The Verger's Bastard

Train station at Budzyn, point of departure for three generations of ambitious Plaths.

The young couple whose parents wouldn't consent to their marriage could and did produce what was then called a bastard, shaming both sets of parents into giving the consent required by law.

The would-be bride and groom were not kids. They were both 26. The trouble was that she was Catholic and he was Lutheran.

Baby Theodor -- Sylvia Plath's future grandfather -- was ten months old when his parents Johann and Karoline Plath were at last married. The pious pair then argued about raising their children in this faith or that.

Station still stands at Budzyn (now in Poland).

Theodor's birth record in the town of Budzyn, Prussia, November 5, 1851, shows his mother's name, Karoline Kaszmarek, but in the space for his father's name is "ignatus" (unknown). Oddly, the record then shows the father's occupation: verger.

A verger was a layman hired to clean and maintain a church and help the priest or minister as a messenger and greeter. For public processions, vergers took up a stick or wand called a virge and cleared a path through the crowds. Thus our phrase "on the verge" -- the leading edge.

A verger didn't have to be literate -- Johann Plath was not. But he respected education or the educated. Maybe Johann wished he could have been a minister, and verger was as close as he could get.

When Johann, emigrant to the U.S., heard that Theodor's teenage son was super-smart, Johann generously paid for young Otto Plath to come to the U.S. and for Otto's tuition for Lutheran prep school and college, on the condition that Otto become -- a minister.

But when Otto told his grandfather he would rather teach than be a minister, Johann crossed Otto's name out of the family bible, an act of Christian righteousness sowing alienation and Otto's future bitter atheism.

It was meant to be a memorable scene, and Otto long remembered and told about that one selfish act.

"argued about raising their children": Clark, Red Comet, 6. "A verger didn't have to be literate: Johann Plath was not": U.S. Census, Wisconsin, 1910. See also Somerset Maugham's short story "The Verger" (1936). "bitter atheism," The Bell Jar. Spelled "Budsin" in Prussia, the Plaths' hometown is now Budzyn, Poland.

The Beaches at Winthrop

"At Winthrop Beach," 1951

"Point Shirley and Beach," 1936

"Point Shirley and Deer Island", 1937

"After the Blow," March 8, 1931

"The Boulevard," 1907

 

The Schobers moved to Winthrop, Mass., in 1918, the Plaths in 1936. Wanting to see the Winthrop they knew and lived in and Sylvia wrote about, I sorted on eBay through postcards, focusing on waterfront scenes. Those from 1905-11 feature resort hotels and the Boulevard promenade atop the seawall. A plethora of cards are postmarked summer 1907, just before the stock market plunged by 50 percent ("The Panic of 1907"). Several postcards, such as the 1931 example, picture disastrous storm damage: flooding, a shattered boulevard, winter waves. I purchased the hand-colored postcard above. It gives me context for the time the Plaths moved to Winthrop, what it looked like then.

Winthrop goes out of style in the late teens and 1920s after people buy cars and drive to vacation places beyond the reach of trains. Yet there were vacationers enough that the Schobers in 1932 and 1933 rented their Shirley Street house and stayed with Otto and Aurelia in Jamaica Plain. Aurelia, Sylvia, and Warren spent the dreadfully hot summer of 1936 in Winthrop with the Schobers, and the Plaths bought their Winthrop house on Johnson Avenue that fall. 

Sylvia's uncle Frank Schober Jr. built his own sailboat, rather like the young men on the 1937 postcard, and in 1940 Otto Plath bought it and that summer went fishing in the bay, daily catching mackerel he insisted be served for supper.

Otto Plath Was Born In a Violent Year

"Prussian Expulsion" ("Rugi pruskie") by Wojciech Kossak

Otto Plath was born in a violent year in Prussia: 1885. If all of Otto's life he objected to military service and so much hated the sight of uniforms he forbade his daughter Sylvia to join the Girl Scouts, maybe it’s because he saw Prussian soldiers forcing out ethnic Poles, mostly small farmers and migrant laborers. From 1885 to 1890 Prussia with threats and violence herded 30,000 Poles across the border into Russia and stationed guards there to keep them out. 

Otto grew up in the province of Posen, on land Prussia had taken from Poland and largely Polish-speaking. So although his parents were German he learned Polish and was part Polish through his paternal grandmother. Otto's parents were not farmers or migrants but town people, so Otto’s immediate family was safe, although the world around them rocked. Without its migrant farm laborers, Prussia was left short of food. Prussian garrisons by the dozen had town residents seeing soldiers every day and hating them. You can imagine how the hostilities affected the kids.

Otto’s Polish grandmother and German grandfather left Prussia for America in 1885. Persecution and demonization of Poles and Jews, a culture war Prime Minister Otto von Bismarck began in 1872, is where "Polack" jokes and slurs came from. Purges such as the Expulsion followed, practice for later expulsions that were photographed. The painting above (1909) is one of an Expulsion series.

