Julius Wohlgemuth death record
Julius Wohlgemuth died in Stettin in 1912 leaving a young son Leopold
If I travel to Germany and Poland this summer, one of the subjects of interest will be the history of the Wohlgemuth family in Starogard, Danzig (Gdansk), and Berlin. I am plotting an itinerary that would give me two days in Gdansk including a sidetrip to nearby Starogard Gdansk, from where the Wohlgemuths originally came. One question that I had was the address of the moving company that the two Wohlgemuth brothers, Julius and Isaak, operated in Danzig.
I knew I had that info in my files at home, contained in several Danzig telephone directory listings that I saved some time ago. But I was away from home just on my mobile and I typed in Wohlgemuth to the Danzig Database on JewishGen. I don't think I had ever seen these results before.
Name
(Maiden Name)Record TypeDateAgeFatherMotherResidenceCommunitySourceLeopold Meyer B 24-AUG-1910 Julius WOHLGEMUTH Rosa SITTENFELDT Poggenpfuhl 73 [Poggenpfuhl 73] FHL 11184407/2, p. 33, I 258, r 3336
Hilde B 30-JAN-1906 Isaak WOHLGEMUTH Betty KATZ Abbeggasse 1 a [Abbegg1a] Danzig FHL 1184407/2, p 08, l 57, r 534
The second one is Aunt Hilda's birth record, showing the names of her parents, Isaak and Betty Wohlgemuth, and their address, as well as a record locator/identifier. The first one gives the name of a wife and son of Isaak's brother and business partner Julius Wohlgemuth. Previous to this, we have not had any information about Julius' family.
I got home and checked the old phone directory images. Yes! Both the business location and Julius' residence were at the same address at Poggenpfuhl 73, right in the heart of the commercial district near to the wharves. Today Poggenpfuhl is called Zabi Kruk, and it remains a busy thoroughfare. Abbeggasse has been harder so far to place. There were several Jewish neighborhoods in 1910 Danzig were Isaak's family might have lived. I'll keep working to locate that address.
So then I popped over to Ancestry in order to update my tree with the new names. I navigated to Julius and noticed there was a new Ancestry hint (leaf) showing for him. Many times these don't check out but I clicked and was immediately shown a February 1912 death certificate from Stettin, Prussia. My German is getting better and I could read the names of his parents and wife on the document. I'll post it in a separate file so it doesn't take up too much space here.
It is too bad that Julius died young, age 41, leaving a widow and young child. The place of death is interesting, Stettin being another Prussian commercial center. Perhaps he died there while on business. It also helps to explain why the moving company in Danzig was sold to a German buyer the following year, and that was when Isaak moved his family to Berlin.
Quite possibly, the widow Rosa Wohlgemuth and her young son Leo also went to Berlin at that time. One of the Wohlgemuth gravesites at the Weissensee Cemetery in Berlin is for Rosa Wohlgemuth, and we were never sure who that was. Now we know it was Julius's widow. And what became of young Leopold Wohlgemuth? Read on in the next post.
