Louise Jeanette Catherine Rebmann (1898-1974)
Picture of Louise Jeanette Catherine Rebmann
Louise Rebmann
Individual Facts
- Name: Louise Jeanette Catherine Rebmann
- Sex: Female
- Also Known As: Lou
- Birth: 11 May 1898, Buffalo, Erie County, New York, USA
- Death: 17 Sep 1974, Tonawanda, Erie, New York, USA
- Burial: 20 Sep 1974, Amherst, Erie, New York, USA
- Migration (Domestic): Abt 1952, New York to California. Edward and Louise.
- Migration (Domestic): Abt 1961, California to New York. Louise only, after husband Edward's death in 1960
Birthplace: Buffalo, NY
When Louise Rebmann was born on 11 May 1898, Buffalo was a fast-growing industrial city. Daily life centered on factory work, railroads, lake shipping, and busy immigrant neighborhoods. Many families lived modestly and worked hard, with home life shaped by coal heat, streetcars, church, and close local communities.
Buffalo offered jobs and opportunity, but it was also crowded, smoky, and demanding. Her early life would have begun in the world of a rising turn-of-the-century American city.
(Text by Positron AI)
Buffalo, NY
Biography of Louise Rebmann Moseley
My maternal grandmother, Louise Jeanette Catherine Rebmann, was born on May 11, 1898, in Buffalo, New York, and later became Louise Moseley. She and my grandfather Edward “Shorty” Moseley lived at 36 Broughton Street in Tonawanda, New York, with a small black dog named Tiny, and our family visited them there on holidays before we moved to California in 1951.
After my grandfather retired, my grandparents also moved to Lemon Grove, California, into a house built onto the back of my parents’ home on Dayton Drive, where my grandmother and I grew especially close. She was cheerful, energetic, and full of humor, often teasing me, repeating sayings like “a place for everything, and everything in its place,” and spending her free time “bumming around” San Diego rather than sitting at home reading or watching television.
Louise left school after fifth grade to work sewing burlap bags and later in a millinery shop, married my grandfather at nineteen, and helped the World War II effort by working at the Wurlitzer factory in North Tonawanda making proximity fuses for the Navy. The daughter of German immigrants from Niederbronn in Alsace Lorraine, she sometimes spoke a local German dialect and was known in our family for making dishes such as German potato salad and potato pancakes, which she called “panacakes.”
Many afternoons of my childhood were spent at her Dayton Drive home playing multi‑deck Canasta, where she consistently beat me and good‑naturedly teased me about the growing discard pile and the cards I could never pick up. After my grandfather’s death, she sold the house, returned to Buffalo to live in a small apartment, volunteered with the Salvation Army, revisited old haunts in Tonawanda with us, and, before her death from colon cancer in 1974, left me $1,000 that Anna and I used to buy a dining room table and some pictures.
Relationships
- Father: Henry Rebmann (1865-1912)
- Mother: Anna Maria Kalert (1860-1930)
- Sibling: Selma Rebmann (1893-1974)
- Spouse: Edward Moseley (1882-1958)
- Child: Lillian Elizabeth Moseley (1918-1996)
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