Otto had been born in Grabowo, but grew up in Budsin. His papers say this, and all his siblings were born in Budsin. An 1880s map, showing the town where Otto searched hayfields for bees he could take home and keep in cigar boxes, shows a nearby Forest Durowo. The forest is still there. I wondered if Otto watched birds and insects there and learned to respect them as he could never respect things military.

Otto Plath emigrated to the U.S. in 1900.

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. The occasion might have been their 25th wedding anniversary in 1907. Celebrating that anniversary, calling it "silver," and the 50th anniversary the "gold," is a German tradition that Sylvia references in her poem "The Applicant."

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." City directories show Theodor worked as a blacksmith in Portland in 1907 and 1908.

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, 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.

Four Generations of Rebel Weddings

I read somewhere that Sylvia Plath really stuck it to her mother by announcing, the day Aurelia got off the boat, that she and Ted Hughes (who was there) were getting married in three days: as if triumphantly quashing her mother's dream of a tame and crew-cut son-in-law. Didn't agree then, thinking Sylvia might have been too ecstatic to be mean, but I agree now because I found a pattern of defiant little weddings in her family. Four generations:

• Sylvia's "Grammy" and "Grampy," Aurelia Greenwood and Frank Schober, defying her father, got their marriage license July 3, 1905, the day the bride turned 18 and did not need parental permission. They wed as soon as legally possible: Monday, July 10 at Boston's Basilica of Our Lady of Perpetual Help.
  
• Otto Plath in a Nevada courthouse really stuck it to his estranged and hated first wife with a quick-and-dirty divorce-mill divorce and by marrying Aurelia Schober on the spot the same day: January 4, 1932.
  
• Aurelia's daughter Sylvia Plath with Ted Hughes told her mother, arrived in London for a visit on June 13, 1956, that they were marrying June 16. Aurelia puked up her dinner that night. She was the couple's only guest at St. George the Martyr church in London. (Glimpse its inside, in the church's promotional video.)
  
• Fast-forward to 1979, when Sylvia's daughter Frieda Hughes, "now 'engaged,' will be 19 on April 1," Aurelia Plath wrote a penpal, as if "engaged" was her granddaughter's teenage daydream, and maybe forgetting her own mother married at 18. But Frieda at 19 married a farmhand. It was a rebellious marriage and short. Ted moaned in a letter to a friend that his daughter was divorced at 23.

Finding Barbara Greenwood, Sylvia's Great-Grandmother

Aurelia Plath's maternal grandparents Mathias and Barbara Greenwood, parents of Sylvia's "Grammy," were both over 50 when they came from Vienna and settled in Denver, Colorado. Aurelia definitely met them; she and her mother took a road trip out West in 1922. 

Barbara Greenwood's children on official papers had given Barbara's maiden name as Meier, Beier, Heimer, and Hemmer. [1] According to Vienna church records, Barbara's maiden name was Bayer (pronounced "byer"). Her father Franz was Hungarian and in Vienna changed his name from Paier (also spelled Pajer) to Bayer. Through Franz, Sylvia was part Hungarian.

Barbara married Matthias Grunwald, a waiter, and at age 54 left Vienna to join him and their children in the U.S. and arrived with her daughter Barbara, age 27, and son Richard, 12. [2] In the 1910 census Mathias and Barbara, last name "Greenwood," were renting a house in Denver. Barbara spoke English; Mathias did not. Their daughter Aurelia Romana Greenwood had come to the U.S. and married waiter Francis Schober, and in 1906 they had a baby girl named Aurelia, who became Sylvia Plath's mother.

In the 1920 census, Barbara Greenwood, 65, is called "Betty," a nickname for Barbara. Barbara Greenwood was buried as "Betty Josephine Greenwood" in Nebraska, which is why it took me ages to confirm any basics about her. Aurelia said her mother's mother had been an orphan; that is proven true. Roman Catholic parish records from the 1700s to the 1900s show absolutely no Jewish family background.

Barbara and Mathias rest in adjacent plots in North Platte Cemetery, which fronts on the Lincoln Highway in Lincoln County, Nebraska. This information is from that cemetery's records:

Mathias Greenwood: Born 19 February 1849 in Vienna. Died 19 June 1926, age 77. Barbara Greenwood: Born 24 September 1854, place not stated. (Her baptismal record says Vienna.) Died 24 May 1945, age 90.

Why should a great-parent matter? Because Sylvia Plath didn't appear out of nowhere. None of us do. 

[1] "Bayer" is confirmed on the marriage record in the Vienna Austria Catholic Church Records 1600-1960, ancestry.com. "Hammer" was Mathias's mother's maiden name.

[2] Richard was in fact the son of 27-year-old Barbara, Junior (1879-1966). The 1930 U.S. census records that Barbara Junior's age at first marriage was 15. In the U.S. she married Henry A. Davis who had a son, Frank. Richard as an adult moved to Michigan and Aurelia, later in life, visited her cousin and his family there.

