Carleton Charles Berry (1871–1948) worked as an assistant undertaker at A.L. Bentley & Son funeral parlor headquartered at 238 Lincoln.

Established in 1888, the Bentley undertaking company consisted of three funeral parlors. In 1900, married for six months, Carl lived at the funeral home, probably serving an apprenticeship.
He and Maggie, the former Margaretha Niebling (b. 1877), had married the summer of 1899 when Maggie was twenty-two. She was one of seven children born to the late Frank Niebling and Magdalena Keilman Niebling.  By 1903, Carl and Maggie lived at 759 Larrabee in Chicago (north of today's Montgomery Ward Park).

Carl, Otto and Emma Berry were three of eight children born to Charles and Ella Walker Berry. All three were brought up in the village of Emmet, Michigan. Today's Emmet has around 87 households with many of its residents commute to larger nearby cities. Agriculture is still an important part of the economy, as it was in 1903.

Twenty-five-year-old Otto Glen Berry (b. 1878) worked as a carpenter at the Advance Thresher Co.^▼1 and was a member of Modern Woodsmen of America.

In 1903, seventeen-year-old Emma M. Berry (b. 1886)  lived with one of her four sisters in nearby Yorkville, where she worked for the Tryabita Food Company^▼3 in Yorkville.

Otto and Emma's funerals were held at the First Presbyterian Church.

Pastor William Potter read the scripture to hundreds in attendance.  Mrs. Alfred Raper sang Lead Kindly Light and Fannie Metcalf played the organ. The Modern Woodsman^▼2  band led a funeral march to the Oak Hill Cemetery.

In the years after the fire

Two years after the Iroquois Theater fire, Carl Berry married Nellie Mann (1882- ). I found no record of children by either Maggie or the second wife. He continued to work in undertaking and by 1940 was an embalmer.  He and Nellie lived in Alabama at the end of their lives.  He described his experience at the Iroquois in 1926 at the annual Iroquois Theater memorial gathering.^▼4

Charles Berry, father of Otto and Emma, died four years after the fire, at age sixty-one.  It was reported that he became ill when his children died.

Discrepancies and addendum

A February 1904 newspaper story about Carl's testimony before the grand jury referred to him as George C. Berry but by 1906 his name was reported as Carl and all other evidence supports his name was Carlton, not George.

One genealogy collection includes a second Berry girl, Bernice "Buncie" S. Berry, as an Iroquois fatality but that appears to be an error.  Only Emma and Otto were included in the Battle Creek newspaper story about Berry Iroquois victims.  They were the only two listed in the coroner's inquest report of Iroquois Theater victims.  Further evidence that Buncie was not an Iroquois victim comes from multiple published references to her activities for nine years after the fire.  A 1905 Marshall, Michigan newspaper reported that Buncie (an uncommon name) visited relatives in Yorkville for a few days.  Two years later, the same newspaper reported that she visited her sister.  In 1910 Buncie was listed in the U.S. Census and in 1912 a Battle Creek city directory listed her as a clerk working at Kelloggs.  Had Buncie survived the fire, it seems probable her escape would have been mentioned in the newspaper story about Carl's survival.

1. Advance Thresher was founded in 1881 and in 1911 sold out to M. Rumely. Production at Advance ended in 1917.

2. Modern Woodman was founded in 1883 by Joseph Cullen Root as a fraternal organization with insurance benefits.

3. Battle Creek, Michigan is/was Cereal Central, home to Kellogg, Post, and Ralston. It was a cereal boom town in 1903, with cereal producers and suppliers in every crook and cranny. The unique feature of Tryabita was the inclusion of celery, said to build up weak stomachs caused by heavy meat diets.

4. The newspaper story in which Carlton's remarks were reported omitted mention of the fireball altogether and said everyone died of poisonous gas.  Looked like the editor chopped text to make space.

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