A Place for Mom

Sylvia Plath's paternal grandmother (1852-1919)

I think now that this photo is exactly what it looks like: Somebody hit the old lady. This is Otto Plath's mother, Sylvia Plath's paternal grandmother Ernestine Kottke Plath, photo taken in 1916 in Oregon State Hospital (formerly "Hospital for the Insane") at Salem.

I'd learned that its new patients lined up every few weeks for a traveling photographer. If the photo was not taken the day of admission, I thought it fair to imagine Ernestine had walked into a doorframe or something, but context changed my mind, especially:

What are the odds that among three known photos of Sylvia's grandmother, one shows her with a black eye? Not makeup or a trick of the light. And likely it wasn't the first she'd ever had.

A immigrant from Prussia and mother of six, Ernestine first broke down in 1905 while living in North Dakota with husband Theodor and their five younger children. Depressed, anxious, and feeling persecuted, Ernestine walked the floor all night with a leg ulcer that only hurt more when she lay down. Her frightened family had her judged insane and sent to the state mental hospital at Jamestown. When Theodor signed her out in 1910 Ernestine didn't want to leave. Theodor had been chasing opportunity in Harney, Oregon, where he'd failed at homesteading and was back to working as a blacksmith. Yet machines had evolved from iron to steel, and horsepower to steam, and in 1911 Theodor was 60, late in life for a master blacksmith to learn another trade.

The couple's eldest son Otto told his wife Aurelia he had been raised without love, and in particular he "constantly voiced his recollections of his mother's type of child care," I guess trying aloud to process trauma forty years past. Family lore says that Ernestine communicated "absolutely nothing to her children for the last thirty years of her life." If literally true, Ernestine went silent in Prussia in 1889 when Otto was four and her two youngest not yet born. If not literally true, we get the idea that six children were too many for her.

In 1911 Theodor, Ernestine, and grown sons Paul and Max left arid eastern Oregon and shared a small house in Oregon City where Max, the only able-bodied one, found work with a lumber company. Theodor and Paul looked for jobs and came home to their sick wife and bad mother now aging and complaining of overwork. Maybe to reduce the tension, the family between 1912 and 1915 tried to place Paul, always sickly, with Otto and his wife in San Francisco. Otto and his wife said no. By 1916 Paul and Max couldn't tolerate their mother and Max wanted to move out and get married. There followed a turbulent scene that ended with Ernestine at the mental hospital begging the staff to please take her in, not to send her back home.

Her diagnosis was dementia. A physician making rounds a year later called Ernestine a harmless old lady. Her nurse noted that Ernestine knew enough to use the toilet. If she'd been battered at home -- we call it elder abuse -- the institution might have been preferable. Tuberculosis killed her in 1919 and her ashes sat in the hospital's basement for a hundred years, her tin among hundreds unclaimed and forgotten. 

Theodor might seem like the family's rock and good guy but he was no prize parent either. If his father Johann and son Otto are indicators, Theodor with family was rigid and punitive, the type Sylvia memorialized in her poem "Daddy." To spite his grown children Theodor willed the first five of them a dollar and left the youngest 120 acres in Washington State. Theodor died in Oregon City, alone; a neighbor found his body. He was buried in a pauper's field with no marker.

After Otto Plath died, his long-suffering widow Aurelia went on living as if he had never existed; as Sylvia said, "buried him in her heart." Sylvia hated this and got revenge on her mother in print. Sylvia herself became an abused wife. This was part of a larger pattern of generational and spousal abuse and resentment that can sink not only marriages but children and families.

"I Am the Same, Identical Woman" (or Am I?)

Sylvia's paternal grandmother

Courtesy of a descendant, here is Ernestine Kottke Plath (1853-1919), Otto Plath's mother and Sylvia's grandmother. Inscribed on the reverse, "Earnestine Kottke," suggesting this photo was taken before she married in March 1882, when she was 28. It might have been cut from a group photo or her wedding photo. The photo's owner has other vintage family photos all inscribed with the names of those pictured.

The Gibson-girl hairdo suggests the photo was taken after 1880: It's typical to fix one's hair stylishly when sitting for a photo. Where the photo was taken is not known.

