The Chariton Leader, Chariton, Iowa Thursday, March 22, 1906 (This does not pertain to Lucas County, however, I thought the story was worth sharing...) ------------------------------- A touching story concerning a mother's love is told by the New York World in this way: "Mrs. Christina Barbara Hock laid her dearest son Carl, to rest a dozen years ago in Woodland Cemetery, Newark, N.J. She was already sixty-six years old, and hardly hoped for an extended span of life. She gave herself to no morbid grieving, but with her own hands planted upon his grave a sturdy rose bush. Though her home was moved to Brooklyn, and the way was long, she returned again and again to watch the plant with the fostering love she had given to the dead son as child and man. The seasons came and went, the roses budded and bloomed and faded, only to renew themselves again, and mother-hunger was satisfied. Death had lost its sting. Mrs. Hock died last Tuesday. She had been visiting her married daughter in Bloomfield, N.J., and on the cars, enroute to New York, she was stricken with paralysis. They took her unconscious to her home at No. 70 Schermerhorn Street, Brooklyn, and it was hours before she roused to recognize her children about her bed. Her dying thought was for the rose, and she bade her daughter, Emilia Hock, with whom she had lived for several years, to remember her cherished wish that after death she be cremated and the ashes of her body be used to nurture the plant she had tended. The cremation took place yesterday at Fresh Pond, and with the opening of spring the desire of this simple-hearted old German woman will be fulfilled. Born in Neifern, Germany, in 1828, she came to this country with her children in the first dawn of her widowhood. Her two sons, Otto, a Justice of the Peace in Newark, and Emil, a vaudeville actor, and two married daughters, Mrs. Edward Batts and Mrs. Anton Brenk, have long been absent from the maternal roof. Miss Emilia Hock was her mother's devoted companion, and both were members of the German Evangelical Church in Schermerhorn Street, whose Pastor, the Rev. Jacob W. Loch, conducted the funeral services on Thursday night." -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Copied by Nancee(McMurtrey)Seifert October 4, 2004 [email protected]