"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.

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.

In The Polish Town

My first trip overseas was to Poland and I'd move there except my house is Polish already, with a flowering meadow across the lane, etc. Finding Sylvia Plath's grandmother's Polish home address I Google-Mapped it. Ernestine Kottke Plath died in an Oregon mental hospital in 1919 but her childhood home still stands: 12, Strozewo (a village).

I saw the address in Ernestine Plath's Oregon State Hospital record.

Just six miles away is a Plath landmark town, under German rule spelled "Budsin," today in Polish spelled "Budzyn," population 2,000. It's Plath's grandfather's hometown. Sylvia called it a "manic-depressive hamlet in the black heart of Prussia." Theodor Plath married local girl Ernestine in 1882 and settled there. I think Ernestine gave birth to Otto in Grabowo because she had relatives there, but Otto grew up in Budsin, and tired of maps I wanted to see the place.

"Strolling" through the older part of Budsin I saw where the Plaths might have raised their children, not quite to their adulthood. The year Otto was born the German Empire's increasingly menacing army started cleansing the empire of Russians, Poles, and Jews. Masses of ethnic Germans like the Plaths were already leaving for the U.S., partly to escape conscription. Otto was 15 when he went to the U.S. His father, and then his mother and five siblings, ages 4 to 13, left Prussia the following year, 1901.

Traditional Polish houses are stone covered in paintable stucco. I learned Gmin means local government, and this is Budzyn's City Hall at the center of town.

Poles put flowers wherever they feel like it. It's a celebratory thing.

For the address of the Plath house in Budsin I'd need church or civil records not readily accessible. But I like Poland for itself and felt at home there. My mother's parents were Polish immigrants. They died when I was very small but I remember the Polishness of their house and ours. I hope you too grew up amid abundant cabbage-rose decor.

Ernestine Plath, Sylvia's Grandmother, Oregon State Hospital

Sylvia Plath's paternal grandmother Ernestine Plath, photograph c. 1916 from her file at the Oregon State Hospital (formerly "Insane Asylum"). Read about her fate here.

This is the second known photo of Ernestine Plath. The first known photo, c. 1907, I found and published in 2022.

Plaths in Steerage

In picturing young Otto Plath wretchedly alone in steerage to the U.S. I was wrong. The ship’s manifest shows that 20-year-old Louis Schulz of Fall Creek, Wisconsin, went to Hamburg to bring Otto, 15, to New York. They landed September 9, 1900. Otto’s grandparents in Fall Creek paid Otto’s passage on S.S. Auguste Victoria, and maybe Louis’s, too. They ensured their special grandson’s safe arrival. And this is how Sylvia Plath’s father came to the U.S.A.

Deck plan, steerage class, S.S. Auguste Victoria. Single men bunked in the bow, single women in the stern, and families in between.

Steerage class was cheap and crowded. Passengers packed two or three to a berth at bow and stern [pictured]. Capacity 580 people. Boilers and coal burners and the ship’s three funnels occupied most of the space. There was no privacy. Meals were ladled out at wooden tables. Toilets were on the deck above. 

Yet whoever chose this ship for Otto’s crossing chose well. The Auguste Victoria express steamer could cross the Atlantic in eight or seven days. The vomit and pee might not get too deep. Photos show the first-class passengers on this liner (named for Germany’s empress) enjoying Gilded-Age luxury. Hamburg America Line had it christened Augusta Victoria, then learned the empress spelled her name with an e.

But the company sold the ship away, ordering bigger ones because Zwischendeck (steerage) passengers were profitable. The S.S. Pennsylvania held 2,382 travelers in steerage, ten times the capacity of its first- and second-class cabins, four times the steerage limit of Auguste Victoria. 

Only steerage passengers were processed at Ellis Island or other licensed ports such as New Orleans or Halifax. Theodor Plath, Otto’s father, traveled steerage class Hamburg to New York on the S.S. Batavia March 3-19, 1901.

Otto’s mother Ernestine Plath, with his five siblings, ages 3 to 15, left Hamburg and at Liverpool boarded the packet boat R.M.S. Lake Ontario operated by Canada’s Beaver Line. At sea December 14-27, 1901, they landed at Halifax. Records show them among 671 passengers. [1] On December 29 officials processed the Plaths at St. John, New Brunswick, where their condition was as listed as good.

[1] Canada, Incoming Passenger List 1865-1935, St. John N.B. 1901 December, p. 46.

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.