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Charles Knoll and Caroline Weiss

Charles Knoll, John and Carolina’s first son, was born in Philadelphia on 8 August 1857. Like his father, he was a butcher. On 24 October 1882, both aged 25, he married Caroline Auguste Weiss at St. Michael’s and Zion German Lutheran Church in Philadelphia. The register enters her as “Weisz,” born at “Ochsenburg, Brakenheim, Wurttemberg.” The witnesses were her brother, Christian Weisz, and Christiana Reichert, her “half sister-in-law”.

Caroline was born at Ochsenburg, in Württemberg, on 23 February 1857 and came to America in 1876 or 1877. Her own family’s story is told in the Knoll and Weiss Families section, along with the family’s memory that she may have had some Jewish ancestry.

In the family she was always “Grandma Carrie,” and her way of making spaetzle (Spätzle), the small egg noodles of southwestern Germany, was understood to have come with her from Germany.

Charles and Caroline had eleven children, and six of them grew up.

Their first child, John Edward, lived only a month and was buried in his grandfather John’s lot on 24 August 1883. Two more sons, Charles George and Charles Edward, died as babies. Benjamin Charles, born in August 1887, may also have died young: his parents gave the name Benjamin to another son two years later, and no death date is recorded for him.

In 1900, as one of his great-grandsons pictured the year for a family reunion in 2001, “Charles, age 42, and Carolyn, age 42, Knoll were most likely living in Philadelphia. They have 6 children. The oldest is Mary Matilda, age 16.”

By April 1910 the family lived at 3419 North Bodine Street. Walter, called “Wolly,” died there on 4 April, aged 16, of chronic nephritis, and was buried at Greenmount Cemetery on 6 April. His father gave the information for his certificate. The census taken that month still listed him, as a raveler in a cotton mill. Charles, 52, was a butcher at an abattoir and had been out of work for twenty-five weeks in 1909. Carrie, 18, was a weaver in a silk mill, Frank, 21, a paper hanger, and Fred, 15, a raveler in a cotton mill; Minnie was 12.

In January 1920 Charles, 62, owned the family’s home in the 33rd Ward. He worked as a finisher in a cloth mill, the only record that does not call him a butcher. Caroline, 62, was recorded as an alien. Frank, 28, and Frederick, 26, were single and at home, and Minnie, 21, lived there with her husband, Elmer Creamer, 21, and their daughter Esther, three months old.

Caroline died at home, 2436 North Marshall Street, on 4 June 1939, aged 82 years, 3 months and 12 days, of chronic nephritis, chronic myocarditis and senility. Her son Benjamin Knoll, of 317 W. Spencer Street, gave the information, and the certificate names her father only as “Weiss”. John F. Fluehr & Sons, 149 W. Susquehanna Avenue, held the funeral, with a viewing the evening before, and she was buried at Greenmount Cemetery on 7 June. Charles died in the same house on 2 February 1940, aged 82 years, 5 months and 25 days, of chronic nephritis and myocarditis, both dating from 1937. His son Fred, of 7421 Tabor Road, gave the information, and Fluehr’s again handled the funeral. He was buried on 5 February. Both lie at Greenmount in Section B, Lot 399, in a grave deeded to Charles, and Pastor Clark officiated at both funerals.