While I usually seek Grave Tales subjects from Geneva’s more distant past, a reader asked me to write about Ruth Joshel Barney in honor of her nearly six decades of community service. “She was one remarkable woman,” the reader wrote. At a time when most of Geneva’s European immigrants came from Sweden, Ruth’s father, Mayer Joshel, was a Russian Jew who landed in Geneva after fleeing discrimination and threats of genocide. Three of his brothers soon followed him to this new refuge, and at least three of the four Joshels became prominent Geneva businessmen and civic activists, according to …

The name on the tombstone sounds like the type of joke that would crack up a fifth-grade class. But Louisa German Outhouse lived a long life as a respected pillar of Geneva society before coming to rest in West Side Cemetery. Described as “one of the first white children born in the Fox Valley” by The Geneva Republican, Louisa was born in February 1840 on a farm in what is now Geneva’s downtown business district. She was one of the first students to attend Geneva’s first school, a one-room schoolhouse on the west bank of the Fox River just south of where State Street runs today. In 1866, at …

During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, many thousands of Europeans emigrated to the United States to seek better lives, not just for themselves, but for their children. One immigrant who achieved that dream rests in Oak Hill Cemetery. Nickolaus Ekdahl was a shoemaker specializing in ladies dress shoes when he and his family journeyed from Sweden to Geneva in 1881. He quickly got a job making shoes for Carl Peterson, a fellow Swede who had set up his own shoemaking business in Geneva in 1870. While Ekdahl’s creations adorned a host of well-to-do Victorian society ladies, among them Mrs…

I don’t know if David Martin’s bloodline still thrives—all four of his sons had predeceased him by the time he died in 1904, leaving two grandsons as his only survivors. But the 19th-century carpenter left a legacy in brick and mortar that still serves Geneva today. Martin was born in Pennsylvania in 1820 and raised in Lancaster, N.Y., a town founded by his parents. He and his wife, Juliet, arrived in Geneva in the late 1840s after spending several years farming in DuPage County. Martin died just a week before the couple’s 62nd wedding anniversary, according to his obituary in The Geneva …

Every community includes its share of town “characters." and turn-of-the-century Geneva was no exception. John Rydsjo (or “Andrew Risjo," as the Geneva Republican called him) died May 22, 1905, at either age 67 or 70, depending on whether you believe his tombstone or his obituary. A native of Rydsholm, Sweden, Rydjo emigrated to Geneva in 1858 and married local lady Louise Mongerson. The couple had one child, Ida, who married Fred Carlson and lived on “east Third Street”—possibly a one-block road that dead-ends into Oak Hill Cemetery that modern maps label as Third Avenue. Rydjo was living …

Some obituaries paint a poignant picture of the dearly departed. Others, like that of Claus Gustafson, give readers startling insights into the society in which the dearly departed lived, especially when read more than a century after the funeral. Gustafson immigrated to Geneva from Sweden in 1881 and worked as a laborer until he died of pneumonia May 29, 1907. The Geneva Republican described him as “one of the oldest and best-known Swedish workmen in this city,” which implies that blue-collar workers rarely reached retirement age, since he was just 50 when he died. The Republican also felt …

Frances Ferris Clark apparently didn’t rate a big tombstone when she died April 14, 1916. Possibly her daughter, Caroline, couldn’t afford a big stonecutter’s bill after paying to ship her mother’s body to Geneva from Hamilton, Ohio. But the fact that Caroline wanted to bury her mother in West Side Cemetery even though both of them had been living together in Hamilton testifies to their enduring love for Geneva. Frances Ferris’ origins are something of a mystery today. Her obituary in the Geneva Republican states just that she arrived in Geneva in 1854 at age 9 and took up residence with the …

Many Genevans who work in Chicago say their commute is a killer. For third-generation resident Julius Alexander, it apparently was. Alexander, grandson and namesake of Geneva’s first blacksmith, was a 25-year-old newlywed Sept. 10, 1923, when he took the Chicago & NorthWestern train from his job at C&NW’s Chicago railway office to his in-laws’ home in West Chicago, where he and his wife, Elsie, were living while they saved up to build their own home. According to The Geneva Republican, “A number of his Geneva friends rode out from the city with him Monday evening, and ‘Bud’ (Alexander’s …

