Ursula B. Adamson

Ursula was born in Oberhausen, Germany to Josef and Else Antkowiak on November 20, 1941, bearing the name Ursula Brigitte Antkowiak. Her sister Annemarie was born the year prior. At that time the cultural climate in Germany divided many families, as was the case with the Antkowiak’s. Ursula’s father Josef enlisted in the Germany army, and in 1943 Josef and Else divorced. After the divorce, Ursula’s mother Else feared that living with her children in the highly industrialized area near Cologne and Duesseldorf could put them in danger from Allied air raids. Else decided to return to her parents home in East Prussia (now Poland), taking with her Ursula, 1 ½, and her sister Annemarie, 2 1⁄2 years old. A few months later, Ursula’s father came to East Prussia and took the children away to an orphanage operated by the Red Cross back in Oberhausen. Soon after, the girls were placed in separate foster homes near Fulda, Germany. From that time on, Ursula lost all ties to her mother and her grandparents in East Prussia. Some 30 years would pass before Ursula discovered her birth mother living abroad. Ursula’s foster parents were named Bertha and Johannes Hansel, and they occupied a home in Angersbach, Hesse, Germany. The details of Ursula’s early life are recorded in a letter written in 1969 for her seven year old son Thomas. After declaring her intention to record her memoirs, the letter reads: “Carmi, Illinois, June 18, 1969 I was born in Oberhausen/Rheinland, West-Germany, on November 21, 1941, during World War II. My father was Josef Antkowiak, a crane operator in the coal mines of Oberhausen, and today he lives in Rheinberg/Rheinland and operates a shoe store. My mother was Else Antkowiak, nee Molsner, and she married my father in 1939, at the time when World War II started. They had two children, first there was my sister Annemarie, she was born on February 20, 1940, and then myself. ” The letter describes her sister’s children Michael, Monika, and Ronny as cousins to her son Thomas, and that Monika is her godchild, then continues: “Now you will wonder what ever happened to my mother. Well, up to this writing, I have never seen her or ever even seen a picture of her. My father I have seen only 3 times in my life. And here are the reasons. Around the year 1942 my parents got divorced. My father was at that time serving in the German army, and during his absence, I guess my mother was going with a friend of my father’s. Also my father was going around with other women, and had one child with a woman, but I have never seen it. After the divorce my mother went back to Poland, where she was from, to live with her parents, that must have been in the years 1943-1945. My father got custody of myself and my sister. Since he had to go back to the war, he left us children with the Red Cross and put us up for adoption. On my sister’s 2nd birthday in 1942 we both got ‘new’ parents, but not in the same family. The Red Cross brought us to a town called Fulda (Oberhessen). I was taken to a couple named Ludwig Pritzer. He was a policeman. My sister came to a family named Eiffert (Konrad and Mary). You will hear about them later on. Even though we lived in the same town (about the size of Evansville) we never saw each other, or for that matter, never knew about each other. One day during the war, the Americans bombed our town and the family my sister was living with got bombed out, and had to move to the country. I remained in Fulda. One day in July 1946, when I was 5 years old, my father came for the first time that I remembered for a visit. He told the people I was living with that it was time for me to know my sister, and asked if he could take me for a visit to my sister, who was now living in a small village called Angersbach about 30 kilometers from Fulda. The Pritzer’s let me go with him, and I remember playing all that day outside with my sister. When it got dark in the evening, I asked my father to take me home to Fulda. He said that it was too late, and we would go in the morning. I stayed with a couple across the street where my sister lived, and I remember crying all night long. The next day he didn’t take me back either. Instead he left, and I had to stay with those people, who from that day were to become my new parents. Their names were Johannes and Bertha Hansel. As it turned out, they didn’t and couldn’t have any children. Bertha (my ‘new’ mother) and Marie Eiffert, my sister’s step-mother, were sisters. So from that day on I never got to see the Pritzer’s again. One day Mr. Pritzer stopped by when he was on patrol and gave me 50 cents. That I remember very well.” “I entered school in the Fall of that year, and things were going very rough, one couldn’t buy anything because of the war, and everybody had to buy food stamps and then redeem them for groceries. 