Nun or none

Collecting Watch Tower literature for many includes collecting variants of publications. Sometimes changes were made due to refinements of belief, other times proof reading glitches or copyright issues played a part. Sometimes what was produced caused questions to be raised. One example of the latter is the picture found in the book Riches (1936).

The original line drawing showed a witness preaching to an elderly gentleman. In the background is a nun who appears to be using a tuning fork on the householder (?) while discouraging the witness from his work. The only problem was that, if you looked at the picture quickly, it might appear to some that the nun was “blessing” the witness’ efforts. A quick check of the text in the book would immediately disabuse anyone of that idea, but feedback showed the advisability of changing the picture. As a result, a new picture was drawn, which replaced the nun with a phonograph.

This meant that there were soon two editions of Riches in circulation. As a result, some wrote in. More than one copy of the standard reply has survived, but the one pictured below was sent to a John Shearrow from Alliance, Ohio. The identical address on a 1940s registration card identifies him as John Cunningham Shearrow (1890-1962) who married and had one daughter, but no further information has been gleaned.

The letter advised any with the “nun” copy to carefully remove the page, and these could still be placed without any picture at this point. As there was no text on the reverse of the picture, this was quite easy to do.

So collectors can find at least three versions of Riches, one with the nun, one with a page neatly cut out, and then a later printing with a replacement picture.

The family Knorr

This blog concentrates on the era of C T Russell, but sometimes material comes to light that reaches beyond that. Below is a cutting of a wedding announcement from 1903.

The groom was D Ellsworth Knorr. Certificates for his birth, marriage, death, and some census returns make the D stand for either Donal, Donell, or Donald, although with the census the enumerator could easily just have misheard. Generally in life the issue was fudged with just an initial: D Ellsworth Knorr. This is how trade directories and his death certificate read. Maybe the query rumbled on during his lifetime, a bit like Malcom (or was it Malcolm) Rutherford? 

There are quite comprehensive details of this Knorr family on Ancestry. D Ellsworth Knorr was the son of Aaron Herb Knorr. His grandfather was Samuel Knorr. The line is traced back to Hans Knauer born 1720 in Airfeld, Bavaria. D’s mother was Mary Margaret Schmidt (1835-1900). As shown by the cutting D married Estella Bloss.

He spent most of his life as a movie theater manager in Allentown. In 1910 the famous thespian, Sarah Bernhardt visited the theater and D Ellsworth Knorr, as manager, showed her to her seat to witness a new projection system. (Event reviewed in his obituary in The Morning Call, for April 10, 1964.)

D Ellsworth (1872-1964) and Estella (1882-1973) had three children.

Robert Ellsworth Knorr, 1903-1972.

Nathan Homer Knorr (1905-1977)

Isabel Estella Knorr, 1906 – 1999.

Incomplete records on Ancestry and newspapers.com show that both the mother Estella and daughter Isabel had funerals linked to Kingdom Halls.

Nathan of course became president of the Watchtower Society, from 1942 to his death in 1977. Ancestry provides his High School Yearbook photo, details of his marriage to Audrey, and other aspects of his life.

Because of copyright and privacy issues I am not reproducing any of this material, and also as stressed at the outset, it is events from the CTR era that mostly concerned us here.

So perhaps we could just end on an event (or rather a non-event) from the 19^th century.

Maria Frances Ackley married CTR in 1879. She had previously been a school teacher.

The year before her marriage she received some unwelcome publicity in the newspapers. From the Pittsburgh Daily Post for January 19, 1878:

The name of the boy she was accused of assaulting? Knorr.

It appears that a fellow teacher in the North Avenue School, Mary Lecky, was concerned that someone might think it meant HER. There was a hasty bit of damage limitation. The Pittsburgh Daily Post for January 22, 1978, carried a clarification:

Putting this in context, we must remember that corporal punishment was allowed at this time and the complaint may have been malicious. However, for a 27 year old female teacher to be accused of “cruelling whipping” a 12 year old boy still seems unusual.

There is no information in the newspapers as to how the investigation turned out, but we must assume Maria was cleared of misconduct. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette for July 3, 1878 carried a report of the latest election of teachers. For the Second Ward, North Avenue School, Marie F Ackley was elected again; as was Mary Lecky.

However, with that kind of experience and after a decade of teaching (with yet more of the same looming ahead) perhaps Maria was getting tired of it all. Getting married, as her two older sisters had done before her, was the normal escape route for a single woman.

Just over a year later, on March 13, 1879, she married Charles Taze Russell.

Still, I am pleased to confirm that there is absolutely no connection with Nathan Knorr’s extended family. While they came from Pennsylvania, it was a different part of the State and also from a different era.