She bought her family a country, one week's wages at a time.
Catherine Ascherl was born in Stockau, near Pilsen, and sent as a teenager to serve wealthy Ascherl relatives in Vienna — stained glass craftsmen who treated her badly.
Around 1877 she sailed for New York alone and took a flat at 119 Pitt Street on the Lower East Side, a block from the Capuchin church. She sent most of what she earned back to Bohemia. It was enough. The rest of the family landed before 1882 on her wages.
When her mother nearly died bearing the youngest sister, Katie made a private vow: if God spared her mother ten years, she would raise the baby herself and never marry. Her mother lived. When the young man she had been seeing came back a decade later, she told him she was too old. She kept the vow for the rest of her life.
- Stockau
- Vienna
- 119 Pitt Street
- Duncombe, Iowa
Told in We Remember Tante Katie, compiled 1989 by Mildred Ascherl Jellig, typed by Charlotte Sommer Ascherl, with calligraphy by Joseph P. Ascherl. No photograph of Katie is known to survive.