1 lb sugar for a month, 3 cakes of butter for a month, and so on. I got a coat of a US Army blanket, and was very proud of it. For Christmas, the Hansel’s gave me a used China doll. The Hansel’s had a shoe store and shoe repair shop. One day a woman came in and didn’t have any shoes for her daughter to wear. She told the Hansel’s that she would trade a China doll for a pair of shoes, so that’s how I got that China doll. My new step-parents always made me write a letter to my father, but he never wrote back. As I got older I didn’t write to him anymore, I really didn’t care for him, since he never came to see me or my sister. So we grew up, knowing we had a father somewhere, but when we got older and asked about our mother, one would tell us, she was killed in the war, or she died of natural causes, or she ran away. Well, we never knew, not even today. Our father visited us the second time, when my sister was confirmed in 1955, and then the 3rd time, about a month before I got married to your father in 1962. The years of my youth that I spent with the Hansel’s weren’t the best and not the worst. They were very strict, selfish, and prudish. So I grew up, to be myself, and that gave me a lot of trouble with them. They threatened to throw me out so many times, so I started thinking about being on my own very early.” The letter concludes: “When I was 10 years old, I attended the high school in Lauterbach. I would have been a very good scholar, but I couldn’t talk my problems in school over with my parents. They were quite old then, compared to the other children’s parents. And I didn’t have anybody to confide in. They called me everything in the book, when I had bad grades, and that didn’t help matters any, my grades got worse. After graduation from high school in 1956, I got me a job with a lawyer, Dr. Friedrich Ortmann, in Lauterbach. He was a really grouchy old man, and just the thought, I had to spend 3 years of apprenticeship as a law secretary there, made me half sick. There were many days I felt like running away, but my mother kept telling me I had to stand it. And so I did. I actually really enjoyed my job, it was very interesting, but I couldn’t stand my boss. I had to attend a secretarial school in Fulda, one day a week during those 3 years, and in 1959 I had finished my apprenticeship, and was I ever glad I did. I learned quite a lot there after all. In March 1959, after my exam, I applied for a job in the courthouse in Alsfeld/Oberhessen, where I worked when I met your father.” After graduating from high school, Ursula worked in a law office in Lauterbach, Hesse. In 1959 she took employment as a clerk in the District Court of Alsfeld, Hesse. It was during this time that she began searching for her mother, a search that would continue for another 16 years, ending in Nottingham, England. A common behavior among the high school girls was to flirt with the American and British troops traveling through their town, and both Ursula and her close friend Lieselotte would end up marrying American soldiers. In 1962, Ursula married Jack Hall, a US soldier from Indiana who was stationed in Fulda. At the wedding, Lieselotte met the father of the groom, Charles Hall, also a US serviceman, and they would later marry and settle down in Angersbach, raising two girls Susanne and Pascale. Charles Hall never returned to live in the US. On February 17, 1963, Ursula and her infant son Thomas boarded a Pan American flight to the United States. They landed at Idlewild Airport in New York (later renamed JFK International). Ursula’s husband Jack arrived one month later on a troop ship. The young family settled in Evansville, Indiana. Jack then started what became a 35-year career at refrigerator manufacturer Whirlpool. Middle Life Sometime in the mid-sixties Ursula and her husband Jack had a falling out, and eventually divorced. Ursula met a new man, John Adamson, from Leavenworth, Indiana. Ursula and John married in 1967 and Ursula gave birth to her second son, Eric Adamson. In 1967, the family moved across the border to Carmi, Illinois, where Ursula found employment as a bookkeeper for radio station WROY. Not content with the task of juggling figures, she learned everything there was to know about the radio station business and began writing and recording radio commercials for local businesses. Her voice was heard to be soothing and even-paced, and her German accent negligible. In 1972, the owner of the radio station urged her to get her third class broadcasting license. At that time the FCC required anyone operating the control board of a radio station to be an American citizen. And so it was that in 1971 she filed her Declaration of Intent to become a naturalized US citizen. On November 16, 1972, with the owner of the radio station and a co-worker serving as her witnesses, the trio traveled to the Federal Court in East St. Louis, Illinois where Ursula took the oath of allegiance as a citizen of the United States. The community in Carmi, Illinois were informed of the events of Ursula’s citizenship in the local newspaper. The news article contains a factual error, that she came to the US as the bride of John Adamson, which is incorrect. She came to the US as the bride of Jack Hall. When Ursula took a higher-paying job as a German/English translator in the nearby town of Mt. Vernon, Indiana, the radio station gave her a nice going away party. By 1974, Ursula, now mother of two boys, divorced