Rose was a teacher at the Thomas Jefferson
elementary school at Laflin and Elburn and may have
attended the theater with another Jefferson teacher
fatality, Florence Tobias. Rose's body was
identified by a ticket stub in her purse. She and
Samuel, an attorney, lived at 1842 N. Sawyer avenue
in Chicago. She was buried in a Karasek
plot in the Bohemian National Cemetery in Chicago
alongside a brother, Anton, who had died thirteen
years earlier.
1903 was a very bad year for Chicago attorney Samuel
B. Rogers (1860–1945). His mother died in June. Rose's
death came six months later, a week after their
sixth wedding anniversary.
Samuel was the son of a farmer from New York,
Charles Franklin Rogers (1817–1896) and
Arabella "Ella" Barnum Rogers (1925–1903). The family lived
in Oshkosh, WI until sometime after 1880 when they
relocated to Chicago. Samuel had one sibling, a
younger brother, Dr. Buell Sumner Rogers (b.
1863–1932). Buell specialized in urinary disease and
taught at the College of Physicians and Surgeons in
Chicago.
Samuel married Rose Mary Karasek (b.1871) in December, 1897.
Rose went by her middle name as a child and sometimes too as
an adult. In reporting her death, the School Journal referred
to her as Mary so she may have been known as Mary among her
fellow teachers. She was one of ten children born to
a Wisconsin dairy farmer Frank Karasek (1834–1888)
and Fannie Karasek (1840–1917). Frank and Fannie immigrated to
America from Bohemia (Austria) and settled in Hickory Grove, Wisconsin.
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Rose was an infant when her parents and six siblings made the voyage
from Breman, Germany to America aboard the steamship,
Baltimore.
In the 1900 census, husband Samuel was reported as
living with his widowed mother at 825 S. Homan.
Though he and Rose had been married for three years,
she was not reported as a member of the household.
That same census record reported that Samuel had two
children but I found no birth records for children of
Samuel and Rose. His mother, however, who did
have two children, he and Buell, was reported
as having had none. City directories from 1899 to
1903 had Samuel and Rose living together, first on S. Homan, then on N. Sawyer.
Maybe the census worker had a bad day.
In the years after the fire
Samuel may have remarried in 1912, to a woman named Alma
Robertson. They moved around for a few decades, living in
Gettysburg, South Dakota and Wisconsin, settling in
Martinsville, Indiana during the last years of his life.
Frank Karasek, Rose's brother, served as an officer in the Iroquois
Theater Memorial Association in 1913.
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