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Rose was a teacher at the Thomas Jefferson
elementary school at Laflin and Elburn and may have
attended the theater with another Jefferson teacher
fatality, Florence Tobias. Rose's body was
identified by a ticket stub in her purse. She and
Samuel, an attorney, lived at 1842 N. Sawyer avenue
in Chicago, blocks away from her mother on that same street. Rose was buried in a Karasek
plot in the Bohemian National Cemetery in Chicago
alongside a brother, Anton, who had died thirteen
years earlier.
1903 was a very bad year for Chicago attorney Samuel
B. Rogers (1860–1945). His mother died in June. Rose's
death came six months later, a week after their
sixth wedding anniversary.
Samuel was the son of a farmer from New York,
Charles Franklin Rogers (1817–1896) and
Arabella "Ella" Barnum Rogers (1925–1903). The family lived in Oshkosh, WI until sometime
after 1880 when they relocated to Chicago. Samuel had one sibling, a younger brother, Dr.
Buell Sumner Rogers (b. 1863–1932).▼2
Samuel married Rose Mary Opl Karasek n December, 1897.
She was the youngest of five children born to
Frantisek "Frank" Karasek (1818– ? ) and Eleanora "Lena" Karasek (1834–1911),
who divorced in 1886. Rose lived with her mother and brothers prior to marriage.
Her parents were from Bohemia, specifically Strakonice, where her father worked as a
stone cutter.
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In the 1900 census, husband Samuel was reported as
living with his widowed mother at 825 S. Homan.
Though he and Rose had been married for three years,
she was not reported as a member of the household.
That same census record reported that Samuel had two
children but I found no birth records for children of
Samuel and Rose. His mother, however, who did have two children, he and Buell, was
reported as having had none. City directories from 1899 to 1903 had Samuel and Rose living
together, first on S. Homan, then on N. Sawyer. Maybe the census worker had a bad day.
In the years after the fire
Samuel may have remarried in 1912, to a woman named Alma
Robertson. They moved around for a few decades, living in
Gettysburg, South Dakota and Wisconsin, settling in
Martinsville, Indiana during the last years of his life.
Rose's brother, a lawyer named Ferdinand J. Karasek (1867–1958), served as an officer in the Iroquois
Theater Memorial Association in 1913.
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