Sentimental Sunday - August Hellmund - Answers Found!

A few weeks ago, I wrote a post about my husband's great great uncle, August Hellmund explaining how I had discovered that he had suffered an accidental electrocution and subsequently was institutionalized and listed as insane.  It was known that he had been at one point released from the institution and in 1930 he was living with his daughter, Evaline and her family.  After his death, he was buried with his wife, Matilda White Hellmund in Elmwood Cemetery, Waterloo, Iowa.   What I had been unable to discover was the circumstances under which August had ended up in the asylum, or what year he had actually passed away.  Contact with Elmwood Cemetery failed to produce any results as they had no actual date of burial listed for August.  It looked as though I had reached the end of the line in terms of what further information I would discover about August Ernst Hellmund.    Until yesterday.

As luck would have it, I received my membership packet from the Ohio Genealogical Society in the mail.  One of the many benefits of membership in the OGS includes access to NewspaperArchive.com and it was the first resource I decided to browse.  My first search request was simply the name "Hellmund" just to see how many "hits" I would receive.  I wasn't disappointed! The list seemed to be full of possibilites.

  One of the newspapers included was The Waterloo Courier in Waterloo, Iowa.  This is the newspaper that had provided so many answers to me previously about the electrocution incident, so I was very encouraged that there might be some further morsels of new information about August.  I wasn't disappointed!

The first article I discovered told me the details of what happened on the night of Tuesday, 23 October, 1914 when August was taken into custody.  Reading it was heartbreaking.  After suffering the agony of the horrendous burns he had received in the initial accident and enduring the skin grafting surgery and 3 month hospitalization afterwards, August began suffering extreme pains in the back of his head.  This surely must have been a sign of severe brain injury. He had lost all use of his arm and he began to have fits of uncontrollable anger and violence, until finally it reached the level where his family and his neighbors had to call the police for help when one night he attacked them with a baseball bat in hand.  How terrible this must have been for him and for the entire family as well.   I take comfort in the fact that he eventually was released from the institution and by 1920 he was again living at home with his family. 

But, this still didn't answer the question regarding his date of death.  As I continued to scan the list of given articles, I discovered what I had been looking for. 

There were actually two accounts of August's death.  The first appeared on Monday, 26 October,  1942, the actual day of his death.  The article explained how he had died as a result of carcinoma and told of how he had been living with his daughter, Stella for the past few years.  It also confirmed the fact that he had been born at sea while his parents were emigrating from Germany, however, the birthdate was slightly different than the one we had believed. 

The second article appeared on Wednesday, 28 October, 1942, and is more of an actual obituary, giving funeral  and family information.

After discovering these articles, I also found information about several of August's children, as well as numerous articles regarding August's sister, Caroline, which appeared in the Piqua Daily Call in Piqua, Miami County, Ohio.  As a matter of fact, in only one day's time, I have created a very large stack of papers that will now need to be sorted and filed accordingly.  But, I'm certainly not complaining.  I love it when I have knocked down another one of those pesky little "brick walls"!

Solving the Mystery of August Hellmund

A few posts ago, I talked about my husband's great great grandfather, Ernest Hellmund, who immigrated to the United States from Saxony in what we believe to be September, 1860. Today, I'm writing about his eldest son, August Ernest.

August was born either "at sea" on the voyage to America, or in Scales Mound, Illinois. It all depends upon which account one reads. He was the only one of Ernest's children not to move to Miami County, Ohio with him when he left Illinois sometime after his first wife, Maria, and two of their children died, in 1872.

On 1 October, 1882, August married Matilda Sophia White and they eventually had 11 children. During my research I discovered that from 1900 through 1910, the family lived in Gratiot, Lafayette County, Wisconsin, but sometime before 1915, they had moved to Waterloo, Iowa.

I was shocked when I discovered this entry in the 1915 Iowa State Census collection that states August was living in an asylum and lists him as "insane". I had no idea why he was there or what had happened between the time he had lived in Wisconsin and the time he had moved to Iowa.

I also had discovered August's gravesite in Elmwood Cemetery, Waterloo, Iowa, where he was buried along with his wife and son. (His daughter, Caroline is named on the stone, but she is not buried here.) However, there is no date on the stone and the cemetery has no record of when he was buried. No further clues there.

August's story threatened to be a lifelong mystery to me until another resource became available to me. This time I found WorldVitalRecords.com, and they had a list of publications that until now I had not seen before and I was eager to search. Once again, I took advantage of the "free trial" subscription to see if there was anything on the site that might be helpful to me. Luckily, one of the cities included in their list of newspaper resources was Waterloo, Iowa. I did a quick search on "Hellmund" not expecting to find too much, but I was in for quite a surprise.

On 8 January, 1913, August had been electrocuted in a freak accident in the power station where he worked. The fact that he even lived was a miracle. But, he was badly burned.

A subsequent article from The Waterloo Reporter on 7 March, 1913 stated, "Yesterday afternoon at the Presbyterian Hospital, August Hellmund underwent an operation in which sixty inches of skin were grafted onto his left arm. The operation was performed by local physicians. Hellmund was nearly electrocuted six weeks ago at the W.C. F. & N. powerhouse while showing a friend through the building. The skin was taken from the patient's thigh and grafted onto his arm. He is now recovering. Few instances are on record in the city where more than this amount of skin was grafted. It was removed in strips about a half inch wide and four inches long leaving spaces between the wounds that may heal rapidly. Only the epidermist with a little of the true skin was taken. The high voltage of electricity burned the tendon's in the victims hand and he will never have complete control of the member. His mind is said to also have been slightly affected by the shock."

Then, in a further article, this one dated 22 October, 1914, and titled "Unfortunate Victims Taken to Asylum", I read "A.E. Hellmund, whose pitiable case of brain affection attracted much attention at police headquarters, was taken to Independence last evening for treatment. His mind disintegrated following an electrical shock of 22,000 volts."

So, there was the answer to why he was living in the asylum in 1915. However, according to the 1930 United States Census, he was at that time living with his daughter, Evalina Hellmund Morgan and her family in Waterloo. Therefore, I know that his death date came sometime after 1930, and thankfully, I don't believe he died while he was institutionalized.

The solving of the mystery of August Hellund is a good example why you have to search many different venues. No one resource can possibly hold all the information you can find on your family. Your family history is a living thing; constantly changing and growing. That's what makes it so wonderful!