This is my Great Grandmother, she had both a hard and interesting life. She was originally from Lipertshofen,Germany. Life started off hard for her and her mother. She was the illegitimate child of Wallburga Obermeier and Georg Nerb, which in the 1800's meant that you were an outcast. Her mother could not even have her baptized in her home village she had to travel to Ingolstadt in order to find a priest who would perform Marie's baptism.
The next part of her story has Marie grown up and working as a domestic or servant before knowing her future husband. This is when the stories get both interesting and fuzzy. Leonard gets into a serious physical fight and has to leave his village in fear of being incarcerated. My cousins and I remember stories from my grandpa saying that Leonard was disowned by his family because he was in love with a domestic and wanted to marry her. So was the fight Leonhardt was involved in because of Marie?
Was he fighting over his love of a woman who was both illegitimate and beneath his station in life? This question may never be solved, all but a couple of people who knew the answer are gone. After leaving Germany in order to start a new life, my great grandparents ended up in Milwaukee, where they raised their family of five children. My grandpa was the second child and the the oldest son. He didn't talk much of his mother to me, but he always talked about he love of flowers, especially lilacs, roses and gladiolus. I can't help but believe that this love came from his mother. One of the few surviving photos of her is the one above standing next to one of her lilacs, the others are from my Grandpa's wedding day and show her in a wheelchair. The last chapters of her life were painful. Her health took a turn for the worst when she and Leonhardt went back home to Germany around 1913, it seems that the entire Obermeier family had tuberculosis, my Great Grandmother included. This trip I've learned from my newly found German relatives brought out the disease and she was never truly healthy again after this trip. She also suffered from extreme rheumatism arthritis which had her in a wheelchair by the time my Grandpa married my grandma in 1923 . She finally succumbed to breast cancer and died in 1926 at the young age of 55.
