The Hyphen Family Lineage

Note: Researching Harold Tesmer

Knowing that his first wife, Margaret (Nagel), had died quite young in 1931, I had expected to find children Robert, Betty Marie, and Raymond Tesmer living with him in 1940. I found a listing in the 1940 US Census for Harold Tesmer in Athens, Marathon Cty, Wisconsin, with a wife and five children, none of whom were those from his first marriage. Additionally, his children by Margaret were all living with other family in 1940 - Robert with his maternal grandparents, and Betty Marie and Raymond with their paternal grandparents. My first assumption was that (unlikely as it was with such a relatively uncommon name) there was a second Harold Tesmer of about the same age and living in the same general region of Wisconsin.

Harold's 1941 obituary, though, indicated that he was alive in 1940, and that the household in Athens was his second family. For whatever reason, his children from his first marriage did not remain living with him after he remarried and started a new family. When he died at the young age of thirty-four, he left a total of eight children from two separate families surviving him.

Of further interest is the discrepancy in reported birthdates for Harold; the listing for his interment on the FindaGrave.com website, along with both his obituaries on the wiclarkcountyhistory.org website (one from the Abbotsford Tribune, and the other from the Colby Phonograph) give his year of birth as 1903. The 1930 US Census record for his household with Margaret gives his age as 23 - making his year of birth 1907 - and both of the records I've found for his birth clearly indicate a year of 1907. All the other census records I've found for him (in his parents' household, and in 1940 with his second wife and their children) also report his age such that his birth year would have beeb 1907. I have not seen a photo of his gravestone to verify the date reported on his interment listing, but I am quite certain the obituaries and the FindaGrave.com listing have the wrong year. This mistake may be due to Harold misreporting his age at some point and for some reason, though it may be a simple error in recordkeeping somewhere else that's simply been perpetuated.

Additionally, his obituary from the Colby Phonograph gives his marriage date to his second wife (Emma Wojchiehowski) as 11 Nov 1929, which must be in error - his first wife, Margaret, was still alive at that point, and he was recorded as living there in 1930. The other possibility is that he was a bigamist, maintaining two families and two households, or some similarly complicated situation, but I find this unlikely - his oldest child by wife Emma (daughter Marcella) is reported as seven years old in the 1940 US Census listing for their household in Athens, making her birthdate two years after the death of Margaret. I would think it more likely that Harold and Emma were married sometime in 1932, though I have not yet found a marriage record for the two of them.