Mystery begins with a discovery
Today we remember Caroline Chonka, who was just 7 years old when she died in Milwaukee in the winter of 1920.
A tombstone with her name on it recently turned up in a spot nowhere near her grave. It lies face up in a thicket of trees and tall weeds alongside a wheat field in Muskego.
Jim Staniszewski lives out there and one day was kicking around looking for old farm relics.
“I saw a rock laying down and it had a man-made cut to it. And I’m like that’s not a field stone. I started kicking the dirt and weeds off of it, and it was a headstone,” Jim said.
The dates on the marker, carved with geb and gest, the abbreviated German words for born and died, indicate the girl’s short life ran from Sept. 28, 1912, to Jan. 25, 1920.
Jim became curious and contacted local and state historical societies. He went online and discovered that the girl is buried 22 miles away at Union Cemetery in Milwaukee’s central city at 3175 N. Teutonia Ave. Her grave there is marked with a nicer marble stone.
There’s one strong clue as to why the older stone no longer marks Caroline’s grave, or maybe never did. It has her name spelled incorrectly as Carolina.
“Even if they removed it because the spelling is wrong, how did it wind up way out here?” Jim wonders.
He obtained a plat map for this area of Muskego from 1914, but the names of the landowners don’t provide any clues.
It’s not unusual for tombstones with typos to be discarded here or there. In 2003, I wrote about three stones found in the Honey Creek in Wauwatosa’s Hart Park. “You can’t fix these things. The old proverb ‘cast in stone’ is quite true in our business,” a monument maker told me then.
Jim, who works as an auto technician and is single with no kids of his own, went to visit Caroline’s resting place at Union Cemetery. I met him out there this week in the sad section of children’s graves.
Caroline is not buried with family members, though her brother, Stephan, who was 12 when he died in 1926, is two sections away.
Jim theorizes that the no-frills tombstone he found in Muskego was state-issued because the children’s graves on either side of Caroline have identically shaped flat stones. To the left is Dorothy Lippert and to the right is Raymond
Watson, both who died young in 1920.
A guy who works with Jim helped him find 1920 census data showing that Caroline’s parents, listed as Steven and Mary, were born in Hungary, as were the two oldest of their five children. They immigrated here in 1912. Caroline was born in Wisconsin, the record says.
I contacted Bill Hoffmann, manager of Union and Graceland cemeteries, which are owned by three local Lutheran churches. Business is much more robust at Graceland with about 900 burials a year. Union, which opened around 1850, averages just 40 these days.
Bill waded into the old Union Cemetery records and found a burial permit for Caroline. It says she died of kidney disease at a time, of course, when transplants were many years off. Her Milwaukee address is listed as 1324 Chestnut St., later renamed Juneau Ave.
A burial permit for her brother Stephan says he died of endocarditis, or an infection of the heart. You can imagine the parents’ sadness as they buried a second child in their new homeland.
There is nothing in the records showing Caroline’s grave marker being replaced.
I wasn’t able to find any Chonka relatives living around here. Their Caroline rests in peace, but with a mysterious ghostly presence miles away.