Millinery Memories: A newly discovered family connection lead two women to a treasure trove of hats

By LEE B. ROBERTS
Journal Times

Sunday, February 24, 2008 2:12 AM CST

“Oh my goodness sakes ... Look at all the hats!”

Dorothy Tennessen’s excited reaction to the collection of hats spilling out of a stack of hat boxes at Sue Bowen’s Mount Pleasant home stemmed from more than her admiration for their historic fashion design. For Tennessen, those hats — from classic black pill box to fancy feathered creations — brought back many a fond memory of the Sixth Street millinery shop where they once were offered for sale.

Tennessen, now 79, had not seen the hats since her mother took her to visit The Hat Shop at 316 Sixth St, as a child. Her mother’s aunt, Gertrude Thielen Williams, owned and operated the shop, which was in the space next to what is now the Sixth Street Theatre, for 50 years. And Tennessen, who grew up in Kenosha, remembers going there on Friday nights to pick up “Aunt Gert.”

“We would sit and try on the hats, and Aunt Gert would give my sister and I a nickel to go to the Red Cross Drug Store and buy some cherry Nibs,” Tennessen said.

Such memories were plentiful when Tennessen, who now lives in Milwaukee, came to Bowen’s house last month to share stories of Aunt Gert, who was also a great aunt to Bowen, now 53. While Bowen and Tennessen have worked together at Wauwatosa’s Froedtert Memorial Lutheran Hospital for more than two years, they didn’t know until a couple months ago that they are second cousins (their grandmothers were sisters). It wasn’t until Bowen showed Tennessen a copy of a Journal Times story about her floral design business, Nature’s Grace, that the two realized they were related.

It was actually Aunt Gert who made the connection. After reading the line in the story that said “It wasn’t until she inherited a collection of feathers from her Great Aunt Gert, who once owned a millinery shop on Sixth Street, however, that Bowen began to think seriously about creating as a profession,” Tennessen told Bowen that her mother had an aunt who had a millinery shop in Racine.

“I asked her what her name was. She said Gert. I couldn’t believe it!,” said Bowen, who is a hospital chaplain at Froedtert. “She then called me from home with the genealogy and, sure enough, it is the same family.”

Branching out

Since then Bowen and Tennessen, who serves as a chaplain volunteer at Froedtert, have spent some time filling in the branches of their shared family tree.

“I now have a genealogy of my Dad’s family,” said Bowen. “I had no idea that my maternal grandmother came from eight children. I thought there were just three girls. I’ve always wondered about the other women in the pictures with my grandmother and two aunts with similar faces. Now I know where her parents were from in Germany. I have names, dates and cities.”

Bowen also has someone with whom she can share her memories of Aunt Gert’s Hat Shop, and much more.

“I remember one day when my sister and my cousin and I got it in our heads to walk from Mitchell School all the way to Sixth Street to see Aunt Gert,” Bowen said. “We just loved her.”

Aunt Gert, in turn, called Bowen’s father and asked him “Do you know the girls are down here?”

“I always admired her,” Bowen said of her aunt. “She was a successful woman in a man’s world.” She was also very stylish, elegant and classy, the cousins said.

“She was my inspiration and now she has united me with my lost family,” Bowen said.

Connected cousins

Although Bowen and Tennessen didn’t really know each other growing up, they have found some similarities in their life paths. Both, for instance, chose to follow religious callings — Bowen as a Lutheran minister and Tennessen as a nun with the School Sisters of Notre Dame for 18 years.

And, while Bowen expresses the creativity she says she inherited from Gertrude in her floral design work, Tennessen’s artistic interests lean toward the theater, as she volunteers her time as an usher for the Milwaukee Repertory Theatre.

The cousins also share a youthful outlook on life.

“I don’t act my age,” Tennessen said, smiling.

“I’m never going to act my age,” added Bowen, with her own youthful smile.

The two have a very good working relationship as well.

“We hit it off from day one,” Bowen said of their time spent giving pastoral care to patients at Froedtert.

The cousins’ newfound connection has inspired Bowen to try and reconnect with some other cousins on her father’s side of the family as well.

Her father had only one brother, who died before he did (her father died just before her 11th birthday) and her uncle’s children moved to the Chicagoland area in the late 1960s and early ’70s, at which point her family lost contact with them.

“I’d love to find them again,” she said. “Maybe I will.”

It is very exciting, Bowen said, to find people in your family that you never even knew existed.

“This experience has opened up a whole new world for me.”

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