Carol's Family Tree

Carol came from a very interesting set of parents.

Her mother, Elsie Caroline Tetzloff, was the daughter of deaf parents, Charles Tetzlaff and Cynthia Williams.  Neither of them had been born deaf:  they were of normal hearing until childhood diseases rendered them unable to hear.  They were sent to the Wisconsin School for the Deaf at Delevan, Wisconsin.  That is where they met and after graduation they were married.

Photo of Charles Tetzlaff in The Deaf Lutheran

Charles was of all German stock.  He was the smartest kid at the school and he wanted to be a teacher, but his parents made him learn the trade of shoemaking.  He made custom shoes by drawing the outline of the person's feet on paper.  Although he was good at his trade, new-fangled shoe factory production drove him out of business.  He ended up working hard labor at a sawmill.

Cynthia's father was a civil war casualty.  He was wounded near the end of the war and after suffering greatly from his wounds he died when Cynthia was about six years old.  Her mother was German.

Charles and Cynthia were looked down upon because of their deafness.  Their 4 kids, including Elsie, had to put up with alot of teasing from neighbor kids who called them dummies.

Cynthia was known in the family as "Little Grandma."  She died in October 1921, the same month her granddaughter Carol Jane Martindale was born.

Carol always used to talk about "Little Grandma," as if she had known her.  She felt some sort of spiritual connection to the grandma whose life ended just before Carol's was beginning.

After Cynthia died, Charles Tetzlaff moved in with the Martindale family and stayed with his daughter Elsie until he died at age 91.

There was some German spoken in the household, but Carol's only German language recollections came in the form of a German Nursery Rhyme that goes back to the 1800s.  She would recite it to me me when I was little.  It went something like this:

"Drei Klein Entchen
Schwimmen auf dem see
Kopfchen in das Wassen
Schwanzchen in die Hoh"

meaning,
"Three little ducks
Swimming on the lake
Heads in the water
and tails in the air"

Carol's father, Don L Martindale, was of mostly English stock.  His dad Albert was one of those good-looking guys who was nothing but trouble, the kind of man you don't want your daughter to date.  Albert was smart, musical, and a accurate rifleman. He was a horse trader, a gambler, an auctioneer, and always was engaged in questionable  activities.  A real job was too boring for him and he was always trying out some kind of scheme.

He fell for Lillian Washburn, married her and immediately joined a circus. Lillian became a bareback  horse rider and sang to entertain.  Albert had a trained bear and soon started initiating his young sons, including Don L, into the traveling circus life.  Don was just starting to perform on the trapeze when Lillian decided enough was enough and divorced her husband, taking their three boys and returning home to Marinette.  She supported herself by having a dressmaking business.  Albert disappeared from their lives and never returned.

Don L went to work full time in the sawmills at age 12, then went into the Navy for 4 years.  After that he wandered around from state to state with some buddies, living in hobo camps, jumping trains, living as a vagabond. He picked up a cocaine habit, and developed a bad alcohol problem.

Meanwhile,his mother Lillian remarried and had a 4th son.  She needed help with the dressmaking business, so she hired local girl Elsie Tetzlaff to keep up with demand.  And after a few months, the prodigal son Don L showed up on his mother's back door.  He was done with the life of a bum and came home.  He got a job at the sawmill, fell in love with Elsie, gave up his partying ways completely, and the two of them married and spent the next 20 years having 9 children.

Here is Carol's family tree: