Whatever Happened to Amelia Thurnau?

REMEMBERING FORGOTTEN WOMEN

And the importance of having a name of one’s own

Not all lives are lived in such a way that they lend themselves to the narrative arcs that define modern life. Some lives, when viewed from the outside in, appear to be ordinary or unimportant, and this tendency is truer for women than for men, and one of those lives that has haunted me with the dearth of information to describe it, is that of a woman named Amelia Thurnau.

Were she alive today, Amelia Thurnau would be 140 years old, but she is not alive, and the mystery of what became of her (which has vexed me for years) finally has at least a partial answer.

I am not a genealogist, per se. I don’t follow all of the protocols, I tend not to document my sources as required, but I am interested in where I came from and what it is that makes me “me,” and it was while I was attempting to sort out my past that my mother mentioned a woman who was ostensibly related to my father.

The woman had lived off of East Tulare Street in Fresno, California and most of what my mother knew she had learned from her mother (my Nana), and her half-sister, Blanche (my Aunt Bebe) who in turned learned everything they knew from a woman who went by the name of Mary Malich.

Census records indicate that Mary Malich was born in Austria, a region, which at the time she immigrated to the United States in 1910, encompassed what would become, Yugoslavia. It was probably this shared ancestry, a common language, and quite possibly a familial relationship that connected Mary Malich to my grandmother.

My grandmother’s circle of friends was tight knit. Mary Malich was one of her closest confidants, and Nana put great stock in the information Mary reported to her.

And, as I learned one day, one of the things that Mary Malich had reported was the man my mother was dating — my father-to-be — had a great aunt who had lived off of East Tulare in Fresno, and that great aunt was crazy. My grandmother and my aunt felt certain that this was something that ran in my…

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