on-line local papers.
[3] The surname comes from family trees on Ancestry.com, none of which cite a source. Occasionally it turns up spelled Hallett. Her middle name is given as Eve. (Just to make things more confusing, there was a longtime Valpo resident named Ida Mae Hollett, who was considerably older than our Ida.)
[4] E.g., "Hobart," Hammond Times, 13 May 1938.

A Dorman Family Reunion (ca. 1907)

From the Dorman descendant who gave us the photo of the Dormans at home comes this photo of the extended family, taken probably circa 1907 and probably at Blue Island, Illinois …


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Images courtesy of James Dorman Greene.

… with this information about who is in the photo:

Front (left to right): Willard, Winston, and Harold with their parents John Dorman and Ella (Walts) behind. Behind them are the other two Dorman boys I believe: John Carlisle and Clarence.

The rest of the front row: Edith Dorman (my grandmother) and two of her cousins. Edith's parents Louis and Ida Hecker are behind her. To their right is William Dorman and his with Lina. Back row starting from third on the left is Fred Dorman and his wife. Then Charles Dorman and his wife Elizabeth Ramm.

Blue Island was where John Dorman's parents had settled after coming over from Germany around 1849. He was born there in 1859.

From the same source comes this map showing where in Germany John Dorman's parents came from:



Their home village, Tangendorf, is now part of the municipality of Prignitz, in the state of Brandenburg. Per Wikipedia, its population in 2010 was 85.

Uncle Adolph

I don't think that I have previously posted this exact, precise view looking north up Center Street from its intersection with Third, in Hobart.


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Per the caption, the postcard is intended to show the post office, which was housed in the late, lamented Guyer building from March 3, 1910 up to February 1923.[1] The building on the right would be the Amazon restaurant. The 1910 Sanborn map shows that, aside from a small storage building on the north side of the Amazon, all other buildings in that block were homes.

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On the verso, we find that we are dealing with another Henning postcard.



The postmark is December 3, 1912. The recipient is Elmer Henning, the five-year-old son of Frank and Bertha Henning.

The sender is his Uncle Adolph — ostensibly; but Adolph was only seven years old at the time (born to Theodore and Minnie Henning in 1905), and I'm not sure that looks like the handwriting of a seven-year-old child. Here's what I think happened: Theodore and Minnie took their family to visit Frank, Bertha, and Elmer; and when they got back home (which may have been their Ross Township farm, or perhaps by 1912 they had moved to Crown Point), Adolph said he wanted to send a postcard to Elmer, so one of his parents or older siblings wrote what he wanted to say. It probably was a thrill for him to send the card, and a thrill for little Elmer to receive it.


Sadly, Adolph died a few months before his 26th birthday, on May 4, 1931 (Indiana Death Certificates).


Lake County Times (Hammond, Ind.), 5 May 1931.

He is buried in Crown Point's Maplewood Cemetery.


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[1] Dorothy Ballantyne and Robert Adams, Along the Route: A History of Hobart, Indiana, Post Offices and Postmasters (The Hobart Historical Society, Inc., 1979, rev. 1992).

Car Wreck Caught on Camera (1915)

Considering that this happened circa 1915, it was against all odds that the photographer happened to be there beside the road with a camera to capture the moment of impact:


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I have not been able to find out anything about this accident. It was not reported in the Hobart newspapers — surprising, since there must have been injuries, at least to the two men ejected from the car.

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OK, I've had my little joke. Here's the verso:



This gag postcard was made by Alfred Stanley Johnson, the same photographer who created the two 1912 postcards we saw earlier, sent by Herman Harms to his very good friend, Minnie Rossow. I suppose the senders picked this one up on a stop in Ainsworth.

This card is postmarked April 12, with no year. We know the year must be 1915 or later, from the copyright date on the front.

It is addressed to Frank Henning. He had been born in 1880 to Theodore Henning and his first wife, Mary.[1] In 1904 Frank married Bertha Gauger in Lake County, Indiana (Indiana Marriage Collection). Subsequent censuses, 1910 through 1940, show them farming in Union Township, Porter County, so the "Hobart" in their address referred to the post office that handled R.F.D. route #2. Here is their farm in the Union Township plat map of 1921:


(Click on image to enlarge)
Image from https://www.inportercounty.org/Data/Maps/1921Plats/Union-1921.jpg.