The influenza epidemic that swept the world in 1918 terrorized nations and took millions of lives. One of those lives was that of Almer Sandberg, a 25-year-old Geneva farmhand who enlisted in the Army shortly after the U.S. entered World War I. “Five weeks ago, Almer left Geneva with the large delegation of young men who left Central Kane County for Camp Grant, but soon afterwards he was transferred to Camp Hancock near Augusta, Ga.,” states Sandberg’s front page obituary in the Oct. 11, 1918, issue of The Geneva Republican. “The young man, who was the picture of health when he left home, was…

The small, simple granite headstone with the moss-covered lettering doesn’t seem all that impressive. But beneath it lies one of the most nationally prominent residents in Geneva history. Bartholomew Yates enjoyed a distinguished career as an East Coast private detective before he moved to Geneva to farm in 1846, said Geneva History Center educator Margaret Selakovich during one of her popular tours of West Side Cemetery. He broke up a regional counterfeiting ring and captured a number of horse thieves. His record earned him a spot on the federal committee that founded the U.S. Secret Service…

If Augustus Conant had been nothing more than the first pastor of the Universalist Unitarian Society of Geneva, that would still make him an interesting character in local history. But this 19th-century Renaissance man’s influence spread throughout the Midwest, and his story—as recorded in 1868 in a biography, A Man in Earnest: Life of A.H. Conant by Robert Collyer—provides a fascinating look at pioneer society leading up to the Civil War. Conant was already a fifth-generation American when he was born in Vermont in 1811. His great-great-grandfather, Roger Conant, came to Massachusetts as a …

These days disabled people have social service agencies to help them find jobs and the training they need to handle them. Back in 1890, John Soderstrom had only his wife, Hanna, to help him hold down his position as Geneva’s municipal lamplighter. John Soderstrom had lost a leg—surviving records don’t reveal how it happened—so he commissioned a specially made wagon that enabled him to reach the kerosene streetlights stationed throughout the city. A horse pulled him and his tools from light to light, where he trimmed the wicks, refilled the lights with kerosene and recorded how much kerosene …

Like most Geneva residents, I’m planning to spend the Fourth of July socializing with friends, savoring burgers and bratwurst hot off the grill and knocking back a cold one or two. But Clement A. Trott and. Herbert I. Harris attended an entirely different type of party on Independence Day in 1917. At that time, both were on their way to France—Trott, an 1899 West Point Military Academy graduate, as captain of the 45th Infantry in the Fifth Division, and Harris, a New York doctor who earned his MD at the University of Buffalo in 1898, as a first lieutenant in the 6th Division medical reserve …

These days, an elected public official who moonlighted as the editor of the local newspaper would attract some raised eyebrows, if not a few indictments. But in 1870, longtime Kane County Clerk Henry Peirce took over as editor of the Geneva Republican without, apparently, a moment’s pause from anyone in the community. Perhaps it helped that Peirce had been a pillar of Geneva society for at least 20 years before taking the helm of The Republican. In 1850, at age 17, he helped found the Kane County Bank, recorded as the first bank established in Geneva and one of the few banks in the U.S. that …

It’s hard to put a value on the contributions Swedish immigrants and their descendants have made to Geneva since the 1850s—especially the family of Kenneth Seastrom, who became Geneva’s first casualty of World War II. Kenneth Seastrom was a second-generation Swedish-American, born to Martin Seastrom and his wife in 1918. His paternal grandparents were Francis and Natalie Seastrom, who left Sweden for New York in 1881 and moved to Geneva 23 years later. Francis, who had apprenticed to a tailor at age 11 and had worked for a tailor shop in London that outfitted Queen Victoria’s husband and sons…

When I shot this photo of Dr. Francis Marstiller’s tomb in West Side Cemetery, I had no idea that I had visited his house almost 10 years ago. The red brick home on the northwest corner of State and Fourth streets where Dr. Marstiller lived and practiced medicine for 53 years held the Geneva office of Kettley Realtors when my family and I were house-hunting in Geneva in 2001. It now serves as an insurance office.  That house saw its share of wheeling, dealing and a hint of scandal between 1895, when the new medical school graduate moved to Geneva with his parents, and his death Dec. 6, 1948. …

Geneva has numbered many distinguished and distinctive people among its residents over the past 175 years. While some made their marks and moved on, many more have taken up permanent residence in the city’s cemeteries. To honor these long-ago contributors to the city’s success, we’ll be profiling them regularly in this column. This week, we’ll start at the beginning—not with Geneva founder James Clayton Herrington, but with his wife, Charity. When the Herringtons first moved from Mercer, PA, to develop the downtown Chicago acreage his father had claimed in 1830, it was Charity who persuaded …