Herman Fellman was a carpenter and contractor from Detroit who had relocated to Chicago to better his business prospects. In 1888, at age twenty-one, he married Sidonie, a fellow German immigrant. Herman had arrived in America in 1872 and Sidonie in 1884. They had two children — a son that died in infancy and a daughter, Gertrude Fellman (1890-1964).

In 1903, Herman sent $10 each to his mother Bertha and mother-in-law Clara Ruhleman, with invitations for the women to come to visit he and his wife in Chicago over the Christmas holidays. They set out from Detroit for Chicago by train on December 24, 1903, arriving that evening in time to spend Christmas Eve. It would later be reported that his mother had a sense of foreboding about the trip. There were dozens of omen stories after the fire. If I labeled all the times a horrible possibility has run through my mind about loved ones as a premonition, my clairvoyance accuracy would be zero.  Perhaps worrying was rare for Bertha. In 1903, her anxiety about their trip to Chicago turned out to be accurate. More about Bertha below.

Sixty-three-year-old Clara Anger Ruhleman's body was found at Rolston's mortuary and identified by her son, Arthur Anger, who came from Lansing, Michigan to make the identification.†

In the years after the fire

Sidonie testified about their experiences at the Iroquois Theater before the grand jury on February 15, 1904.  Two years later in Detroit, she married Alois Hastreiter and two years after that married Otto Herman Jarrendt in Chicago.

Daughter Gertrude grew up, married Fred Michael Stucker, and they had a daughter named Doris.  Gertrude's family lived with her mother and stepfather in Chicago in 1920 and by 1930 had relocated to California.

Adolph Fellman, Bertha's son and Herman's brother, lost his wife in 1904 and their five-year-old daughter in 1905.  A pile of grief for one human to endure.  He remarried a woman named Ottilie Werner (1871-1946) and they had a son named Walter Fellman (1906-1989).

The puzzle of Bertha Fellman's body

The only Fellman for whom a burial permit was issued was Herman.  That's because they never found his mother Bertha's body.  Three weeks after the fire, the family filed a petition in probate court to have Bertha declared dead so so her estate could be closed.  Sidonie Fellman testified that Bertha had been with them in the theater.  Adolph, his wife, Emma, and Sidonie would have viewed the few remaining unidentified bodies.  A week after the fire, only four bodies remained unclaimed, including two females.  (That would have included the one eventually buried beneath the Iroquois Theater memorial marker in Montrose Cemetery.)

There were no reports of corpses being assembled from a collection of body parts, or that officials suspected entire bodies had been consumed by the fire.  Excepting a report of one severed hand found in the ice in Couch Place alley the day after the fire, and the head of one boy on the first floor, next to his body, references to body parts were in conjunction with removing bodies from the balconies.  Some had been burned badly enough that when first responders attempted to separate badly burned bodies from piles on the stairway landing and in front of the exits in the balconies, limbs sometimes separated from the body but there were no references to a quantity of disconnected parts, as would be the case in the Eastern disaster a dozen years later. 

There is a chance that the answer to the puzzle about Bertha Fellman's body lies in an event ten years later.  In 1913 a career criminal called Spencer confessed to having stolen a body and buried it under a bogus name, Nellie Skarupa.  It was the body of a woman fifty or so years younger than Bertha Fellman's but badly damaged by the fire.  Did Bertha go in the ground as Nellie?

Possibly connected to Spencer and the Fellmans was a curious incident that took place in the few days in the first week in January between when Adolph and his wife located Herman's and Clare's body and their return to Detroit.

A man appeared at the Fellman home in Detroit, claiming to represent a Chicago undertaker.  He claimed to be there to retrieve the caskets soon to arrive with the bodies of Herman and Clara.  A relative became suspicious and took him to an undertaker the family was familiar with to discuss the arrival of the caskets.  The undertaker found the man's behavior odd and treated him coldly.  The man disappeared and did not return.  He was described as short and with a mustache.  By 1913 con man Spencer did not have a mustache but he might have had one in 1903.  If him, whatever might he have had in mind when approaching the Fellmans?  His cons were sometimes long on arrangements and short on gain, not helped by an opium addiction.

Discrepancies and addendum

* Several online sites repeat what I believe must be an error: that Herman Fellman changed his name from Sidonic Fellman to Herman Fellman. Inaccurate data entry or a character recognition error seems more probable than that a man named Sidonic married a woman named Sidonie.  In some records, his name was spelled Hermann and/or Felmann.  Sedonie's name was also spelled Sidonia and/or Ruehlman or Ruhelman.

†  The Everette disaster book inaccurately stated that Clara lived in Chicago.  She lived in Detroit.

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