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Thirty-one-year-old
milliner, Margarethe Annen,▼1
took her two young nieces to the Mr.
Bluebeard matinee at Chicago's newest playhouse, the Iroquois
Theater on Randolph St. When a stage fire spread
to the auditorium the girls escaped, but Margarethe did
not.
Annen family members
searched mortuaries for two days without
success. By studying victim lists
published December 31 in the Chicago
Tribune they
may have noticed there were two victims
said to live at 299 Webster: Margarethe
and a stranger at Rolston's Funeral Home
tentatively identified as May Curran.
Police had found a watch engraved "May
Curran" on or near Margarethe's body and
some other type of identification on the
body that gave her address as 229
Webster and concluded the deceased was
May Curran of 229 Webster St.
The Curran family of Detroit came to Chicago
to examine the body thought to be May
Curran and determined it was not their
relative, probably the same day the
Annen's examined the body and determined
that it was Margarethe.
The Curran
family returned to Detroit to continue
their search for the
mysteriously missing May Curran, and
the Annen's planned Margarethe's
funeral.
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Margarethe Annen (b. 1872) lived at 299 Webster▼2
with her widowed mother, Mary M. Kreuser Annen (1850–1923),
twenty-one-year-old brother, Frank Charles Annen III (1882–1975),
and sister, Elisabeth Annen (b. 1885). Mary had born nine children in all,
of which five survived as of the 1900 census.
Margarethe's father, Frank Charles Annen II., had
passed in 1893.
Survivors, nine-year-old Marion E. Vacher
(1894–1976) and five-year-old Cora M. Vacher
(1898–1983), were the daughters of Margarethe's
older sister, Mary "Mamie" Annen Vacher (1870–1934)
and George B. Vacher (1868–1948).▼3
George worked in a variety of railroad jobs over the years,
including as a conductor and chauffeur.
Margarethe's body was finally identified by her
brother Frank C. Annen III.
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Margarethe's funeral was held mid-afternoon Saturday, January
2, 1904, at St. Vincent church, and interment was in
the Annen family plot at St. Boniface Cemetery in
Chicago, where Margarethe's parents and several
siblings were buried.
In the years after the fire
In 1907 Mary and George Vacher had a third daughter named Charlotte
Vacher, but she lived for only six years.
Marian Vacher left school before the ninth grade and
married Ben Holtz, an auto mechanic. She spent her
last years in Florida. Her sister Cora married
William H. Boldt, a railroad clerk.
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Discrepancies and addendum
1. The Annen name was sometimes spelled Annon or Annan.
2. With Chicago's 1909 house
renumbering, the Annen house number was changed
from 299 Webster to 903 Webster. Frank C.
Annen II had built the large home in 1882 and it
was occupied by family members until at least
the mid 1930s. Today it is a lovely
single-family dwelling but during the fifty-year
occupancy by the Annens it was a two-family
home, tenant revenue helping support Mary Annen
after her husband's death.
3. 1904 newspapers misspelled the
girls' last name as Vocher, but the family reported
it as Vacher in the 1900 & 1910 census.
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