her husband John Adamson and never remarried. She kept her married name Adamson. The search for her mother during the first ten years in the US had been futile. Letters sent to the International Red Cross in Geneva, German refugee organizations, as well as to the Polish Embassy in Washington were either left unanswered or contained no concrete information. From the civil clerk’s office in Oberhausen, she was at least able to obtain the names and vital information about her mother and grandparents when they were residing in East Prussia in the 1930’s. But that information was from before the war. Where might they be living now if they survived the invasion by the Russians in 1945? Did they flee to the West? Ursula’s father, who she had met only three times in her life, had remarried and was unwilling to provide any details. In 1973 Ursula left the radio station to work as a translator and interpreter for Babcock & Wilcox in Mt. Vernon, Indiana. This company was building a nuclear reactor and steam generator for the West German utility RWE in Oberhausen. German nuclear regulations required the presence of German engineers in the Mt. Vernon plant during the construction of the components. It was at that time that she explained the lifelong search for her mother to one Mr. Langenberg, a German engineer from Oberhausen who worked at the Mt. Vernon plant. Mr. Langenberg, who as it turned out had been an altar boy in the church in which Ursula had been baptized back in 1941, was fascinated by the challenge and promised that upon his return to Germany he would personally visit the Red Cross and make inquiries. After all, the war had been over for more than 25 years. Several months passed after Mr. Langenberg returned to Germany and Ursula had all but forgotten about his promise. Then one day in 1975, Ursula received a letter from England. The letter started off in English by saying “Dear daughter, my sister Frieda in Germany has called me to say that you are looking for me”. This letter was from her mother! She couldn’t believe that her mother was still alive. Ursula had never heard about an aunt named Frieda living in Germany. And what was her mother, now going by the name of Else Harrison, doing in England? Well, it turned out that when the war was over, Ursula’s mother had returned to Oberhausen, searching for her children. Oberhausen was under British control after the war. It was there that Ursula’s mother met and married an English soldier who was named Thomas Harrison. Unable to find her children, she left Germany in 1947 with her husband and immigrated to Nottingham, England. In 1977, Ursula sent an airplane ticket to her mother and the two were reunited for the first time in over 30 years. Ursula’s wish to celebrate at least one Christmas together with her mother became reality in 1987 when she visited Nottingham, England. Three months later, in March 1988, her mother died from a coronary condition. After a couple of inter-company transfers from Illinois to Akron, Ohio and Michigan, Ursula settled in Columbus Township, St. Clair County, Michigan in 1986. In 1990, tired of the daily commute to Troy, Michigan, Ursula decided to establish her own translation agency, working out of her home. During the 1990’s Ursula became a grandmother to two boys of her son Thomas and his wife Fay Hall. She visited them in Maryland and they came to visit her in Michigan back and forth over the years. Ursula retired in 2004 and devoted most of her free time to genealogy research. She was a charter member of the Richmond Historical Society. In 1992 she was elected Treasurer of the Society, the office which she held for many years. That same year she also became editor of the newsletter, The Richmond Historian. In gathering historical facts for the newsletter from libraries in Port Huron and Mt. Clemens, as well as from churches and cemeteries in the surrounding townships, Ursula was able to trace the origin of many German and Polish immigrants. Her fluency in both English and German afforded her to search the records of many German Lutheran churches in Casco, St. Clair, Lenox and Richmond. Soon she was asked for assistance by the descendants of many German immigrant families for help in discovering their family roots. In 1999 Ursula thought it was time to put the Richmond Historical Society on the Internet so that researchers from other parts of the world could find out about their ancestors. To date, the site has had tens of thousands of visitors. She also maintained a Facebook page called “Memories of Growing Up in Richmond”, which was dedicated to residents of Richmond Township and features original pictures dating as far back as the late 1800’s. Ursula is remembered by many people around the world and she made a positive impact on the lives of those around her. Fiercely independent, yet filled with sweet sentiment for everyone, she passed away on June 28, 2026, after many months of turbulent health conditions. May she rest in peace. No services are planned at this time. Jowett Funeral Home is privileged to serve the Adamson Family.

Ursula B. Adamson

November 20, 1941 - June 28, 2026