Death of Joseph Haitz

The Ripley Bee

Joseph, or Joe as he referred to himself, died on Valentine's Day in 1960.  He was 82 years old while I was three and half months shy of being just 3 years old.  I have no memory of him.  At the time of his death, his sixteen children had given him 37 grandchildren, and I was just one of his 10 great grandchildren!  He was the patriarch of a very large family and, in fact, they had been photographed and featured in local newspapers as one of the largest in the area.    

Joe was no stranger to large families.  He was one of ten children born to Frank Haitz and his wife, Elizabeth Germann.  A devout Catholic family, they attended St. Michael Catholic Church in Ripley, Ohio where Joe would later become a member of the Holy Name Society and the Ripley Council of the Knights of Columbus.  Of his siblings, there remained only one sister, Anna Serwna, to mourn his passing.  She would live three more years reaching the grand age of 100!

A requiem high mass was intoned on February 17 in St, Michael's by the Reverend Father Charles Moore.  Joseph was  buried in Maplewood Cemetery, Ripley, Ohio.  He lays to rest with his wife who followed him just three years later.

Maplewood Cemetery, Ripley, Ohio

2015 - copyright Lynn Ann Wayson Koehler.  All rights reserved.

Evidentia and the Obituary of Joseph Haitz

My Genealogy Do-Over is going to take me forever!  I decided to concentrate on my maternal grandfather’s Haitz family in hopes that I will have a lot of it correctly cited, proven, and entered into Family Tree Maker Mac 3 before the reunion in the fall.  I would really like to be able to take a large chart of some sort, possibly a descendent chart, to show all the relationships between the children and grandchildren of Joseph and Henrietta (Koewler) Haitz, my great grandparents.  They were the parents of sixteen children so it gets a little confusing to someone like me who did not grow up in Ripley, Ohio where they lived all of their lives!  As an Army Brat, my family only visited Ripley about once a year when we were stateside and, even then, I don’t remember getting together with any of my great aunts, great uncles, and their children or grandchildren.  With the exception of my Great-Aunt Elizabeth, I only knew some of their names and I had no faces to go with most of those until pretty recently.  In the past couple of years, I have been fortunate to connect with some of my Haitz family members through social media and my husband and I have enjoyed going to a couple of the annual Haitz family reunions where I met some of them in person.  It’s a huge family to try and get to know!

Death Claims Father of 16, The Ripley Bee, 18 February 1960,
page and column unknown;
copy in possession of Lynn Ann Wayson Koehler.

Today, I entered the information from Joseph Haitz’s obituary into Evidentia.  I was able to enter 28 claims and 97 subjects!  With sixteen children to document, it got rather tedious and I will admit that I was never so happy to hear my washer and dryer go off periodically so that I could take short breaks from all the data entering.  Now, granted, a lot of people probably would not have used Evidentia for an obituary for their great-grandfather whose information is already well known, but I kind of like the idea that all my sources, their citations, and the facts that are in the documents will be located and organized so neatly in one place!  

These are just two screen shots of what I entered into Evidentia from the obituary of Joseph Haitz

One of my to-do list additions is to go back to the Union Township Public Library, find the correct microfilm, and write down the page number of The Ripley Bee where the obituary was published.  It really bugs me that my citation is incomplete!  Oh well, the things I didn’t know enough to do back in the day is why I am now doing this Do-Over!