Christina (Christine in the U.S.) was born 5 weeks after the death of her older sister. She emigrated in her teens, with an uncle, to Wisconsin, and from there to San Francisco, by her mid-twenties -- quite an adventure for a young woman of her day!
She first appeared in the 1865 (Langley) San Francisco City Directory, living on Stockton Street. Her title, “Mrs. Christina Dern,” was most likely a semi-fiction to hide her single status and denote that she was not working by herself (i.e., as a prostitute). A similar subterfuge may have occurred in the following year’s directory, when she appeared as “Christina Dern, widow” renting “furnished rooms” (a “proper” occupation for a respectable, single woman) at the corner of Dupont (now Grant) Ave. & Washington St. (in what would later become Chinatown). She last appears with her own listing in 1867, in the Langley SF Directory as “C. Dern,” a few months before her marriage.
She most likely had borne her first child, therefore, out of wedlock – her descendants heard whispered rumors that Lillian was not John Slinkey’s daughter, a fact both confirmed by John’s later references to Lillian as his wife’s daughter. For years during her lifetime, however, her family promoted two fictional stories: [1] that both Lillian and Milton Slinkey were Christine and John’s children, whereas Lillian most likely had another, now-unknown biological father; and [2] that Milton was Christine’s child, not Lillian’s (a teenaged pregnancy covered up by the family’s move to Martinez for a while, before they launched into Sausalito society). Christina’s first child, daughter Lillian Katherine, was born on July 26, 1867 (as per her death certificate and an 1885 newspaper report announcing her 18th birthday party), though the family perpetuated the mythical date of 1868 for many years, to cover up the likelihood that John was not Lillian’s biological father.
Christina Dern’s future husband first appears in California records in a San Francisco City Directory published in September 1867, as “Schlinke, John E.,” working at the “news depot, 35 Second St. (and J.B. Cone & Co.)” while residing at 52 Minna [an alley-lane south of Market]. Christina and John first appear together in California records in a listing of their October 1868 marriage, by Justice Oscar T. Shuck, in San Francisco. They first appear with an Anglicized name in a December 1869 S.F. Directory as “Slinkey, C. Mrs.” offering “furnished rooms” [i.e., running a boarding house] at 783 Market (south side, between Stevenson Alley and the north end of Fourth Street); “Slinkey, John E.” was then working for “Regan & Corbett” while residing at the same address as Christina (783 Market). The couple stayed living there for the next 3-4 years, with Christina still furnishing rooms [no listing yet found in 1870 census], and their fortunes had increased to where they were able to employ a household servant by the mid-1870s. In Langley’s San Francisco Directory of April 1871, her husband was listed as “real estate agent,” and in the March 1872 directory (which does not list Christine), he is listed under her same occupation, “furnished rooms.” S.F. City Directories from March 1873 to 1879 list J.E. Slinkey operating the “Overland House” (hotel and saloon) at 531-533 Sacramento Street (with residence at 533 Sacramento, essentially part of the hotel). A surviving photo from the late 1860s shows the Overland’s predecessor, the “Original House” (a two-story structure next to the larger, three-story “What Cheer House”).
During the 1870s, Christine and John were joined by Christine's youngest brother John and John Slinkey's younger brother Dan, each bachelors and good barkeepers over the years at the family establishments (though Dan would turn into quite the alcoholic, and died of a morphine overdose in Aug. 1900). The "San Francisco Call" (Jan. 30, 1880) provides the only known record of another daughter, unnamed in the newspaper notice and born on Jan. 28th to the Slinkeys. The infant died young before that summer, since the federal census that year does not list her; family recollections include no mention of her.
Shortly thereafter, Slinkey seems to have tired of San Francisco – perhaps as a result of the baby’s death – and became the proprietor (purchaser or lessee) of the Cremorne Gardens resort hotel in Martinez, a town on the south bank of the mouth of the Sacramento River, where land travelers crossed by ferry to California’s first capital, Benicia, and one of several small, resort towns to where San Francisco residents would escape for weekend vacations. Slinkey renamed his new purchase the Morgan House and moved his family there; they appear in the July 1880 federal census in Martinez.
