Yetta Rupp's Voter Registration Card from 1930 in Multnomah County

Having completed the translation of Carlo Knight's The Advocate of Tiberius: The tormented existence and almost tragic death of Thomas Spencer Jerome and learned much more about Jerome's paramour Yetta Rupp, it's time to dig.

We know that she ended up in Alameda, California by 1935 and was living with a woman named Anna Whitehead. Who I believe now was not her so-called "partner" but actually her sister (born 1868). The fact that a widowed woman by that same name was living in Portland in Multnomah County at the same time as Yetta's appearance in the voter rolls seems to corroborate this. Anna died in New Orleans in 1954 and listed in her record are the same middle names of her parents that Yetta used on her voter registration. It's interesting to note that John Leonard Rupp and wife Augusta Wilhelmina Lange named two of their 15 children using their middle names and another son was given the name John just to confuse things further.

I did locate an article concerning an Anna Rupp from 1894 whereby the domestic working for a clothier in Merrill, Michigan had stolen goods and shipped them back to a cousin in Saginaw. In the article the woman needed a translator - perhaps conveniently so - so the Rupp's were decidedly German and likely recent emigres. Which may have had something to do with the tumult between Yetta and Jerome in later years as man and disgruntled house servant. Not to mention that several scholars believed that Jerome and his close friend Charles Lang Freer, with whom he bought the Villa Castello in Capri in 1899, were once romantically involved.

Detroit News, May 28, 1894

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P. O. Surveying Detroit Needs

Detroit News , October 8, 1929 This is a long article about the Postal Service but our concern is with Arch Coleman, the first Assistant Postmaster-General, who recalled in his visit back to the town that he grew up in, that he was born in the house which was the first Yondotega Club at 302/518 East Jefferson. An article by the Free Press seemed to suggest that he was born nearby.

Yondotega Club Beginnings Told

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The Yondotega Club

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