Glimpses – SOPHIE HAYS AND FAMILY by Judith Williams
I have great great grandparents directly from Germany; born in the 1820s. They, Hugo Cuno Benno Jugel and Johanna Rosena Warner, had ten children. Two of these children were Emma and Pauline. Emma, born in 1864, is the one that first heard about the Faith from its mention at the Parliament of World Religions in Chicago in 1892 or 1893. As far as I know this was first mention of Faith in America. She took the Message back to Nebraska. Pauline Jugel, born in 1863, married Henry Christine Johann Pater Luehr, born in 1854. They are my great grandparents. They had fourteen children. Three of these became Baha’is; Freida, Pauline (yes, mother Pauline named her daughter Pauline) and Sophie. Freida married John Frank Hay and moved to Michigan. Pauline never married. And Sophie, my grandma, married David Henry Hays. They had two girls before his death, when the girls were still very young. Henrietta and her sister Freida both married. Freida became a Baha’i but none of her children nor her spouse became Baha’is. Henrietta married Ralph Wilson Kroll. They both became Baha’is in the early 1950s. They had ten children. All five girls became Baha’is; two of the five boys became Baha’is.
When [my grandma] Sophie was only married four years she was widowed and left to rear two young girls on her own. Her husband, David Hays, suffered from what was at that time considered to be consumption so he was on his deathbed for a bit. During his final days he had asked Sophie to rear the children as Catholic, his chosen faith. This, she told him, she could not do! She would rear the girls, Henrietta and Frieda, as Baha’is. And so she remained firm in her religious convictions her whole earthly life. I am so grateful!!!