From 8-year old Hilda’s diary:

Tonight when Grandfather put me to bed, I told him that he didn’t have to tell me a story, that I would tell him one instead. So I told him the one about Florence Nightingale and he loved it very much. He said that he had never heard it before because when he was a little boy in Austria, he didn’t have a good Grandmother who could buy him books and even if he did have a good Grandmother that had wanted to, they had no money because they were so very poor. I asked him if they were poorer than the poor family who live around the corner from us, the ones that Grandmother is always sending pots of soup to and he said, “Kindchel, we were poorer than anyone you ever heard of but we were good, all of us.”

This is one of the few windows we have into Hilda’s grandfather Jacob’s past. He was the brother of my grandmother Adolph’s father and this corroborates my her story of how poor the family was and how miserable life was after their mother died in childbirth and their father remarried. According to my grandmother, “One fine day, the oldest son Adolph, then 10 years old, packed his bundle to be off. He had neither money nor any idea where to go but for the fixed plan to go to school wherever he would have an opportunity.” The other children went to America to seek their fortune. The simplified family tree shows two of the siblings.