Young mothers
Edelburga, 7 July 2026
It’s trendy these days to tend a starter and also to name that starter. A few days ago, a friend asked the name of mine — she’s Abby. And the story behind the name is a tragic and mysterious one.
Abby the starter
Fellow family historians will agree that you sometimes find yourself mysteriously drawn to an ancestor you’ve never met. You might not even know much about them beyond a name and some dates, but you see them as a kindred spirit.
In this way, I am drawn to my great-great grandmother Appolonia, whose 171st birthday is this weekend. It’s a strange name, but, lacking baby name books, the Pennsylvania Dutch turned to what they had to hand in the house. St. Apollonia is celebrated on February 9th in the old Pennsylvania almanacs and it seems that the name was not uncommon among the Pennsylvania Dutch. After all, Katherine Milhous — the author we met in a previous post — wrote the book “Appolonia’s Valentine” in 1954 about a Pennsylvania Dutch girl and her French penpal.
Appolonia makes her Valentine’s card
My great-great grandmother Appolonia is recorded on documents with several different spellings and sometimes as just Abby. I know next to nothing about her, but for some inexplicable reason, I am drawn to her.
Grandmother Abby died young at only 32. I don’t know why she died so young, but it was likely one of the many ailments that ravaged the 19th century. The family certainly wasn’t spared disease. Just two years after her death all eight of her children were co-infected with diphtheria and scarlet fever.¹
One of those children who survived was my great grandmother, Emma. Sadly, she also died in her early 30s like her mother. She suffered from tuberculosis for four months over the Christmas season. In her last week of life, she was bedridden and gave birth to a stillborn daughter. It is so horribly tragic.
I often wonder about the significant loss that these ancestors endured. So much love and loving guidance was lost. To lose young mothers in two successive generations must have also significantly impacted household wisdom on those old farmsteads.
And yet, I’d probably not be here were it not for the death of another young mother in her early 30s. In the 1930s, typhoid fever swept through my grandfather’s family. It claimed the lives of his wife and their 8 year old son. My grandmother, Emma’s daughter and Abby’s granddaughter, moved in as a housekeeper afterwards to help keep the household afloat and the remaining children cared for. Some five years later, she and my grandfather were having children of their own, the last being my mother.
I wonder if my grandmother had a mysterious draw to her grandmother Abby like me. She kept a stack of yellowed newspaper clippings related to family in an empty chocolate box in the top drawer of her bureau. One was a picture of four generations of the Schnell family — the elderly woman seated was her grandmother Abby’s sister-in-law.
Four generations of the Schnell family²
From all accounts, connections to her mother’s family were severed after her mother’s death. It’s curious to me that later she came across this photo in the daily newspaper and saved it. Did she look at it and wonder about her grandmother Abby and mother Emma? The two women in the picture would have corresponded to Abby and Emma in her line. I wish I knew more.
Grandmother Abby is ever present in my life these days. The starter named after her thrives and shares her lost wisdom with me in subtle but significant ways. Like that of all loving grandmothers, it is the wisdom of patience, warmth, and nourishment.
Sources
¹Allentown Democrat, 26 March 1890, p 2.
²Morning Call, 10 September 1943, p 22.