Edna Caroline Schulz, daughter of Henry Matthew Schulz and Mathilda Friederika Yaeger, was born on 7 March 1897 at home at 236 East Big Bend Road, Webster Groves. She was baptized on 20 June 1897 at St. Lucas Evangelical Church, Sappington. Edna began school at “Loretta Academy” [later Nerinx Hall] because there was no kindergarten in the Webster Schools. Starting from first-grade, she attended Bristol Elementary School. By 1910, her family had moved to 60 Marshall Place. Edna graduated in 1915 from Webster Groves High School.

Edna became a homemaker quickly because her mother died of liver cancer in 1916, leaving Edna to care for her four-year old sister Harriet and father, Henry. Shortly after her mother’s death, Edna and her father transferred their church membership to the Webster Groves Presbyterian Church.

Charles Henry Straub was twenty-nine and Edna Schulz twenty when Pastor David M. Skilling married them on 19 September 1917 at the Presbyterian church. Charles and Edna honeymooned in Colorado Springs, Colorado. Throughout their lives, Charley and Edna lived in the Schulz family home at 60 Marshall Place with her father. They had two children—Eleanor and Henry Straub.

In 1933, a major encephalitis epidemic in St. Louis killed many people; Edna caught it. Although Edna was not expected to live, her strong constitution prevailed and she survived with no immediate adverse effects.

Charles died suddenly in November 1935. Edna was only thirty-eight and the children twelve and eight.

Charles had joined the American Legion, so Edna belonged to the American Legion Auxiliary. She participated in many service activities of this organization, including selling poppies every year at Bristol School, an activity in which her granddaughters helped. Edna also served as secretary-treasurer, aka bookkeeper, for the Henry Schulz Feed Company.

Edna Schulz Straub
Edna Schulz Straub, 1947
Photo in the collection of Carol Whitton
Used with permission

Carrying on the tradition of her mother and grandmother, Edna was an excellent cook. However, much of her German style cooking could never be replicated exactly because she always used the same pans and judged appropriate amounts by the dents in the pan without measurement. Descendants especially loved her delicious coffee cake deliveries every Saturday morning! Edna helped organize a group of female Schulz cousins who regularly lunched and played card games such as Bridge or Canasta. She continued living with and caring for her father. She and daughter, Eleanor Wright, compiled the original Schulz family descendants’ tree a few years before her father’s death.

After the 1960 death of her father, Edna sold their home and moved to a small house on Colebrook Avenue. By 1970, her Parkinson’s disease, a late arriving side-effect of the earlier encephalitis, worsened and she moved into Bethesda Nursing Home in Kirkwood.

On 3 March 1974 Edna Caroline Straub died, four days before her 77th birthday. After the funeral at Webster Groves Presbyterian Church, she was buried with her husband and parents in the Schulz plot, at Oak Hill Cemetery, Kirkwood.

 

Written by Carol Whitton
April 2017

© 2017, St. Louis Genealogical Society

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Last Modified: 25-Oct-2018 21:42