It’s been a long time since I’ve written about my family in this blog, but I’m just going to skip the explanations and excuses and get to the good stuff.

Maria Magdalena (Causin/Cossin) Roberts (1832–1894) was one of my long-time brick-wall ancestors whose family origins I was eventually able to discover. Born 14 August 1832 in Buffalo, New York to Alsatian immigrants, Joseph Antoine and Marie Agathe (Hensÿ) Cossin, she migrated to Detroit, Michigan where she was married on 12 May 1857 to German immigrant, Michael Ruppert/Roberts. Michael worked as a carpenter, and the couple remained in Detroit for the rest of their lives. Maria Magdalena—usually recorded as Mary—kept the house and raised eight children, four of whom outlived her. She died 27 February 1894 in Nankin, Michigan.

Although I was able to definitively identify her parents and their origin in the villages of Pfetterhouse and Seppois-le-Bas in the Haut-Rhin district of Alsace, many questions remain. Those early years between her birth in Buffalo and her marriage in Detroit remain a mystery, along with the fates of her parents. Where did they die? Did they, too, migrate to Detroit, or were they already deceased in Buffalo by the time of Maria Magdalena’s marriage? It’s been difficult to document the family with certainty in historical records from either Buffalo or Detroit, and the many variant spellings of the surname—ranging from the preferred Cossin, to Curzon, to Gosÿ—have added to the challenge.

Recently, I returned to my research on this family, hoping that a newspaper search might produce some new clues. To my delight and astonishment, I found the little article shown here, published in the Detroit Free Press on 7 August 1894—just over five months after Mary Roberts died.

Clearly, I’m not the only one who has sought Maria Magdalena’s whereabouts! I am certain that the woman described in the Personals ad must be “my” Maria Magdalena, who was born in 1832, and was still “Mademoiselle” in 1855, since she did not marry Michael Roberts until 1857. According to the ad, she was already living in Detroit by 22 April 1855, which adds another point to the timeline. Most interesting is the identification of a brother, Anthony, born in 1838, which is brand new information! Where was he born, Buffalo, Detroit, or somewhere else?

A quick search on Ancestry revealed that Y. J. Cicotte of Detroit was probably Y.G. Cicotte, who was enumerated in the 1870 census and was identified as a lawyer. The 1880 Detroit City Directory identified Julius Stoll of 185 Randolph Street as being in the Real Estate and Insurance business. It’s likely, then, that neither of these men was necessarily a friend of Maria Magdalena’s; they were merely professionals whose services had been engaged, first by Maria Magdalena herself in 1855, and then in 1894 by her friends in Alsace who wondered about her whereabouts.

Why did her “friends in Alsace” wait so long to seek her out? Was there some new development back home that led them to break the silence of nearly 40 years? The Detroit Free Press is digitized online at Newspapers for the entire period from 1855 through 1894, and this Personals ad is the only reference to any of these Cossins. If Mary’s friends in Alsace had made attempts to contact her previously through similar Personals ads, those ads should have turned up. Or was it Mary herself who broke off the correspondence, apparently without even informing them of her marriage?

The fact that these friends inquired only after Mary and her brother, but not her parents, suggests that perhaps Joseph Antoine and Marie Agathe were deceased before 1855. Previously, I’d checked the Buffalo, New York Death Index, 1852–1884 for evidence of their deaths, but did not find them. The cemetery where Mary Roberts herself is buried, Mount Elliott in Detroit, offers a database of records from five local cemeteries, and the Cossins are not found. However, the database appears to be incomplete, because I searched the names of five additional relatives known to be buried in that cemetery, and only one of them turned up in the database. So, I emailed the cemetery, and I’m waiting for their reply. Last year, I also checked death records for 1836–1857 from St. Louis parish in Buffalo, where Mary Cossin Roberts was baptized, and did not find them. However, it might be worth another look just in case I missed them the first time. I definitely need to check those baptismal records again for the birth of Anthony Cossin circa 1838.

So many questions, so little time!

© Julie Roberts Szczepankiewicz, 2024