Sunday Obituary - Jacob Willenbring

Jacob Willenbring obit via St. Cloud Daily Times

JACOB WILLENBRING

  Jacob Willenbring, 93, died May 24 at the St. Cloud Hospital. He was born Nov. 15, 1881, in Richmond and was a lifelong resident of Stearns County.
  In 1904 he married Catherine Viehauser. She preceded him in death on Aug. 15, 1935.
  Funeral services were Tuesday at 1 p.m. at Ss. Peter and Paul Church, Richmond. Pallbearers were Conrad and Jim Kloskin, Bob, Don and Tom Lommel and Bob Miller.
  Mr. Willenbring is survived by daughters and son, Mrs. Conrad (Aurelia) Kloskin and Mrs. Edmund (Mildred) Lommel. St. Cloud; Mrs. Richard (Irene) Miller, Backus; and Rolland, Fifty Lakes; brother, Tom, Grand Rapids; 10 grandchildren and 22 great-grandchildren.
  Two sisters, Katherine and Mrs. Andrew (Anna) Beumel, and a brother, Mike, preceded him in death.



Here we see a side-by-side comparison of the cleaned up scan of the obituary, and the text as generated from that scan by Nuance's Omniscan OCR software.  I've formatted the text, but it required virtually no cleanup.  Optimizing the scan before you use the OCR software really saves time correcting the OCR output.

Jacob Willenbring was a well known citizen of Stearns County, Minnesota around the turn of the 20th century.  He played baseball for the Torah (later Richmond), Minnesota team.  Jacob is one of my wife's distant relations, the father of an aunt by marriage of my mother-in-law.  I happened to find his name and picture in a book, Stearns & Benton Counties The First 100 Years Presented by the St. Cloud Times in Conjunction With the Stearns History Museum and Benton County Historical Society, published by Piedmont Publishing in 2002, ISBN 1-932129-18-9.  The book is a wonderful gathering of local historical photos with some historical narrative and a whole lot of names of local people of the times.

Sunday’s Obituary – if you have obituaries of family members and ancestors, consider posting them along with other information about that person as part of Sunday’s Obituary. This is an ongoing series developed by Leslie Ann at Ancestors Live Here.