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 19th 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.
So fascinating 😆
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