A history of the Hausser family in Cleveland

Note: I wrote this for the Hausser family reunion in 2003 and updated it in 2017. The narrative is based on public documents and interviews with family members. Corrections and suggestions are welcome, as are photos and documents. -- Jim Breiner, 2 March 2019.

Avon Lake, Ohio, 1927. Nan and Gus Hausser and "The Hungry Five" at one of the cottages on Lake Erie that members of the bakers union could rent during the summer. The twins, Kathleen (Curly) and Eileen, age 6, are on either end. Jim, age 3, is next to Curly, then Leona, 10, the oldest, next to, Ruth, 7.

It was a union of a West Side Irish family with an East Side German one when Anna Frances Lavelle and August Hausser got married Nov. 21, 1916, in St. Rose’s Church on the West Side. The bride wore a green velvet dress. Nan, as she was known, was 30, five years older than her husband and very touchy about the subject of her age. The groom, known as Gus, worked in his family's bakery. They had met at a dance. Both of them had lost their fathers when they were teen-agers and took responsibility for raising their younger siblings. Both of them were also children of immigrants, her side from Ireland and his from Germany.

While they were courting, Gus would take the streetcar across town to her home at 4116 Whitman Ave., near the old Lourdes Academy. Many times after their dates, Gus, who rose before dawn to work in the bakery, would fall asleep on the streetcar on the way home and ended up riding it back out to the West Side.

Their marriage produced five children – Leona, Ruth, Kathleen (Curly), Eileen and Jim -- and a host of grandchildren and great-grandchildren, and this is part of their story. It is a story of a family and a family business.

Gus Hausser’s roots

August “Gus” Hausser was born in Cleveland in 1891, first child of German immigrants Anna Gilles and August Hausser.

Anna Gilles, grandmother to the Hungry Five, said that her family left Germany so her brothers would not have to serve in the Kaiser’s army. In the 1880s, when the Gilleses left, the Germany of the northeast was Prussian, Protestant, and militaristic. This ideology and political philosophy clashed with that of the German Catholics in the south and west of Germany. They lived in the west, in a village called Landkern, not far from Coblenz and the Rhine River. So it was natural that Anna’s father, Anton, and mother, Maria Elizabeth (Berenz), would decide that things might be better elsewhere. At the time, 90,000 Germans a year were immigrating to the United States.

The Gilleses came from a village near Coblenz.

An immigrant's dream: from Germany to Brooklyn to Cleveland

This is the story of my great-grandfather, Mathew Breiner, and grandfather, Ferdinand Breiner. Most of it comes from public records in Germany and the U.S.: census, city directories, births, deaths, baptisms, and some oral history. I originally wrote it in 2002 and have added some updated information. Corrections, suggestions, clarifications, documents, and photos are all welcome. -- Jim Breiner, 2 March 2019.

When Mathew Breiner died of pneumonia in Kings County Hospital in Brooklyn in 1918, he was 66 years old and most of his family was gone. His wife, Magdalena, had succumbed to stomach cancer six years earlier, and six of their eight children were dead as well. 

The only family still living in Brooklyn was Mathew’s son, also named Mathew. The other remaining son, Ferdinand, was estranged from his father. Several years earlier he had left Brooklyn for Cleveland, married and started his own meat business.

An immigrant's dream

The old man had been a drinker. Supposedly he had been successful in business, owned some property, and had seven meat-cutters working for him at one point, but he lost much of it because of his drinking. So one wonders what was going through Mathew’s mind as he lay on his deathbed. He had lived half his life in a village in Germany and half in the bubbling immigrant stew of Brooklyn, N.Y. Did he have any regrets about picking up his young family and moving them across the Atlantic Ocean? Did he have idyllic dreams of the village he had left behind? Did he hope to see the son he had alienated, Ferdinand, one last time?

Breiner Brothers Meat store, Brooklyn, N.Y., about 1904. Mathew Breiner, the father, is standing at the rear. Then from left are sons Matt, Frederick, and Peter. Our grandfather, Ferdinand, was about 8 at the time and is not pictured.

Here at the end of his life, on his death certificate, his occupation is listed, strangely, as “blacksmith”. Did his son Mathew suggest that to the authorities? Or is that how he described himself to the attending care givers? Maybe he still described himself that way, a bit ironically, since that’s what he was when he left Germany 33 years earlier. On official documents there, his trade was listed as – “hufschmied”, a farrier or blacksmith.