| Notes |
- Anna was one of a set of twins. Sister was Harriet who died at 3 months of Cerribritis (?). Four girls who had just made their communion bore her casket.
From Milwaukee Magazine article on Jones Island life, 1982:
[quote] Anna Lenz Sikora is now in her 80s, but her dancing eyes make it easy to imagine the delightful girl she must have been when she lived on the island. She was 17 when she moved into the city; today, she divides her time between her small South Side home and a summer cottage on Fox Lake. Her husband, Walter, still fishes and makes and mends his own string nets.
Sikora remembers her ealy years on Jones Island as being the happiest of her life.
"In the summers, we swam and had picnics and the boys would swim in the lake with nothing on when the big ship Christopher Columbus passed by and made big waves," she remembers. "And in winter, we would play in the snow and skate on the frozen river. Everyone there was so friendly; nobody ever locked their doors."
Anna's parents, JOhn Lenz and Philomina Selin, came from Danzig in 1902, after the island had already been occupied for three decades. John Lenz drowned in a fishing accident off the coast of Waukegan, where he had hired on with a fishing expedition to make more money for the family. Anna was four years old then, and can remember her mother rowing a boat back and forth across the river to work in a Milwaukee laundry to support her children.
The Lenz house was typical of the period. It contained one bedroom, a living room, a kitchen, a root cellar, and a summer kitchen. The female members of the family slept together in one room, and the males bunked in another. Anna recalls chickens living undr her house, for the island was home to a variety of small livestock, including one cow.[end quote]
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Extended Family Histories
1900 - 1985 (84 years)