Their house is still standing. Its address is now 609 W 450 N. It was built in 1921, per the Porter County Assessor's records, so there must have been an earlier house where they lived when they first moved there. An outbuilding dates to "1900," which in assessor parlance tends to mean "a long time ago but nobody remembers exactly when."

Frank and Bertha farmed that land for upwards of three decades. They had two children: a daughter, Margaret, born in 1905, who died before her second birthday; and a son, Elmer, born in 1906. Around 1931, Elmer married Florence Mounce. The 1940 Census showed the young couple, and their son, Harold, living on the farm with Frank and Bertha. By the 1950 Census all had left farming: Frank and Bertha retired to Hobart; Elmer and Florence moved to Valparaiso where both took jobs.

Frank died in 1953 …


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Vidette-Messenger (Valparaiso, Ind.), 3 Jan. 1953.

… and Bertha in 1962:


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Vidette-Messenger (Valparaiso, Ind.), 3 Feb. 1962.



The postcard's senders were probably Frank's half-sister, Amanda, and her husband, Albert Weiler, whom I talked about in an earlier post.

Albert died of injuries he suffered in an accident on his farm in 1944:


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Hammond Times, 18 Jan. 1944.

A few months later, Amanda sold the farm and its contents:


Hammond Times, 13 Apr. 1944.
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The description of the farm's location sounds like the old Michael Weiler farm shown in my previous post, linked above. It had lost about ten acres — some of that, likely, when the new U.S. 30 bisected the farm.

Amanda survived her husband by 16 years, dying in March 1960. She also survived one of her sons.


We[2] don't know exactly who "Uncle & Aunt Holmstrom" were. I have found a record of a Louise Hennings marrying a Carl Holmstrom in Chicago in 1875, but can't find enough information on her to determine if she was related to our Hennings.

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[1] She and Theodore had been married in Cook County in 1877 and lived in Chicago. Mary died in 1881, before Theodore came to Ross Township.
[2] The Henning family genealogist and I.

Destruction at Fourth and Center

The Gazette of March 19, 1964, included this photo of the demolition of Dr. Pliny Gordon's house.


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I have not been able to verify that "a beautiful and modern apartment building," or anything else, for that matter, was built on the site.

The Dormans at Home on a Summer Day

A great-grandnephew of John and Ella Dorman recently sent me this wonderful family photo:


(Click on image to enlarge)
Image courtesy of James Dorman Greene.

It was taken circa 1907 at Summit Lawn, where the Indian Ridge Golf Course now operates.

Ella Dorman is standing at center. John is seated at right. The boy in the toy automobile is little Winston, who would not live to be named in the 1910 census. The boy standing behind him is probably his brother, Harold. The others are not identified.

It's summer, obviously — leaves everywhere; light clothing, shirtsleeves, and bare feet. Looking at the two American flags on display, I'm inclined to think the family is celebrating Independence Day.

Winston's toy auto is interesting, isn't it? It's probably a pedal car, resembling the full-size autos of the time (minus the headlights). Automobiles for adults were just beginning to be popular in this area. A little boy with a miniature auto suggests financially comfortable parents, who liked to give their children nice things.

The other boy is riding a tricycle of the penny-farthing style that was popular in the 1880s.

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From the same Dorman descendant comes this circa-1935 photo of the Summit Lawn house …


(Click on images to enlarge)
Images courtesy of James Dorman Greene.

… and these portraits, also circa 1935, of Ella and John Dorman:




These images are from a complete copy of Rose Mathew Dorman's family history booklet, which I will soon substitute for the incomplete copy I posted earlier.

Incipient Hornet's Nest

Recently I noticed this strange little nest under the eaves on the back of my house.


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If you climb up a ladder and get close enough to it, you can see the hexagonal cells inside.



After checking around on the internet, I have decided that this is how hornet's nests start out. We've already seen how they end up.

The bad news is, it's right in my back yard, about 3 feet above my head and 5 feet from my back door. The good news is, I haven't seen any activity in or around it since I first noticed it. I'm hoping and praying that it's been abandoned.


Here is a time-lapse video of a hornet queen building her nest almost from the very start.

Here is a time-lapse video in which you can see the pupae wiggling in their little hexagonal cells.

Here is a longer video by a guy who thinks that having a hornet's nest in your back yard is not a problem.