Carl Raths
28 Mar 1842 (Germany) – 16 Apr 1927
Augusta Staatz Raths
10 May 1856 – 6 Dec 1918
Frieda Aff
10 Sep 1876 – 15 Aug 1962
Charles Aff
11 Feb 1870 – 25 Dec 1945
Clara Schmidtke
8 Mar 1898 – 13 Feb 1950
William Schmidtke, Sr.
27 Feb 1897 – 13 Feb 1973
This mausoleum is the final resting place for three generations of the Raths family. Carl was a cloth-cutter, and he and his first wife Maria (who is not interred here) had one daughter, Fredricke (Frieda) in 1876. Maria passed away 26 November 1881 at the age of 40 when Frieda was five years old. Maria was listed as “sickly” on the 1880 census which obviously and quite sadly must have been true. Both Carl and Maria were immigrants from Holstein, Germany.
I couldn’t find any record of where Maria was buried so she may be elsewhere in Concordia, but the only death record has no cemetery info and her name doesn’t come up on findagrave.com at all.
In 1882, Carl remarried to Augusta Staatz, the US-born daughter of German immigrants who was fourteen years younger than her husband. The couple had one child together, but sadly it did not survive to adulthood.
Frieda married Charles Aff in 1895, and they had two children together, with only daughter Clara surviving childhood.
There is no date on the exterior of the mausoleum to indicate when it was built, so it’s likely it was around the time of Augusta’s death in 1918. After her passing, the rest of the family all lived close to each other on Addison Street for the remainder of Carl’s life.
Clara sadly predeceased her mother and was interred with her grandfather, step-grandmother, and father in the family mausoleum. Frieda survived many more years, doting on her two grandsons and great-granddaughter before passing away at the age of 85 in 1962. Clara’s husband William was the last to be interred in 1975.
RIP Raths family
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