In the spring of 1882, the family left sleepy Martinez for the more promising town of Sausalito, where they would remain for over 15 years, catching the town during its boom years and rising to local prominence after they built the fine, new El Monte Hotel (on a ridge overlooking the downtown), started a newspaper, and founded a new chapter of a San Francisco social club, the Society of Old Friends. They were saddened by the death of their son Emile (at age 19 months), but raised Milton (probably Lillian's son, only a year younger than Emile) as their own. Christina's widowed father Henry joined the extended family in 1890, along with his grandsons Johann Dern and Emil Dein. The latter helped run a second, smaller establishment, the Hotel Sausalito (with adjacent dance hall), which John Slinkey opened in the spring of 1890.
Unfortunately, the town boom was starting to sputter, by then. Christine was noted in the "Sausalito News" as having been stricken with bouts of "nervous prostration" as early as the fall of 1891, when her husband was forced to sell the the money-losing El Monte. The family fortunes declined even more precipitously, along with that of all Sausalito, after the 1893 Depression and the extension of the railroad north to newer, more popular weekend-getaway destinations farther up the coast. Slinkey was forced to put the Hotel Sausalito (then more of a boarding house) up for sale in the winter of 1894.
Even the addition to the extended family of Christine's grandson John Emil Dern's new wife Elisabeth's aunt Florence and business-manager husband, Lt.-Col. William Seitz, that fall, couldn't stop the decline in business. In 1895, the Seitzs left for England, and in early 1897 John & Elizabeth Dern left with their infant daughter Flora back to their native Germany (where their second child, son Willie, would be born that fall). By then, John Slinkey had filed for insolvency; newspapers reported in Sept. 1896 that he had invested over $90,000 in his various businesses in Sausalito. His last Sausalito properties were auctioned off in May 1898.
Christine is reported in the "Sausalito News" (May & Aug. 1897) to have gone to stay with a friend in Rio Vista to recuperate from "nervous prostration" (the same from which she'd suffered back in 1891). It's possibly she suffered from clinical depression, or "melancholia" in that era's terms, which contributed to her death in the first days of 1899, one year after she and her husband had returned to San Francisco. Their "first-class lodging house" (fittingly named "Sausalito House") at 110 Ellis Street, NW corner of Powell, was where Christine hanged herself, in a closet of Room 2. She had reportedly told her doctor that she wished she were dead and had asked him about the various levels of pain attendant upon different methods of suicide.
The "Sausalito News" (Jan. 21, 1899) ran the following article:
"SUICIDE OF MRS. SLINKEY -- Ill Health and Business Reverses Caused the Rash Act. On Friday last the residents of Sausalito were shocked to learn of the death of Mrs. J. E. Slinkey, and on all sides could be heard expressions of sympathy for the husband and children. " The "San Francisco Call" (Jan. 15, 1899) noted that she was the wife of "James E. Slinkey" [sic], the mother of Lillian K. and Milton Otto Slinkey [the fiction the family promoted], a native of Germany, aged 54 years.
An anonymous letter to the coroner -- suggesting her husband had poisoned her after she'd been an invalid for over a year -- led to the exhumation of her body. A coroner's jury found no evidence of foul play, and ruled her death a suicide after she had "suffered from melancholia." Her body was reinterred at Laurel Hill Cemetery (on the south side of Twin Peaks), but was moved in Mar. 1920 to be placed next to those of her husband.
She first appeared in the 1865 (Langley) San Francisco City Directory, living on Stockton Street. Her title, “Mrs. Christina Dern,” was most likely a semi-fiction to hide her single status and denote that she was not working by herself (i.e., as a prostitute). A similar subterfuge may have occurred in the following year’s directory, when she appeared as “Christina Dern, widow” renting “furnished rooms” (a “proper” occupation for a respectable, single woman) at the corner of Dupont (now Grant) Ave. & Washington St. (in what would later become Chinatown). She last appears with her own listing in 1867, in the Langley SF Directory as “C. Dern,” a few months before her marriage.
