I do not remember the first time I saw her, but the last time I saw her, she looked peacefully asleep. Her hair was white and curly, skin wrinkled, hands, rosary tangled in her gnarled fingers, folded serenely on her chest. I was five years old and this was my first funeral. I did not really understand what was going on, as I had never been to an Orthodox Catholic church, much less an Orthodox Catholic funeral. I did not know my great-grandmother very well and was about ten years older and when I finally did hear her story, I was floored. I only wish I had been older before she died so I could have heard it from her.
Anna (Schegetz) Heinrich was born in Hungary in 1905, the oldest of three daughters. When she was young, her family came to United States, but her mother did not care for the new country. She left with her three daughters a few years after arriving to go back to Hungary while Anna’s father sold their home and business, planning to reunite with his wife and children back in Europe. Unfortunately, World War I got in the way, closing the door to European travel. He could leave America, but he could not go home.
Meanwhile, Anna, her mother, and twin sisters, Elizabeth and Catherine, were living with a friend, earning their keep by working on a farm, waiting for the war to end and for their husband and father to come back to them. Things went well for a few months – the war stayed away from where they were staying and the little family was fairly happy – until tragedy struck. In the harvest of 1914, Anna’s mother was badly burned in a fire and died three days later, leaving the three girls to work alone for a woman the Schegetzes obviously did not truly know.
None of the three girls could read, so they did not question when the woman they assumed to be their benefactor told them that their father had written and said that he had met another woman in America and had started a family, despite the fact that, by all accounts, Mr. Schegetz had no way of knowing about his wife’s death. The girls had no choice but to stay for the next five or six years with a woman who reveled, a little too loudly, in the fact that she basically had three slaves to do her farm work. A family friend found out what had been going on and, now that the war was over, was able to get word to Anna’s father and assured him that he would help the girls get their papers together and help them get to America.
And so it was that in the summer of 1920, that Anna, now fifteen, and her two sisters, both eleven, none of whom spoke English or any other European language, made the trip across Europe to Schaumberg, France, where they boarded the U.S.S Lafayette and made their way to Ellis Island in New York, where they met up with their father who went with them on a train to Detroit, Michigan to start a new life in America.
After getting established in Detroit, Anna got a job in a bakery, where she met a young man named Godfrey Heinrich, a man I would eventually name a stuffed bunny after. They were married in 1928 and Anna gave birth to a daughter, Theresa Ulga Heinrich on August 4, 1932. They left the bakery where they met and went to work at another bakery in 1936, which they would later own in 1943 and call Heinrich’s. And, as per what seemed like tradition, their daughter, Theresa, met a young man her father hired as a baker named Lee Stanton Wehlann and married him on August 13, 1955. In 1959, Lee and Theresa became parents of a baby boy they named Don and in 1990, Don and his wife, Beth, welcomed a baby girl into their lives. I think we can all guess who that is.
So it seems that after all the hardships and all the work, a girl from war-torn Europe was able to achieve the American dream. She was not famous. She never received any laud from the rest of the world. Chances are, no one past my generation in my family will even remember her, but the honor of telling her story is all mine.
