Johanna Blumenfeld, born to Menachem Mendel Joseph Blumenfeld and Julie Meyer on 25 Sep 1860 given the Hebrew name of Chana, was raised by her stepmother Henrietta Baum after Julie died on 28 Jun 1863. Her father died 14 Jan 1886, and two years later on 31 July 1888, she left for New York on the Werra from Bremen and Southampton with her siste Recha. On the ship's manifest the two young women are listed as coming from Dogern, but the Hamburg passenger lists tell a different and more probably correct story as they were born and raised in Hamburg.

Six years later, she married a widower who lost his wife the year before. Just as she was raised by a stepmother, she became the stepmother of three daughters. This picture was probably taken when she went on her honeymoon in Niagra Falls, NY. in 1892.

 

In 1900, Johanna took her only child, a son now aged seven, to Europe to see his relatives in the old world. Now Johanna is a matron in the picture below.. Two of her sisters, Rosa and Recha, lived nearby in New York, and her brother Julius came over from Berlin on 1906 on the steamship U. S. Amerika and stayed at the Waldoff Astoria hotel while he visited his married sisters, Johanna, Rosa, and Recha, and his young nephew Martin.

Here Johanna appears as a middle-aged woman.

And now she is quite elegant as a senior. The 1930 Census shows that her sister Rosa, a widow of nine years, who never had children, was living with Johanna and her husband.

Johanna died of [congestive] heart failure caused by arterioscerosis and pulmonary infection, and was buried iin Mount Hebron Cemetery. she was listed as sixty-eight years old, but actually was seventy-five, and had as so many women for the better part of their lives shaved a few years off her age.