Quite a few previous posts on this blog have told the story of men and women who were lifelong single people. I find it quite interesting that in several of those cases, I have discovered that there was more than one child in a family that remained unmarried for their entire lives and often lived with each other during that time. I have another one of those tales to tell today.

Martha Esther Telle was born on August 22, 1897, so she qualifies to be today’s birthday girl. She would be celebrating her 127th birthday today. She went by the name, Esther, during her life. She was the daughter of Gottfried and Martha (Frentzel) Telle. She was baptized at Grace Lutheran Church in Uniontown. An image of her baptism record from that congregation’s books is shown below.

Esther is found in the 1900 census at the age of 4. This entry gives the wrong birth year for more than one of the children. It says Esther was born in 1895, but we know she was born in 1897. Her father was a farmer in the Union Township. A nephew named Ernst Bultmann, was doing farm labor for the Telle’s.

Another son that will be highlighted in this post was born in 1903 named Erdmuth Siegmund Telle. He was born on August 20th, so he could have been our birthday boy 2 days ago. Like the other Telle children, he was baptized at Grace Lutheran Church in Uniontown. Here his his baptism record. Ernst Bultmann was one of his sponsors.

Erdmuth is found in his first census entry in the 1910 census. He was 6 years old and Esther was 12 years old at that time. Their grandmother, Eva (Hemmann) Telle was also living with them.

In the 1915 plat maps for Perry County, we find the G.B. Telle farm located near Uniontown on the banks of the Apple Creek.

In the 1920 census, we find a variety of occupations represented in the Telle household. An older brother, Adolph, worked at a garage, and another older brother, Albert, was a manager at the swing factory, which was located in Wittenberg. Erdmuth was old enough to be helping his father on his farm. It was typical for young men like Erdmuth to be given an occupation like “farm laborer” in those days, but almost never were young ladies or even their mothers given an occupation even though they were doing plenty of work around the farm and inside the farmhouse to support the family.

The 1930 census is the only one I will display in this post in which we do not find Esther and Erdmuth living in the same household. We find Erdmuth living with his parents and working with his father on his farm. Erdmuth was the only Telle child in this entry.

I was unable to find Esther in that year’s census. I think she was likely working elsewhere like so many young women did in those days. I looked for her in the Perry County census, but to no avail. I also especially looked for her in St. Louis, but again I was unsuccessful. Then, in 1940, we find her once again living with her mother, Martha, and her brother, Erdmuth in the Union Township. The father of Esther and Erdmuth had died in 1938.

Erdmuth had a World War II draft card completed in 1942. His mother is listed on this form as his employer.

The last census the public can view, the one taken in 1950, once again shows the same trio of Martha, the mother, along with Esther and Erdmuth, her single children. Erdmuth was doing the farming.

Erdmuth Telle died in 1976 at the age of 72; Esther Telle died in 1992 at the age of 95. According to church records in the Grace Lutheran Church books, each of them is buried in that congregation’s cemetery. However, only Esther has an entry and a gravestone photo on Findagrave.com. Esther’s gravestone is pictured here.

With the exception of Esther working at a different location around the year, 1930, she and her younger brother, lived with each other during the entire life of Erdmuth. Then, I suppose Esther may have lived by herself during the time after her brother died and her own death. There were also over 20 years in which their mother was a widow prior to her death in 1962 that her 2 unmarried children were of very valuable assistance to her in her older years. Maybe someone in the Telle family could fill in some of the details in this story that I was unable to determine.