Ann Hillmann Schwaba - Continued

Peter and Mary had six children; Joseph, Walter, Burt, Harold, Fred, and lastly Gertrude.  Joseph had a son, Joseph.  His wife's name was Marjorie.    Burt married Elsie and had no children.  Harold married Amy and had three children; Edmund, Harold, and daughter whose name I cannot remember.    Fred became a doctor and married Anna Jennings and had four children, Cyrilla, Maurita, Peter, and Fred.    Gertrude married Herman Miesch and had three children; Jacqueline, William, and Robert.    All of Peter and Mary's children settled in New Jersey and spent the lives there--Walter, my father, being the only exception.  He worked for the Union Tank Car Co.  The company transferred him to Chicago in the late twenties.  Up until then our family lived in a small town called Hawthorne, New Jersey.  His brother Joe, who was a builder, built our home there.  When we moved to Chicago we first lived on Wilson Avenue, but moved after one year to the Portage Park area and stayed there until the deaths of both my parents.    My mother, Anna Daley, was born in Waldwick, New Jersey in 1887.  Her parents were John and Mary Ellen, who were both from Ireland.  John came to America as a 16-year-old with his brother Thomas.  They had relatives in New Jersey who sponsored them.  Both of the boys got jobs on the Erie Railroad and worked on that line until their deaths.  Mary Ellen was actually born in Liverpool, England. Her parents,

Her father was a foreman in iron works at the railroad yards in Patterson, New Jersey.  This was considered an excellent job.  After he married our grandmother, Mary, he started in the grocery business.  He was not successful in this endeavor because of the Depression of the 1890�s.  He gave many people credit and they did not pay their bills and he was forced out of business.  It was at this time that our grandmother contracted tuberculosis and they had to move to an area were she would get fresh air and lots of milk.  Consequently, they bought a farm in Clifton.  Somehow she recovered from this almost deadly disease, and continued have a lot of children.    By this time Peter came to the attention of a very successful silk manufacturer in Patterson, New Jersey--a Mr. Julius Brandeis.  He gave Peter the job of managing the silk mill, one of the largest in the east.    The family moved into a large home on Crooks Avenue in South Patterson.  They had lots of fruit trees, chickens and what would constitute a small farm. I can remember, as a small child, seeing my grandmother canning lots of berries and fruit and my grandfather and his German cronies making peach brandy from all the peach trees on their property.  Saturday afternoon's were a German fest as the men would sit outside and drink beer and speak German while the women would be in the large kitchen baking pies and making German dishes.  My grandmother, Mary, was a great cook.  Mary died in 1931 of breast cancer.  It was thought that it was predicated on the fact that she had tuberculosis in her youth.  Peter went on to live until 1944 or 1945.  When he was almost 70 he began a new silk mill making silk typewriter ribbons for the Underwood Typewriter Co. After his death, the business was sold.  He was really quite an entrepreneur all his life.

Continued