She most likely had borne her first child, therefore, out of wedlock – her descendants heard whispered rumors that Lillian was not John Slinkey’s daughter, a fact both confirmed by John’s later references to Lillian as his wife’s daughter. For years during her lifetime, however, her family promoted two fictional stories: [1] that both Lillian and Milton Slinkey were Christine and John’s children, whereas Lillian most likely had another, now-unknown biological father; and [2] that Milton was Christine’s child, not Lillian’s (a teenaged pregnancy covered up by the family’s move to Martinez for a while, before they launched into Sausalito society). Christina’s first child, daughter Lillian Katherine, was born on July 26, 1867 (as per her death certificate and an 1885 newspaper report announcing her 18th birthday party), though the family perpetuated the mythical date of 1868 for many years, to cover up the likelihood that John was not Lillian’s biological father.
Christina Dern’s future husband first appears in California records in a San Francisco City Directory published in September 1867, as “Schlinke, John E.,” working at the “news depot, 35 Second St. (and J.B. Cone & Co.)” while residing at 52 Minna [an alley-lane south of Market]. Christina and John first appear together in California records in a listing of their October 1868 marriage, by Justice Oscar T. Shuck, in San Francisco. They first appear with an Anglicized name in a December 1869 S.F. Directory as “Slinkey, C. Mrs.” offering “furnished rooms” [i.e., running a boarding house] at 783 Market (south side, between Stevenson Alley and the north end of Fourth Street); “Slinkey, John E.” was then working for “Regan & Corbett” while residing at the same address as Christina (783 Market). The couple stayed living there for the next 3-4 years, with Christina still furnishing rooms [no listing yet found in 1870 census], and their fortunes had increased to where they were able to employ a household servant by the mid-1870s. In Langley’s San Francisco Directory of April 1871, her husband was listed as “real estate agent,” and in the March 1872 directory (which does not list Christine), he is listed under her same occupation, “furnished rooms.” S.F. City Directories from March 1873 to 1879 list J.E. Slinkey operating the “Overland House” (hotel and saloon) at 531-533 Sacramento Street (with residence at 533 Sacramento, essentially part of the hotel). A surviving photo from the late 1860s shows the Overland’s predecessor, the “Original House” (a two-story structure next to the larger, three-story “What Cheer House”).
During the 1870s, Christine and John were joined by Christine's youngest brother John and John Slinkey's younger brother Dan, each bachelors and good barkeepers over the years at the family establishments (though Dan would turn into quite the alcoholic, and died of a morphine overdose in Aug. 1900). The "San Francisco Call" (Jan. 30, 1880) provides the only known record of another daughter, unnamed in the newspaper notice and born on Jan. 28th to the Slinkeys. The infant died young before that summer, since the federal census that year does not list her; family recollections include no mention of her.
Shortly thereafter, Slinkey seems to have tired of San Francisco – perhaps as a result of the baby’s death – and became the proprietor (purchaser or lessee) of the Cremorne Gardens resort hotel in Martinez, a town on the south bank of the mouth of the Sacramento River, where land travelers crossed by ferry to California’s first capital, Benicia, and one of several small, resort towns to where San Francisco residents would escape for weekend vacations. Slinkey renamed his new purchase the Morgan House and moved his family there; they appear in the July 1880 federal census in Martinez.
In the spring of 1882, the family left sleepy Martinez for the more promising town of Sausalito, where they would remain for over 15 years, catching the town during its boom years and rising to local prominence after they built the fine, new El Monte Hotel (on a ridge overlooking the downtown), started a newspaper, and founded a new chapter of a San Francisco social club, the Society of Old Friends. They were saddened by the death of their son Emile (at age 19 months), but raised Milton (probably Lillian's son, only a year younger than Emile) as their own. Christina's widowed father Henry joined the extended family in 1890, along with his grandsons Johann Dern and Emil Dein. The latter helped run a second, smaller establishment, the Hotel Sausalito (with adjacent dance hall), which John Slinkey opened in the spring of 1890.
Unfortunately, the town boom was starting to sputter, by then. Christine was noted in the "Sausalito News" as having been stricken with bouts of "nervous prostration" as early as the fall of 1891, when her husband was forced to sell the the money-losing El Monte. The family fortunes declined even more precipitously, along with that of all Sausalito, after the 1893 Depression and the extension of the railroad north to newer, more popular weekend-getaway destinations farther up the coast. Slinkey was forced to put the Hotel Sausalito (then more of a boarding house) up for sale in the winter of 1894.
