Frank Edward Rensch,1859-1914

Headstone GPS Coordinates: 

Birth: 22 June 1859, Berlin, Germany

Death: 13 December 1914, Seattle, King County, Washington

Relatives in Seabeck Cemetery: Paul Rensch

American Revolutionary War Patriots*: None

Disclaimer: These lines have not been officially proven by NSDAR standards.

Frank Edward Rensch was born on June 22, 1859 in Berlin, Germany to his parents Andreas Friedrich Eduard Rensch and Marie Elizabeth Caroline Borgman. He was baptized on August 14, 1859 in Berlin, Brandenburg as Eduard Franz Rensch.  He was the youngest of his parents’ five known children.

When Frank was twenty years old in 1879, he arrived in New York. In 1896, he was likely in San Francisco, California when he married a German woman named Amelia Gantke whose family originally settled in Wisconsin. It’s a bit of a mystery on how Frank and Amelia met, but they were married, and had their first son Paul born in May 1896. 

In 1900, Frank was listed on the San Francisco, California census working as a Sea Captain. His wife, sons Paul (1896) and Frank E. (1898), were living in his household along with a woman named Mabel Rensch who was listed as Frank’s sister. No records can be found about this possible sister who was recorded as being born in 1849 in California. She does not show up in any family records with Frank’s parents back in Germany, so it’s unclear if Frank had a biological older sister.

In 1901, Frank, Amelia, Paul, and Frank (Jr) had moved to Port Townsend where Frank still worked as the master of the schooner named “A.J. West”. He and his wife had another son named Ernest Godfrey born that year.

Around 1908, Frank quit sailing as a captain and moved his family to Crosby where he purchased his own ranch to become a poultry farmer. The family lived next door to and became friends with Nathaniel Sargent who frequently mentioned the Rensch family members in his diaries. Frank was one of the wealthier men in Seabeck, and was the first person in town to own an automobile.

Eventually, the sea called to Frank, and he took up sailing jobs again while his family lived in Crosby. The “Port Townsend Daily Ledger” published on March 19, 1914 wrote about Frank’s visit to the city and his trip to Chile: 

“Captain F.W. Rensch of Crosby, Kitsap county, was in the city yesterday on business. The captain has many friends here, where his family made his home for a number of years while he was running out of the Sound. Captain Rensch abandoned the sea some time ago, to make his home on a Kitsap county farm. He made a couple of trips last year as a skipper of the barkentine Newsboy. He took the craft to Chile last fall, there turning over to parties who had purchased the ship. Captain Rensch returned home on a passenger steamer, thus missing all the severe weather in which so many windjammers were wrecked or disabled.” 

Later that year in 1914 after this article was published, Frank died on December 13 in Crosby when he was fifty-five years old from cancer in the mouth and jaw that he had been suffering from for two years. He was buried in Seabeck Cemetery under a concrete grave slab and bronze marker next to his older brother Paul.