Monday, January 1, 2018

A mysterious Daisie


Let's start the year with a mystery. This is an old visiting card that I picked up a while back at the antique store in York New Salem. Though fancy around the edges, it's the standard size of American visiting cards — 3½ inches by 2 inches.

Something (now torn) was pasted to the left side of the card, so I can't read the entire name. But what can be seen is A. Daisie Roehrer.

That name is a stumper in the search engines. But if you take into account alternate spellings and misspellings, some possibilities emerge. Here are two such possibilities for Daisy Rohrer:

1. I found mention of a Daisy Rohrer, born in 1886 (no date of death), who was the wife of Orlando Mather Rohrer (1887-1958), a native Pennsylvania. (I generally assume these pieces of ephemera don't stray too far from home.)

2. I also found a Daisy M. Rohrer, who lived from 1877 to 1938 and is buried in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. Thought the dates of birth are different, I don't think we can exclude the possibility that Daisy #1 and Daisy #2 are the same Daisy. (Or Daisie.)

One of the Daisies (Daisys?) seems to have had an adventure in Hawaii, per this clipping from the May 23, 1900, edition of the Lebanon (Pennsylvania) Courier...


Meanwhile, to finish up, here's a closer look at the intricate and tiny bird underneath the "R" on this visiting card.

2 comments:

  1. Love the bird flourish. Hope Miss Daisy had fun sailing to Honolulu

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  2. The obscured initial before the letter "A." on the calling card appears to be "E."

    A certain "E. A. Daisy [sic] Roehrer" was a graduate of Ephrata High School in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. According to this source, she graduated from that institution in 1895: http://lancasteronline.com/archives/elmer-bobst-returns-to-lititz/article_a6368e4e-ec0e-533b-a8a7-68ebdffe11a2.html (Search for "Roehrer".)

    That would place her year of birth in or around 1877, consistent with the year indicated on the gravestone you referenced above; however, the spelling of her first and last names remains inconsistent.

    -- M.F.

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