Even the addition to the extended family of Christine's grandson John Emil Dern's new wife Elisabeth's aunt Florence and business-manager husband, Lt.-Col. William Seitz, that fall, couldn't stop the decline in business. In 1895, the Seitzs left for England, and in early 1897 John & Elizabeth Dern left with their infant daughter Flora back to their native Germany (where their second child, son Willie, would be born that fall). By then, John Slinkey had filed for insolvency; newspapers reported in Sept. 1896 that he had invested over $90,000 in his various businesses in Sausalito. His last Sausalito properties were auctioned off in May 1898.
Christine is reported in the "Sausalito News" (May & Aug. 1897) to have gone to stay with a friend in Rio Vista to recuperate from "nervous prostration" (the same from which she'd suffered back in 1891). It's possibly she suffered from clinical depression, or "melancholia" in that era's terms, which contributed to her death in the first days of 1899, one year after she and her husband had returned to San Francisco. Their "first-class lodging house" (fittingly named "Sausalito House") at 110 Ellis Street, NW corner of Powell, was where Christine hanged herself, in a closet of Room 2. She had reportedly told her doctor that she wished she were dead and had asked him about the various levels of pain attendant upon different methods of suicide.
The "Sausalito News" (Jan. 21, 1899) ran the following article:
"SUICIDE OF MRS. SLINKEY -- Ill Health and Business Reverses Caused the Rash Act. On Friday last the residents of Sausalito were shocked to learn of the death of Mrs. J. E. Slinkey, and on all sides could be heard expressions of sympathy for the husband and children. " The "San Francisco Call" (Jan. 15, 1899) noted that she was the wife of "James E. Slinkey" [sic], the mother of Lillian K. and Milton Otto Slinkey [the fiction the family promoted], a native of Germany, aged 54 years.
An anonymous letter to the coroner -- suggesting her husband had poisoned her after she'd been an invalid for over a year -- led to the exhumation of her body. A coroner's jury found no evidence of foul play, and ruled her death a suicide after she had "suffered from melancholia." Her body was reinterred at Laurel Hill Cemetery (on the south side of Twin Peaks), but was moved in Mar. 1920 to be placed next to those of her husband.
Christina (Christine in the U.S.) was born 5 weeks after the death of her older sister. She emigrated in her teens, with an uncle, to Wisconsin, and from there to San Francisco, by her mid-twenties -- quite an adventure for a young woman of her day!
She first appeared in the 1865 (Langley) San Francisco City Directory, living on Stockton Street. Her title, “Mrs. Christina Dern,” was most likely a semi-fiction to hide her single status and denote that she was not working by herself (i.e., as a prostitute). A similar subterfuge may have occurred in the following year’s directory, when she appeared as “Christina Dern, widow” renting “furnished rooms” (a “proper” occupation for a respectable, single woman) at the corner of Dupont (now Grant) Ave. & Washington St. (in what would later become Chinatown). She last appears with her own listing in 1867, in the Langley SF Directory as “C. Dern,” a few months before her marriage.
She most likely had borne her first child, therefore, out of wedlock – her descendants heard whispered rumors that Lillian was not John Slinkey’s daughter, a fact both confirmed by John’s later references to Lillian as his wife’s daughter. For years during her lifetime, however, her family promoted two fictional stories: [1] that both Lillian and Milton Slinkey were Christine and John’s children, whereas Lillian most likely had another, now-unknown biological father; and [2] that Milton was Christine’s child, not Lillian’s (a teenaged pregnancy covered up by the family’s move to Martinez for a while, before they launched into Sausalito society). Christina’s first child, daughter Lillian Katherine, was born on July 26, 1867 (as per her death certificate and an 1885 newspaper report announcing her 18th birthday party), though the family perpetuated the mythical date of 1868 for many years, to cover up the likelihood that John was not Lillian’s biological father.
