A Life of Tragedy
Jennie Bonawitz is best known for the tragedy that followed her through her whole life. She went through plenty of hardship and lost those she cared about.
Jennie Bonawitz was a Selinsgrove resident born over 100 years ago, in 1888. She was the daughter of Amos and Flora Bolig, who were farmers. Jennie had two sisters and a brother. She married a former steel mill worker-turned-shoemaker by the name of Martin Edgar Miller. After celebrating their honeymoon in Bethlehem, PA, they lived near Middleburg. Everything looked good for the young couple until disaster struck. In early 1917 Martin got sick and remained ill for several months. After a medical examination, he was sent home where his health improved. Unfortunately for Martin, the illness was tuberculosis, and it ended up killing him that year at the age of 33, leaving Jennie without a husband. They had no children before he died.
The Selinsgrove community showed an outpour of support for the young widow. It was still common for women in the early twentieth century to have their life goals be to get married and have kids. It was frowned upon to be a woman who was not married or have kids, which encouraged many widows around this time to find new partners quickly. (Elman and London, 2016).
Jennie married Roy Bonawitz in 1919. She worked as a housewife while Roy ran a car garage in Selinsgrove. They settled down in a house on North Market Street. In 1920 at the age of 32, Jennie gave birth to her first child: a boy named Warren. The couple welcomed the birth of their second child, a baby girl named Pauline, in 1922. All seemed well for the Bonawitz family until their household was struck with scarlet fever. It spread throughout the house, causing Warren, Pauline, and even Jennie to become sick. Scarlet fever ran rampant through smaller communities during the 1910s, killing 20% of those infected with it. In smaller, tight-knit communities like Selinsgrove, unless isolated, many people ended up being infected by it (Kaiser, 1915). Although Warren recovered, 5-year-old Pauline was not so lucky. In 1927, Jennie and Roy Bonawitz lost their only daughter. For the next two years, Jennie suffered from scarlet fever until it took her life in July of 1929 at the age of 41. Jennie Bonawitz’s unborn daughter perished with her.
Recommended Reading
Kaiser, Albert D. “Scarlet Fever.” The American Journal of Nursing, vol. 15, no. 9, 1915, pp. 717–22.
Elman, C., & London, A. S. (2016, January 4). “Sociohistorical and demographic perspectives on U.S.
remarriage in 1910.” Social science history. https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/social-science-history/article/abs/sociohistorical-and-demographic-perspectives-on-us-remarriage-in-1910/27FB44B4BA2ADC64A2CA4F1B99B96095