Otto Plath's Family Matrix

Ship's manifest listing immigrants Ernestine Plath and five of her six children, 1901

Here's rare information about Sylvia Plath's extended family on her father Otto's side. Otto Plath was the eldest of six children born to Ernestine and Theodor Plath, residents in the zone of  Prussia called Posen, ethnic Polish territory ruled by the German Empire from 1871 to 1919, when it became part of Poland. Otto had five siblings. From immigration papers, the U.S. Census, city directories, draft cards and other official documents we can learn about their lives. Of all her aunts and uncles, Sylvia met only her Aunt Frieda, briefly, on a 1959 trip to California. Here is the family:

 

Otto Emil Plath: April 13, 1885-Nov. 5, 1940. Ships' manifests show 15-year-old apprentice shoemaker/bootmaker Otto Plath, traveling in steerage, arriving in the U.S. on September 9, 1900, ahead of his father Theodor, a blacksmith who arrived in March 1901. In December 1901, through Canada, came Otto's mother Ernestine with Otto's five younger siblings, ages 3 to 13. They lived on an uncle's North Dakota homestead while Otto lived with Wisconsin relatives. In the 1905 Wisconsin state census, Otto is a boarder in Watertown, WI. Otto marries for the first time in Washington State in 1912. In 1920's federal census, Otto is a boarder in Berkeley, CA. In 1930, Otto, a boarder in Boston, for some reason shaved five years off his age. Otto Plath married Aurelia Schober in Carson City, Nevada, on January 4, 1932. Sylvia was born October 27, 1932. Otto died November 5, 1940, age 55, on the 22nd anniversary of his father Theodor's death.

 

Paul Plath: Dec. 20, 1886-Sept. 24, 1933. Paul in the 1910 census is named Paul "Platt" and is farming in Oregon with his father Theodor Platt (who'd entered the U.S. as "Plath"). Paul's brother Max "Platt" is a "hired man" for their neighbors. Wife and mother Ernestine is not listed in their household in 1910, and neither are the two Plath daughters, Martha and Frieda. Paul "Plath" in 1920 is a laborer in Washington State, and in 1930 a laborer boarding in Portland, Oregon. Paul could not have been born in December 1888 as papers sometimes claim, because his brother Max was born in February 1889. Paul in 1933 married his widowed landlady, Christina, a Russian 10 years his senior. Paul died later that same year, 1933, of pneumonia.

 

Max Theodor Plath: Feb. 15, 1889-Dec. 21, 1953. Max Plath took after his father and was a homesteader and mechanic, then became an inspector at a lumber mill. He moved frequently, living in 1910 with his father in Harney, Oregon, then shared a house with his mother until she was hospitalized in 1916. In 1920 Max lived in Saddle Butte, Oregon; in 1926 in Portland, in the early 1930s in Salem, in 1936 in Eugene, in 1946 in Cottage Grove. Max married Bertie in 1917, then Harriet in Stevenson, Washington, in 1935. The 1930 U.S. census said Max had two children, born in 1928 and 1930.

 

Hugo Fredericks Plath: Dec. 6, 1890-Aug. 17, 1974. Hugo kept the surname "Platt." Around 1911 he visited Canada, it seems on business. His draft card, signed in June 1917, says he both lived and worked at Standard Auto Supply in San Francisco. On that card Hugo asks exemption from the draft, saying his mother and father are his dependents. Hugo enlisted anyway on July 29, 1918, and served until December 23, 1918. The longest-lived of the siblings -- 83 years -- Hugo dwelt mostly in and around Los Angeles, at one point giving his occupation as "carpenter."

 

Martha Bertha Plath Johnson: Feb. 21, 1893-April 8, 1961. Theodor Plath in 1901 sent his wife Ernestine and his five younger children directly from Europe to Maza, North Dakota. As Martha's parents and brothers moved farther west, Martha seems to have stayed in Maza, and in 1910 at age 17 works as a "servant" for family there. At 19 Martha marries the town postmaster. She has two daughters, stays in Maza, and is buried, alongside her husband, near what is left of that town.

 

Frieda A. Plath Heinrichs: Mar. 15, 1897-Dec. 19, 1970. In the 1910 census, Frieda, age 13, is not living with her parents but rather is listed as "niece" of the Stapel family in Green Lake County, Wisconsin. Mrs. Stapel was Theodor Plath's sister. Frieda graduated from a Chicago nursing school. She visited her mother Ernestine in the Oregon state mental hospital in summer 1919; Ernestine died there September 28. In 1930 Frieda is a nurse in San Francisco, and by 1935 is married to physician Walter J. Heinrichs. They live in and around Los Angeles. In Letters Home, Aurelia S. Plath incorrectly gives Frieda Heinrichs' death date as 1966. California voter-registration rolls show both Walter and Frieda registered in 1966, but Frieda alone in 1968.

 

The seven Nix brothers in Sylvia Plath's children's book The It-Doesn't-Matter-Suit are named for her paternal relatives. The fictional seven are named Paul, Emil, Otto, Walter (the name of Sylvia's uncle by marriage), Hugo, Johann (the name of Sylvia's paternal great-grandfather), and the central character, Max. Written in 1959, the book was first published in 1996.

 

For sources or to make corrections, please contact me. Official papers and books aren't always right.

 

Theodor Plath lists his minor children on his naturalization papers, filed in North Dakota; Otto at age 22 is not a minor.