Family Recipe Friday: Jesse's Lemon Cake

Last week we made a lemon cake from the recipe given to me by cousin Donna that was her mother's recording of how Jesse's mother made the cake that became his birthday favorite. We took the cake to dinner at friends where it was enjoyed by all. The next day Dick again commented on how good it had been. While I've had the recipe for over ten years, this was the first time I tried to make it. So happy to know this family recipe is alive and well! One added note, a friend in Germany says she has a couple of cake recipes similar to this, so it may actually have been a German idea that Catherine brought with her, not something she acquired in Tennessee. I think capturing it in a scrapbook page makes a nice way to pass it along. Remember to click on the image to see it full size.

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Designer Credits: Ohana by Biograffiti
fonts: Kristen ITC, Gold Mine, Euromode

Tombstone Tuesday: Jesse R. and Helen A. Hoffman

Jesse Ralph Hoffman and his wife Helen Anna Charlotte Dianiska are buried in the Brooklyn Heights Cemetery in Cleveland, Ohio. New graves like theirs have these flat stones so they can be mowed over. Helen's parents and two siblings are buried here as are Jesse's mother, step-father and cousins of his mother. This is lot 410 in the Roselawn section, graves #3 and #4, reading:

Hoffman
Beloved Husband, Jesse R., 1904 - 1997
Beloved Wife, Helen A., 1907 - 1990

Jesse Hoffman's High School Record

Jesse Ralph Hoffman, son of Henry and Catherine (Hochrein) Hoffman and grandson of the immigrant Henry Hoffman, graduated from West Commerce High School in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1924. He was nineteen then. That September he enrolled in Wittenberg College in the southwestern Ohio city of Springfield. That Lutheran-based school is now Wittenberg University. When Dick notified Jesse's alumni association of his death, we learned that he had been in college later than we expected. It took a while to locate the right source of records, but eventually the school sent Dick his father's college records. One page was the high school transcript in the scrapbook page below.

There is another page listing the courses Jesse took each year in college. It has no record for the 1925-26 school year and the last session listed is the first semester of 1928-29. Although we always thought that he had graduated, it seems that he did not. He took three courses in Business Administration and had the best grades in one of them. The photos above are possibly from high school and later, after college. The later photo was taken in the upstairs of the house where he lived next door to his mother. The photographer was his brother-in-law, Albert Kaltenstein.

After college Jesse had a job as a bookkeeper where he was an office worker among a group of laborers at the C. O. Bartlett & Snow Co., a structural iron works. He told us that they called him the professor. He said it was in part because of the glasses he wore. It seemed to have both pleased and embarrassed him, but he did like to tell the story. Most of his working life was as a painting contractor, first with his step-father, Charles Klich, and later as head of his own business.

Wordless Wednesday: Jesse Hoffman and Rich about 1941