I can barely reconcile this image with a known image of Ernestine, age 62, taken at Oregon State Hospital (formerly "for the Insane") in 1916. Another descendant shown the "young" photo had never seen it, could not confirm it was Ernestine Kottke although it was so labeled. What do you think? The older Ernestine seems to be toothless. Here is information about how aging alters one's nose.

There exists a third photo of Ernestine Plath posed with her husband, taken in Oregon between 1911 and 1916, showing features their son Otto inherited.

Theodor and Ernestine Plath had seven children: the first died in infancy, and Otto was born next, in 1885. Ernestine was first hospitalized for depression, sleeplessness, and "persecution" in 1905, three years after moving with her family from Prussia to North Dakota. In Oregon her diagnosis was dementia. Just another "sad Plath woman"? I don't think so. In both photos I see spirit.

The Light of the Mind

"Darkness is not empty. It is information at rest." -Teju Cole

Usually I'm in some archive or library thrilled to be hunting out Plath material and am rarely photographed in such places. Here I am at the Merseyside Maritime Museum in Liverpool, England, viewing old photos of the R.M.S. Lake Ontario, a boat first designed to carry mail. Measuring 400 feet by 45 feet, it was re-fitted to carry 600 steerage passengers, among them Sylvia Plath's grandmother Ernestine and five of her children, who crossed from Liverpool to Canada in 1901.

The R.M.S. Lake Ontario was an old banger built in 1887, twice damaged in collisions, and scrapped in 1905.

Nine million European emigrants passed through Liverpool. Those who began their journey at the port of Hamburg usually first landed at Hull, near London. From there they were packed into trains that delivered them directly to Liverpool.

Sylvia's Grandmother's Mental Hospital, Jamestown, North Dakota

Sylvia Plath's grandmother Ernestine Plath spent five years in this North Dakota mental hospital: 1905 to 1910. The print says, "Main Bldg, N.D. Hospital for the Insane, Jamestown, N. Dak." Somebody printed picture postcards of the North Dakota state insane asylum? Hey, it was handsome and modern. Few or no locked rooms, chains, or cages: The hospital's director, a progressive, instead of confining patients gave them jobs. While Ernestine was here, the hospital was Jamestown's largest employer. 

Crowded with more than 600 patients, the Hospital for the Insane in 1904 stopped admitting females except for the sickest. Ernestine Plath was one of them. "Jamestown" was the first of two mental hospitals in which Ernestine spent a total of eight years.

How to Research Family History

A while back I heard that Sylvia Plath's ancestry had been researched and written up but mostly cut from the final draft of Red Comet (2020), the very fine Plath biography. Another biography declined to discuss Plath's family and childhood to concentrate instead on Plath's "intensity." But where did she get that intensity?

Such questions led me to research Plath's family history (the "stock" or pedigree Sylvia found important when judging her boyfriends), finding patterns and plenty of drama:

Sylvia and Aurelia had African-American cousins. Aurelia's aunt's 1906 marriage to an African-American fits what is now a five-generation family pattern of marriages made to defy a parent or a family.

The first known photo of Otto Plath's parents, Theodor, and Ernestine, Sylvia's grandmother, who died in a mental hospital, I found on a genealogy website. Aurelia Plath, keeper and handler of Plath-Schober-Greenwood-Hughes dirty laundry, kept Ernestine's illness a secret so Sylvia could continue to idealize her dead father, a "pacifist" who to his wife and family was verbally abusive.

Sylvia had no Jewish ancestor. Sylvia had a German father, but she's also Polish, Austrian, and Hungarian. Plath's intelligence and no-nonsense work ethic came to her from both sides of the family. (She wrote: "I don't have time to be intelligent in a fluid, versatile way. I'm too nose-to-the-grindstone.")

For research I used most often two genealogy databases that anyone seeking their own family history can use:

On the free-of-charge database Familysearch.org view billions of pages of digitized info about a billion ancestors, each linked with documentation: census, immigration papers, birth/baptism, marriage, military, and death records, if any exist. That is its advantage over other genealogy sites. Site is run by the Mormon church (also called LDS). Free, but you must register on Familysearch.org as a user.

A good feature: Each ancestor on FamilySearch is assigned a short alphanumeric label so you can be sure, for example, that your ancestor "Anna Campbell" is the same "Anna Campbell" who is listed among 30 different Anna Campbells all born around the same time.