Christina Dern’s future husband first appears in California records in a San Francisco City Directory published in September 1867, as “Schlinke, John E.,” working at the “news depot, 35 Second St. (and J.B. Cone & Co.)” while residing at 52 Minna [an alley-lane south of Market]. Christina and John first appear together in California records in a listing of their October 1868 marriage, by Justice Oscar T. Shuck, in San Francisco. They first appear with an Anglicized name in a December 1869 S.F. Directory as “Slinkey, C. Mrs.” offering “furnished rooms” [i.e., running a boarding house] at 783 Market (south side, between Stevenson Alley and the north end of Fourth Street); “Slinkey, John E.” was then working for “Regan & Corbett” while residing at the same address as Christina (783 Market). The couple stayed living there for the next 3-4 years, with Christina still furnishing rooms [no listing yet found in 1870 census], and their fortunes had increased to where they were able to employ a household servant by the mid-1870s. In Langley’s San Francisco Directory of April 1871, her husband was listed as “real estate agent,” and in the March 1872 directory (which does not list Christine), he is listed under her same occupation, “furnished rooms.” S.F. City Directories from March 1873 to 1879 list J.E. Slinkey operating the “Overland House” (hotel and saloon) at 531-533 Sacramento Street (with residence at 533 Sacramento, essentially part of the hotel). A surviving photo from the late 1860s shows the Overland’s predecessor, the “Original House” (a two-story structure next to the larger, three-story “What Cheer House”).
During the 1870s, Christine and John were joined by Christine's youngest brother John and John Slinkey's younger brother Dan, each bachelors and good barkeepers over the years at the family establishments (though Dan would turn into quite the alcoholic, and died of a morphine overdose in Aug. 1900). The "San Francisco Call" (Jan. 30, 1880) provides the only known record of another daughter, unnamed in the newspaper notice and born on Jan. 28th to the Slinkeys. The infant died young before that summer, since the federal census that year does not list her; family recollections include no mention of her.
Shortly thereafter, Slinkey seems to have tired of San Francisco – perhaps as a result of the baby’s death – and became the proprietor (purchaser or lessee) of the Cremorne Gardens resort hotel in Martinez, a town on the south bank of the mouth of the Sacramento River, where land travelers crossed by ferry to California’s first capital, Benicia, and one of several small, resort towns to where San Francisco residents would escape for weekend vacations. Slinkey renamed his new purchase the Morgan House and moved his family there; they appear in the July 1880 federal census in Martinez.
In the spring of 1882, the family left sleepy Martinez for the more promising town of Sausalito, where they would remain for over 15 years, catching the town during its boom years and rising to local prominence after they built the fine, new El Monte Hotel (on a ridge overlooking the downtown), started a newspaper, and founded a new chapter of a San Francisco social club, the Society of Old Friends. They were saddened by the death of their son Emile (at age 19 months), but raised Milton (probably Lillian's son, only a year younger than Emile) as their own. Christina's widowed father Henry joined the extended family in 1890, along with his grandsons Johann Dern and Emil Dein. The latter helped run a second, smaller establishment, the Hotel Sausalito (with adjacent dance hall), which John Slinkey opened in the spring of 1890.
Unfortunately, the town boom was starting to sputter, by then. Christine was noted in the "Sausalito News" as having been stricken with bouts of "nervous prostration" as early as the fall of 1891, when her husband was forced to sell the the money-losing El Monte. The family fortunes declined even more precipitously, along with that of all Sausalito, after the 1893 Depression and the extension of the railroad north to newer, more popular weekend-getaway destinations farther up the coast. Slinkey was forced to put the Hotel Sausalito (then more of a boarding house) up for sale in the winter of 1894.
Even the addition to the extended family of Christine's grandson John Emil Dern's new wife Elisabeth's aunt Florence and business-manager husband, Lt.-Col. William Seitz, that fall, couldn't stop the decline in business. In 1895, the Seitzs left for England, and in early 1897 John & Elizabeth Dern left with their infant daughter Flora back to their native Germany (where their second child, son Willie, would be born that fall). By then, John Slinkey had filed for insolvency; newspapers reported in Sept. 1896 that he had invested over $90,000 in his various businesses in Sausalito. His last Sausalito properties were auctioned off in May 1898.
Christine is reported in the "Sausalito News" (May & Aug. 1897) to have gone to stay with a friend in Rio Vista to recuperate from "nervous prostration" (the same from which she'd suffered back in 1891). It's possibly she suffered from clinical depression, or "melancholia" in that era's terms, which contributed to her death in the first days of 1899, one year after she and her husband had returned to San Francisco. Their "first-class lodging house" (fittingly named "Sausalito House") at 110 Ellis Street, NW corner of Powell, was where Christine hanged herself, in a closet of Room 2. She had reportedly told her doctor that she wished she were dead and had asked him about the various levels of pain attendant upon different methods of suicide.
