Elmer and Mary Louise
Elmer Kraus Weppner and Mary Louise Herger were both born in Buffalo in 1893. Elmer, the banker Edward’s eldest son, went to Lafayette High School and Williams College, graduated from Cornell in 1914 and finished the University of Buffalo’s law course in 1916. Mary Louise’s father, Charles G. Herger, was the Buffalo-born son of an immigrant from Württemberg. Her mother was Frances Cornell. Elmer and Mary Louise married in 1920.
Elmer’s brother Raymond went to the Mexican border with the 108th Infantry in 1916, served overseas as a sergeant in the First World War, and then studied at the Carnegie Institute of Technology and went to work for General Electric in Cleveland. Their sister Caroline took a master’s degree at Canisius College in 1930.
The largest family in this generation was August F. Weppner’s: two sons by his first wife, Arnold Henry and Robert Arthur, whose families moved to Cleveland, and nine children with Josephine Gebhard. By 1931 Oliver was an assistant vice president of the Marine Trust Company, and Paul, another University of Buffalo law graduate, was a partner in Block & Weppner. Their sister Grace very likely became Sister M. Theodore of the Grey Nuns of the Sacred Heart. And in 1921 Arnold’s granddaughter Lilian Abel, the daughter of Emma Weppner Abel, married Howard C. Herger, Mary Louise’s brother, tying the two families together a second time.
Their five children were born between 1923 and 1933: Edward Charles, Mary Louise, Anne Theresa, David Francis and Benjamin. Edward went to school with the Jesuits at Canisius, which German Catholics had founded half a century earlier.
The family's names kept coming back. Charles and Francis turn up again in this generation. Benjamin later gave his sons the middle names Cornell, Kraus and Herger.