Grandma's Granny's Family Album

  Valentine and Mary Hegeman Wendel at their Valley Stream, NY home, about 1960 Of the 4 Wendel grandparents, (see Wendel Pedigree Chart) the last one I started researching was Mary Louise Hegeman.  I don't know why, maybe because I never met her.  All I knew about her was what my father-in-law Fred had told us when showing us the family Bible - she was the youngest of 11 children, most of whom had died as babies, and her parents had weird names.  And of course, she was from Brooklyn. She was actually very simple to find.  Born in 1904 in Flatbush, a part of Brooklyn, to Euphemia and Horatio Seymour Hegeman, and the youngest of 5 children spread far apart in years, she fit the bill perfectly.  Indeed, in 1910, Effie, as she called herself, had told the census taker that she was the mother of 11 children and 5 were living.  In cities in 1900, the infant mortality rate matched Effie's, about 50%, due to crowded conditions, poor sanitation, and incurable diseases that we now vacci