A Little Family History

Elizabeth had three older siblings and two younger ones.  The younger two were twins, a boy and a girl, Janos and Maria.  The older ones were Ferencz, Anna and Rozina.  Not a small family, but not a large one either.  Her mother, Anna Heim had been born in 1845, and died on December 7, 1918 at the age of 73.
The curious thing about Elizabeth's family is that the only family member she shared a surname was with her mother.  The older siblings were Peisz (apparently pronounced pie-za or bye-za) and the younger ones Kendl.  Anna's second husband, Janos Kendl, according to family lore, had been a bodyguard to the Kaiser.  Elizabeth would later tell her granddaughter that her step-father told her of being in a battle where blood flowed in rivulets on the field.  When Janos Kendl died at the age of 80 from old age, he was listed as a farmer, foldmives in Hungarian.  No mention was made of military service, but perhaps that was when he was a younger man.
Elizabeth seemed not to have a father.  The place for the father's name on her marriage certificate lies intriguingly blank.  Sandwiched between these two documented marriages, the circumstances of her birth remain an unsolvable mystery.  When quizzed about her parentage by her grandchildren, she always said her father was Heim.  This was a falsehood that kept some secret, or perhaps some shame, hidden.
When Anna Heim's first husband Ferencz Peisz died is currently unknown.  However, Anna was remarried by 1883 when the twins were born.  The child just older than Elizabeth was Rozina, born in 1872.  Sometime in that eleven year period a child with an unnamed father was born.  The question that is also unanswerable is why he was not named, and what stigma that carried in Mór.
After combing through birth records from the period from 1896 to 1913, it would seem that about 6% of births during this period were to single mothers.  Most of these mothers were in their early 20s, and only a few were widows - only six between 1896 and 1908.  Of these six, two had two or more children after the death of their husbands.  Between 1909 and 1913, there is no indication in the records that any of the single mothers are widowed.

An Introduction

Elizabeth Heim was born on November 9, 1876, in Mór, Féjér, Hungary, in what was then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.  The United States government would later change this date to November 15th.  In reality it is difficult to say with precision what her real name was.  In essence it was Elizabeth.  To the Hungarians she was Erzsebet, to her family she was Lizi.