Mom was the eldest daughter of immigrants
from Germany. Her father, Heinrich
Göbel, arrived in his teens and worked his way to become a noted chef in
Rochester, NY. Her mother, Clara Marie
Steinmetz, arrived with her mother and sisters at the age of eight; she worked
as a domestic until her marriage to Heinrich, who had since become Henry Gabel,
ultimately settling on Goebel. As she
grew up, Mom saw her 18-year old brother, Fred, dead from an accidental
electrocution, and her two-year old sister, Marguerite, dead from scarlet
fever; her youngest brother, Henry, lived to the ripe old age of 97.
Always surrounded by cousins and friends, she
enjoyed family outings, especially visits to her Uncle Fred Gabel’s farm in
Mendon, NY. After graduating from high
school, she attended business school, eventually working at Remington
Typewriter Co. as a bookkeeper. The
summer of 1922, she worked at Camp Mohawk, a resort inn on Fourth Lake in the
Adirondack Mountains.
After marriage to Frank Arthur Miller in
1924, she lived in Batavia, where her two sons, Frederick Arthur, and Robert
Harold, were born. She was an active
member of the Methodist Church, and with her husband, joined a local Bridge
Club. Mom and Dad continued to meet monthly
with Mom’s girlfriends and their husbands to play Pinochle, rotating from
house-to-house, even though it meant traveling the 30 miles to Rochester.
After the family moved to Rochester,
in 1941, she took a job as Receptionist, Cashier and Switchboard Operator at
Kroll's, a women's clothing and millinery shop on North Clinton Avenue. After her husband's death, Wilhelmina
suffered a series of strokes. She moved
into a nursing home on East Henrietta Road, where she lived for her last 4
years. She died in Genesee Hospital of
pneumococcal pneumonia at the age of 82.
She was a grand lady and the proud mother of two, grandmother of 13 and
great-grandmother of three.
