Ludwig Rosenberger Family Collection 1821-1987 Bulk: 1850-1938

This collection contains a wide array of documents, correspondence, and clippings, documenting the life of several generations of the Rosenberger family. The collection is particularly strong on vital and medical records, containing a number of birth and death certificates and immunization records. The collection also contains several reference letters from Rosenberger's employers, and a considerable amount of correspondence with J. von Ahlften in South Africa pertaining to the estate of Moritz Rosenberger. Some documents belonging to relatives two generations older than Ludwig Rosenberger, stretching far into the nineteenth century, are also present. A number of records pertaining to citizenship oaths and fees attest to the assimilated, middle class nature of the family. Several records, receipts, and correspondence document the Rosenbergers' emigration.The clippings focus on the career of Rosenberger's cousin, the politician Lawrence K. Roos, as well as on Rosenberger's donation of his Judaica collection to the University of Chicago. The collection also contains many obituaries.Other major subgroups of materials include a number of passports and membership cards, as well as several handsome memorial books for deceased relatives. There is also a stamped ticket, which, according to Rosenberger's account in an accompanying letter, was a pass to access his workplace on the Domplatz in Munich when it was barricaded during the Beer Hall Putsch of 1923.Ludwig Rosenberger was born in Munich in 1904. His father, Moritz Rosenberger (1867-1934), was a clerk (Prokurist) at J. Einhorn & Comp., and his mother Amalie (née Roos) came from a family of salesmen. Through his mother he is related to Lawrence K. Roos, a prominent politician in the St. Louis, Missouri region during the middle of the twentieth century. Rosenberger apprenticed and later worked as a clerk at the Munich bank H. Aufhäuser in the years 1920-1924, and then spent for years as an accountant in Israel. Sometime after 1928, he emigrated to the United States, where he developed a successful furniture wholesale business in Chicago. Although he never attended university, he became a manuscript scholar and amassed one of the largest collections of Judaica in the world, stretching back several centuries. He donated this collection to the Regenstein Library at the University of Chicago.Photographs removed to Photograph Collectiondigitize