The Leyes Family of Mad River & Dayton, Ohio

 

 

ABOVE: This photograph of Margaret (Seager) Leyes was preserved and passed down through
Margaret’s granddaughter Bernadina (Leyes) Zavakos to Bernadina’s great-granddaughter Laura Zavakos Wood.

 

ABOVE LEFT: Louise Stich, born in August 1881, is pictured all in white, wearing a veil and holding a paschal candle. She looks so very young; and yet the occasion could have been her reception into the novitiate of the Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur. Louise’s religious name, Sister Louis Joseph, may have been a tribute to her uncle Louis J. Stich, who died in November 1901. Louise died sometime prior to 1910.

ABOVE RIGHT: Elizabeth C. Stich was born in July of 1887. She followed in her sister Louise’s footsteps when she, too, became a nun in the same religious order. Elizabeth’s religious name was Sister Julia Agatha. While the 1930 census noted her occupation as that of high school teacher, Sr. Julia Agatha apparently taught in the lower grades as well: Margaret Jergens remembered her mother’s cousin as a lovely nun who sometimes substituted for Sister Theodore in the first and second grade classroom at Our Lady of the Rosary school in Dayton, Ohio.

Louise and Elizabeth Stich were the only daughters of Catherine E. Leyes and her husband Andrew Stich. These photos were preserved and passed down through Bernadina (Leyes) Zavakos to Bernadina’s great-granddaughter Laura Zavakos Wood.

 

ABOVE LEFT: In 1858 Margaret (Seager) Leyes purchased a second-hand cradle for Joseph, her firstborn. This cradle was used for her four other surviving children before being handed down through the family. Apparently of the Queen Anne style, it is made entirely of walnut. In the above photo, taken around 1996, Margaret Leyes’s great-granddaughter Rita Schmidt smiles at her great-grandson Matthew, the latest of Margaret Leyes’s descendants to use the venerable cradle. ABOVE RIGHT: John and Margaret Leyes’s youngest child, Henry J. Leyes (1870-1949) with his harvest, circa 1918.

 

ABOVE: Margaret Louise Clayton (1920-1997), second from left, stands with three
of her Jergens cousins. Margaret Louise was the daughter of Louise “Lula” Leyes.

 

 

Cecilia Leyes is shown here in a close-up cropped from the larger picture, below.
This class picture of grades 4 & 5 in a Dayton school was taken on April 25, 1907,
per the notation written on the slate held by one of the children. (Cecilia, who was
twelve years of age in April 1907, seems a little old to have been a 5th grader.) In the
larger picture, Cecilia stands in the next-to-last row, third from the right.

 

ABOVE LEFT: Peter and Cecilia (Leyes) Jergens and their children in 1921. ABOVE RIGHT: Cecilia Margaret (Leyes) Jergens in the 1950s. To see Cecilia Leyes’s wedding picture, click here.

 

 

ABOVE: One of Andrew and Irma Leyes’s daughters, alive and well and still living in Ohio.

 

 

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