Carl Julius Jatho's World War I registration; click image to enlarge.
Mary Elizabeth Jatho and Nebraska native Paul Malek on their wedding day, 1951
Carl Julius' children,
early 1950s, from left,
Mary, Carl Jr., and Dorothy in Florida. Click the photo to enlarge.
Carl Julius, the youngest of G.W's and Elise's children, was born on June 6, 1866. The 1870 census taker spelled his name "Collie", which may be the way his German-speaking father pronounced it.
C.J.'s earliest documented job was as a railway postal worker on the Charleston to New York line. During his frequent trips he befriended 15-year-old Maud E. Gilbert of Washington DC, whose house he would visit during stop-overs. In February 1894 he managed to persuade Maud, who was avowedly stage-struck, that a Broadway career was within her grasp...and that he was the one to help her attain it. The besotted couple took off to New York.
Maud's intrepid mother, a clerk in the Treasury Department, procured a detective who tracked Carl Julius and Maud to a New York rooming house. Maud was returned to her mother and Carl Julius pled guilty to abduction. Eventually he returned to his family in Chaireston.
Meanwhile Maud added an "e" to her name and as Maude Gilbert appears to
have made good on her aspirations. She found a certain level of fame in the New York,
London, and Los Angeles theatre scene (she's pictured at left in the role of Lomita in the
1907 play "Under the Bear Flag"), and even starred in a few silent movies during the
1910-1920 era. She married fellow actor Hayward Ginn and died in California in 1953, having retired from acting in 1940.
After the Maud episode the Jatho family gave Carl Julius a job working with his brother Edmond in his broom-works back in Charleston. In April 1904 C.J. married Mary Eugeni Linn, and his entrepreneurial skills were further tapped. C.J. and Mary are listed in a 1909 city directory as owners of Chasen's novelty store. By 1910 Carl Julius, Mary and her father James Linn had moved to Gainesville, Florida.
But the marriage didn't last; Mary Jatho returned to Charleston and Carl Julius remained in Florida. Records have not yet revealed the year of their divorce, though Mary Jatho listed herself as a widow from then on in the Charleston city directory. And it's possible a divorce might not have been obtained. They were expensive and sometimes legally impossible to get. The term "grass widow" was sometimes used for a lady whose husband conveniently disappeared, and this may have been the case with Carl Julius and Mary Jatho.
In 1917 Carl Julius married Mary Susan Smoot, originally from Alabama. He worked as a bookkeeper and was so consumed with patriotism that he registered for the World War I draft, shaving ten years off his age to qualify.
C.J. stayed mostly out of touch with his Charleston relations, though he said that he did some work for his older brother George at Colgate Inc. (the soap and toothpaste company), where George was already a top salesman.
Carl Julius later told his family he'd been disinherited from the family fortune because he wouldn't join the Lutheran church (though he was, in fact, confirmed at St. John's Lutheran Church at age fourteen).
It's not clear that there ever was a family fortune (available information suggests that there was not), and it's not known whether there was some other family rift that kept the siblings estranged. C.J. also told his offspring that the family name had once been spelled Jatheaux and was French, though we know now that the family origins were German.
C.J. and Mary Smoot had three children, Dorothy Virginia (born in 1919), Carl Julius Jr. (1923), and Mary Elizabeth (1924). C.J. Senior died in Florida in 1929; Mary Susan brought up their children on her own.