The "Sausalito News" (Jan. 21, 1899) ran the following article:
"SUICIDE OF MRS. SLINKEY -- Ill Health and Business Reverses Caused the Rash Act. On Friday last the residents of Sausalito were shocked to learn of the death of Mrs. J. E. Slinkey, and on all sides could be heard expressions of sympathy for the husband and children. " The "San Francisco Call" (Jan. 15, 1899) noted that she was the wife of "James E. Slinkey" [sic], the mother of Lillian K. and Milton Otto Slinkey [the fiction the family promoted], a native of Germany, aged 54 years.
An anonymous letter to the coroner -- suggesting her husband had poisoned her after she'd been an invalid for over a year -- led to the exhumation of her body. A coroner's jury found no evidence of foul play, and ruled her death a suicide after she had "suffered from melancholia." Her body was reinterred at Laurel Hill Cemetery (on the south side of Twin Peaks), but was moved in Mar. 1920 to be placed next to those of her husband.
She first appeared in the 1865 (Langley) San Francisco City Directory, living on Stockton Street. Her title, “Mrs. Christina Dern,” was most likely a semi-fiction to hide her single status and denote that she was not working by herself (i.e., as a prostitute). A similar subterfuge may have occurred in the following year’s directory, when she appeared as “Christina Dern, widow” renting “furnished rooms” (a “proper” occupation for a respectable, single woman) at the corner of Dupont (now Grant) Ave. & Washington St. (in what would later become Chinatown). She last appears with her own listing in 1867, in the Langley SF Directory as “C. Dern,” a few months before her marriage.
She most likely had borne her first child, therefore, out of wedlock – her descendants heard whispered rumors that Lillian was not John Slinkey’s daughter, a fact both confirmed by John’s later references to Lillian as his wife’s daughter. For years during her lifetime, however, her family promoted two fictional stories: [1] that both Lillian and Milton Slinkey were Christine and John’s children, whereas Lillian most likely had another, now-unknown biological father; and [2] that Milton was Christine’s child, not Lillian’s (a teenaged pregnancy covered up by the family’s move to Martinez for a while, before they launched into Sausalito society). Christina’s first child, daughter Lillian Katherine, was born on July 26, 1867 (as per her death certificate and an 1885 newspaper report announcing her 18th birthday party), though the family perpetuated the mythical date of 1868 for many years, to cover up the likelihood that John was not Lillian’s biological father.
Christina Dern’s future husband first appears in California records in a San Francisco City Directory published in September 1867, as “Schlinke, John E.,” working at the “news depot, 35 Second St. (and J.B. Cone & Co.)” while residing at 52 Minna [an alley-lane south of Market]. Christina and John first appear together in California records in a listing of their October 1868 marriage, by Justice Oscar T. Shuck, in San Francisco. They first appear with an Anglicized name in a December 1869 S.F. Directory as “Slinkey, C. Mrs.” offering “furnished rooms” [i.e., running a boarding house] at 783 Market (south side, between Stevenson Alley and the north end of Fourth Street); “Slinkey, John E.” was then working for “Regan & Corbett” while residing at the same address as Christina (783 Market). The couple stayed living there for the next 3-4 years, with Christina still furnishing rooms [no listing yet found in 1870 census], and their fortunes had increased to where they were able to employ a household servant by the mid-1870s. In Langley’s San Francisco Directory of April 1871, her husband was listed as “real estate agent,” and in the March 1872 directory (which does not list Christine), he is listed under her same occupation, “furnished rooms.” S.F. City Directories from March 1873 to 1879 list J.E. Slinkey operating the “Overland House” (hotel and saloon) at 531-533 Sacramento Street (with residence at 533 Sacramento, essentially part of the hotel). A surviving photo from the late 1860s shows the Overland’s predecessor, the “Original House” (a two-story structure next to the larger, three-story “What Cheer House”).
