Today’s birthday girl is Emma C. Lowes, who was born on February 25, 1870. Emma was the daughter of Henry and Louisa (Kiepe) Lowes. A previous post, Trip to the Lowes in Arnsberg, was written about Emma’s parents. In that post, it was said that sometimes the Lowes surname was spelled as Loves. In fact, when the Lowes family arrived in 1851 aboard the ship, Ernestine, their name was spelled as Loves on that ship’s passenger list.

Emma is found as a baby in the 1870 census. Her father was a farmer in the Apple Creek Township.

Next, we find Emma in the 1880 census at the age of 10. You can see that the Lowes family had added 3 more children in the previous decade, and 1 more child would be born in 1881.

Since Emma got married before the next census we are able to view, we will now turn our attention to the man she would marry. His name was William H. Weisbrod, who was born on September 17, 1866. William was the son of Mathias and Sara (Cotner) Weisbrod.

At this point, let me give you a bit of a German language lesson. In German, weis means “white’. Brot or brodt means “bread” according to Google Translate. So, the surname, Weisbrod, would be translated as White Bread. When Emma’s grandmother, Eva (Pistner) Weisbrod was buried, her gravestone was engraved with the name, Whitebread, and when her stepmother, Eliza (Shoultz) Weisbrod was buried, her gravestone was engraved with the name, Weisbrodt. All other graves I looked at from this family tree use the spelling, Weisbrod.

We also have this artifact in our museum which gives the Lord’s Prayer in German. You can see that the word, “bread”, can also be spelled as Brod, even though Google Translate does not give brod as meaning “bread”.

The Weisbrod family had arrived in this country prior to the large German Lutheran immigration in 1839. They arrived in 1837 aboard the ship, Louisa. Their surname was spelled Weisbrod on the passenger list below. William’s father was just a baby when his family arrived.

I was unable to locate William in the 1870 census when he was a young child. In 1870, William’s mother died, and his father then married Eiza Shoultz. In the 1880 census entry for the Weisbrod’s, we see that William was the oldest child in his family at the age of 14. His father was a farmer in the Apple Creek Township. This entry spells the surname as Weissbrodt.

William Weisbrod married Emma Lowes on May 10, 1894. The Missouri marriage license for this couple is pictured here. It says this pair was married by a justice of the peace.

According to several family trees on Ancestry.com, this couple had 7 children. In the 1900 census, the Weisbrod household included 3 children. William was a farmer in the Apple Creek Township.

Next, we find the Weisbrod’s in the 1910 census. All 7 of their children are found in this entry. William’s oldest son was a teenager and helping on his family farm.

The 1920 census shows the Weisbrod’s with 6 children and 2 grandchildren. Their daughter, Nora, had gotten married to Everett Smith in 1915, and they had 2 children before Everett died in 1919.

The last census in which we find William and Emma was the one taken in 1930. William and Emma were in their 60’s and living with 3 children.

Emma Weisbrod died in 1932 at the age of 62. Her death certificate pictured below indicates that she had an injury to her leg that resulted in leg ulcers an infection which contributed to her death. Her name is spelled as Weisbroad on this form, and she is given a birthday of February 26th.

William Weisbrod died in 1935 at the age of 68. I was not able to find his death certificate, but I did locate this image of his obiituary.

William and Emma Weisbrod are each buried in the Shoultz Cemetery in Appleton. That is a small cemetery found on private property in the Apple Creek Township. Emma’s gravestone gives her birthday as February 26th, but her Findagrave.com site says she was born on February 25th.

I think you can figure out for yourself why I gave this post the title, Emma Loves White Bread, but I will explain it anyway. Emma was born as Emma Lowes, which sometimes was written as Loves, not Lowes. She married a man named Weisbrod, which can be translated as White Bread.