My paternal grandmother. Jewish daughter of Katherine and Leopold Krause. Born 13 October 1885 in Prague (?) Bohemia (now Czech Republic) Her father was German and Grandma Jennie recalled seeing him ride a white horse. She also recalled seeing the funeral cortège of Habsburg Crown Prince Rudolph pass by on its way from the Meyerling hunting lodge where the Crown Prince and his mistress died mysteriously in 1889.

Jennie and her siblings were orphaned and sent to live with their maternal aunt and uncle in Prague. Her uncle was a butcher and Jennie was employed by him as a "goose girl," tending geese and being fouled as she force-fed them for market. As a teenager she immigrated to America via Hamburg with her brother Adolph, sailing in steerage, and arriving in New York City around 1900 - 1904. It is believed that their immigration was sponsored by an uncle or other relative in New York. Adolph soon moved to Passaic New Jersey and married Hungarian immigrant Esther Atlasz. Jennie worked in a factory in New York City but found the work intolerable.

How Jennie came to leave New York and arrive in Greenville, South Carolina is not quite clear, but one story had it that Grandpa Alfred William vonFingerlin worked for the Immigration Department at Ellis Island and it may have been there that he recruited our Jennie to work in the family household in Greenville. Another story had it that Jennie sailed down to South Carolina to work in one of the many textile mills there. Great Grandfather Edgar M von Fingerlin owned stock in a mill there, and it may have been that his son Alfred selected her from a boatload of immigrant workers. She did go to work in the vonFingerlin home as a housekeeper, hired by Grandpa.

Grandpa had been married and perhaps still was. The family plot at Christ Church Cemetery in Greenville holds the remains of the infant daughter of A von Fingerlin, buried 25 February 1897. Married or not, Alfred got Jennie "in a family way" and, as she later told the story to my sister Donna, in fear of her illicit pregnancy, hid in a closet, and then, in the dark of night Alfred and Jennie set out in a horse-drawn carriage for points south.

It was about this time that Alfred changed the family name from von Fingerlin to Cleveland. Why Cleveland? It was said that Alfred's father Edgar had been a guest in the Grover Cleveland White House. And by the size of the statuary in a nearby Cleveland plot in the Christ Church Cemetery in Greenville, Cleveland was a prominent name in South Carolina as well.

I believe they first settled in Lindale or Atlanta Georgia, one of which is the birthplace of their firstborn, daughter Katherine, but they moved quite a bit across the South, living in Trion, Georgia; Hartselle, Alabama; Mussel Shoals, Alabama; Corinth, Mississippi; Beaumont, Texas; San Marcos, Texas; San Diego, California; and Highland Park (Los Angeles), California. Daddy told of accompanying Grandma as she carried a pearl-handled pistol down a number of Southern backstreets in an effort to catch Grandpa Cleveland in one of his rumoured trysts. It may be that Grandpa's pecadilloes contributed to their frequent relocations. Their divorce in the late 1920's or early 1930's was soon followed by Grandpa's marriage to a Dr Ella ___, but Grandma and Grandpa Cleveland were remarried and divorced at least once more. In the 1930's Grandma Jennie went to live in Hawaii where she had a nice life with a military man until 1936. In the early 1950's she had a one-month marriage to a Mr Fritz of Redwood Valley, California.

The children of Alfred William Cleveland (né von Fingerlin) and Jeanette Krause:

1. Katherine Cleveland
born: 16 January 1906? Lindale or Atlanta, Georgia
died: October 1989, Nevada City, California
children: Marjorie Crystal deTarr, Linda Lee Cox, Paul Sanford Cox
2. Edward Edgar Cleveland
born: 25 February 1907, Trion, Georgia
died: 25 March 1992, Ukiah, California
children: Donna Lee, Edward Alfred, Jane Marie
3. Marguerite Cleveland
born: 24 July 1911
died: 30 October 1912
4. Arthur Cleveland (AKA: Joe Mitchell)
born: 1911?
died: 1986?
children: Miles Mitchell
5. William Marcus Cleveland
born: 7 November 1913, Hartselle, Alabama
died: 15 August 1997, Tucson, Arizona
children: Marcus William, Diana Jean, John
6. Samuel Cleveland (AKA: Nicholas Alexander Cleveland)
born: 26 May 1915, Hartselle, Alabama
died: 6 February 1998 Honolulu, Hawaii
children: Ronald, Gerald

Grandma Jennie at age 50, in 1935 

Grandma's sister died in Lidice Czechoslovakia, when Hitler ordered a retaliatory extermination of the town's people, who were mostly Jewish.

I was 7 years old when Grandma Jennie died of cancer on 11 September 1952. She had lived for just a year or 2 in a house trailer next to our house, 3 miles north of Ukiah California. She used to make a favorite potato dish called "kartoffelkley" and mom remembers her making a dark cake and a white cake at Passover. I remember her singing "When it's Springtime in the Rockies" and "O Tannenbaum" and asking me why I cried when I visited her in the hospital. Grandma Jennie spoke "High German" and broken English and my sister Donna told of being non-plused when grandma told her she was going to give her a "klein" - which turned out to be a clown. I hope to add the memories of others to this meager memoir as they come in. Most recent update: 1 September 2003