The site Ancestry.com is a gold mine of digitized records. Home subscriptions are costly, but my public library subscribes, and at the library I use it free. Libraries also subscribe to other helpful historical databases such as Newspapers.com. Ask your librarian.

You'll hit walls where there are no records or confusing records. I've learned that guesses are always wrong. These are human records of human beings, so sometimes inaccurate. My stepfather's gravestone says "1916" when he was born in 1919 because when he got his first job in the U.S. there was a mistake when he signed up for Social Security, and he wouldn't correct even the gravestone (ordered years in advance), fearing Social Security would find him out. 

My own record says I lived in Ferguson, MO, a place I never even went. I think it's where my landlord had his office. So trust but verify.

Who?

Meet Sylvia Plath's grandfather Theodor, master-blacksmith/inventor, and his wife Ernestine, grandmother who died in the Oregon State Hospital for the Insane. These are Otto Plath's parents, from Budsin, Prussia (today, Poland). Otto got to America the year before they did.

The props of fancy chair plus classical column mean the portrait was taken in the U.S.A. where bad taste reigns in such things. I mean, our four-year-olds get studio-photographed holding golden plastic "4"s. Already approaching age 50 when Mr. and Mrs. Plath arrived in 1901, they are likely closer to 60 in this photo. The narrow necktie suggests it's after 1905. Ernestine was in a North Dakota mental hospital from 1905 to at least November 1910, so it was taken between then and October 1916 when Theodor signed her into the Oregon state mental hospital, where she came to a tragic end.

Embossed in the corner is the photographer's name, hard to read. If it says "Hale" it was Herbert A. Hale, longtime Portland, Oregon photographer, turn of the century to 1917. Enlargement reveals beneath the logo small roman letters that look like "ego" or "eco" and might say "Oregon."

I think there is something of Otto Plath in the looks and stance of both parents. The photo, scanned into a public family-tree gallery, is the first I've seen of either parent. Ernestine died in Salem, Oregon, the tin of her ashes finally claimed by a descendant in 2020; Theodor, buried in Oregon City, had a pauper's grave with no stone. But, very good news: In 2021 a seeker located and marked his grave.

Sylvia Plath's Mad Grandmother's Ashes

One of 3500 cans of ashes. Photo by "Kim" at Findagrave.com.

Sylvia Plath's paternal grandmother Ernestine Kottke Plath died at the Oregon State Hospital (formerly "Insane Asylum") in 1919, and her ashes in a canister sat in the hospital's basement for a hundred years with 3500 other such canisters holding the ashes of state-hospital patients. This forgotten "Library of Dust" was the subject of a 2011 documentary film of that name, and the subject of a Pulitzer-Prize-winning newspaper editorial published in Oregon in 2005.

When patients' death certificates became available, an Oregon-based contributor to the site Findagrave.com volunteered to locate living relatives willing to receive the ashes. One of the certificates was for Ernestine Kottke Plath. The researcher, Phyllis Porter Zegers, learned that Ernestine's granddaughter Sylvia Plath became a poet and killed herself, but Zegers focused on finding Ernestine's living descendants.

A family member claimed Ernestine's ashes, finally, in September 2020. It's like Lady Lazarus risen.

[View Ernestine Plath's hospital photo, taken c. 1916, discovered in 2024.]

Sylvia Plath's father Otto Plath was Ernestine's eldest child. While his mother lived, Otto made himself scarce, leaving home for the U.S. at age 15 and then, when his parents and siblings came to the U.S., attending schools far away from them. Aurelia Plath later wrote that Otto stayed bitter about Ernestine's bad mothering. Ernestine's husband Theodor Plath committed Ernestine to the asylum in Salem, Oregon, in 1916. Zeger wrote that according to hospital records Ernestine was admitted suffering from overwork and a leg ulcer, had two "attacks" of something, and dementia. After three years in the crowded mental hospital, Ernestine died there of tuberculosis.

Sylvia Plath knew little or nothing about Ernestine. Aurelia kept secret from Sylvia her Aunt Frieda's information about Ernestine's mental illness. But we carry our ancestors' imprint always, in ways we might not know.