|
Thirty-nine-year-old Hilma M.
Johnson Berg (b.1864) took her two children to the
afternoon matinee performance of Mr. Bluebeard at
the Iroquois Theater. She purchased seats or
standing room in the third-floor balcony. The
children were thirteen-year-old Olga Victoria Berg
(b.1890) and eleven-year-old Victor Lawrence Berg
(b.1892).
Hours later, husband and father Frank A. Berg
(1859-1914) identified the bodies of his wife and
children at Jordan's and Shelden's mortuaries.
Olga's body had been found on the stairs in the
Iroquois lobby and carried out by police officer
Albert F. Simsrott.
Hilma and her children were buried at Mount Greenwood Cemetery in Chicago.
|
 |
Frank Berg had emigrated from
Sweden in 1868 with his parents, Victor and Anna
Anderson Berg, and Hilma's arrived with her parents,
Charles and Matilda Johnson in 1882. By 1903 they
had been married for nineteen years and Frank worked
as a machinist. Olga and Victor attended the Van
Vlissingen elementary school (pictured). The family
lived at 408 W. 111 St. in Chicago's
Pullman/Roseland area.
In the years after the fire
In 1909 Frank received a settlement from Fuller Construction
of $750 for each of the three victims in his family.
These three were among only thirty-five settlements awarded.
He died in 1914 at the Pullman Hospital in Chicago and was buried in the Mt. Greenwood Cemetery alongside his wife and children.
|
|
Discrepancies and addendum
Some newspapers miss reported
that Olga and Victor were the same age, others that
Hilma's name was Helena. Some didn't report
Olga and Victor among the fatalities. Some
reported Hilma as being an unmarried woman.
* Some 1904 newspapers reported a third Berg child named
Rosalind among the victims. The coroner's office did
not issue a burial permit for a Rosalind Berg,
however, and in the 1900 census Frank and Hilma
reported having had just two children, Victor and
Olga. Possibly an error occurred when
newspapers copied an early report in the Chicago
Tribune that stated the Berg family was from
Roseland, a neighborhood on Chicago's south side.
|