During the 1870s, Christine and John were joined by Christine's youngest brother John and John Slinkey's younger brother Dan, each bachelors and good barkeepers over the years at the family establishments (though Dan would turn into quite the alcoholic, and died of a morphine overdose in Aug. 1900). The "San Francisco Call" (Jan. 30, 1880) provides the only known record of another daughter, unnamed in the newspaper notice and born on Jan. 28th to the Slinkeys. The infant died young before that summer, since the federal census that year does not list her; family recollections include no mention of her.
Shortly thereafter, Slinkey seems to have tired of San Francisco – perhaps as a result of the baby’s death – and became the proprietor (purchaser or lessee) of the Cremorne Gardens resort hotel in Martinez, a town on the south bank of the mouth of the Sacramento River, where land travelers crossed by ferry to California’s first capital, Benicia, and one of several small, resort towns to where San Francisco residents would escape for weekend vacations. Slinkey renamed his new purchase the Morgan House and moved his family there; they appear in the July 1880 federal census in Martinez.
In the spring of 1882, the family left sleepy Martinez for the more promising town of Sausalito, where they would remain for over 15 years, catching the town during its boom years and rising to local prominence after they built the fine, new El Monte Hotel (on a ridge overlooking the downtown), started a newspaper, and founded a new chapter of a San Francisco social club, the Society of Old Friends. They were saddened by the death of their son Emile (at age 19 months), but raised Milton (probably Lillian's son, only a year younger than Emile) as their own. Christina's widowed father Henry joined the extended family in 1890, along with his grandsons Johann Dern and Emil Dein. The latter helped run a second, smaller establishment, the Hotel Sausalito (with adjacent dance hall), which John Slinkey opened in the spring of 1890.
Unfortunately, the town boom was starting to sputter, by then. Christine was noted in the "Sausalito News" as having been stricken with bouts of "nervous prostration" as early as the fall of 1891, when her husband was forced to sell the the money-losing El Monte. The family fortunes declined even more precipitously, along with that of all Sausalito, after the 1893 Depression and the extension of the railroad north to newer, more popular weekend-getaway destinations farther up the coast. Slinkey was forced to put the Hotel Sausalito (then more of a boarding house) up for sale in the winter of 1894.
Even the addition to the extended family of Christine's grandson John Emil Dern's new wife Elisabeth's aunt Florence and business-manager husband, Lt.-Col. William Seitz, that fall, couldn't stop the decline in business. In 1895, the Seitzs left for England, and in early 1897 John & Elizabeth Dern left with their infant daughter Flora back to their native Germany (where their second child, son Willie, would be born that fall). By then, John Slinkey had filed for insolvency; newspapers reported in Sept. 1896 that he had invested over $90,000 in his various businesses in Sausalito. His last Sausalito properties were auctioned off in May 1898.
Christine is reported in the "Sausalito News" (May & Aug. 1897) to have gone to stay with a friend in Rio Vista to recuperate from "nervous prostration" (the same from which she'd suffered back in 1891). It's possibly she suffered from clinical depression, or "melancholia" in that era's terms, which contributed to her death in the first days of 1899, one year after she and her husband had returned to San Francisco. Their "first-class lodging house" (fittingly named "Sausalito House") at 110 Ellis Street, NW corner of Powell, was where Christine hanged herself, in a closet of Room 2. She had reportedly told her doctor that she wished she were dead and had asked him about the various levels of pain attendant upon different methods of suicide.
The "Sausalito News" (Jan. 21, 1899) ran the following article:
"SUICIDE OF MRS. SLINKEY -- Ill Health and Business Reverses Caused the Rash Act. On Friday last the residents of Sausalito were shocked to learn of the death of Mrs. J. E. Slinkey, and on all sides could be heard expressions of sympathy for the husband and children. " The "San Francisco Call" (Jan. 15, 1899) noted that she was the wife of "James E. Slinkey" [sic], the mother of Lillian K. and Milton Otto Slinkey [the fiction the family promoted], a native of Germany, aged 54 years.
An anonymous letter to the coroner -- suggesting her husband had poisoned her after she'd been an invalid for over a year -- led to the exhumation of her body. A coroner's jury found no evidence of foul play, and ruled her death a suicide after she had "suffered from melancholia." Her body was reinterred at Laurel Hill Cemetery (on the south side of Twin Peaks), but was moved in Mar. 1920 to be placed next to those of her husband.
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WS-Cypress section, Row 6, Grave 273
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