Dubief, Martha Maria Robert
ROBERT, DUBIEF
Posted By: Lisa Joan Walden (email)
Date: 6/2/2021 at 15:12:25
Marthe Maria Robert was born March 17, 1879, in a small village in the Province of Normandy in France, the second of six children.
When 12 years of age her family moved to Paris where she soon went to work. There she met the man who was to be her companion for the short 10 happiest years of her life, she used to say, Marius Dubief. They were married in 1901 and had three daughters, Germaine, Mrs. George Payan, who preceded her mother in death; Fernande, Mrs. Ralph Silver of Lamoni; and Leone, Mrs. Jack Ivars of Glendale, Calif.
She did not have an easy time raising three small girls alone the oldest not yet three when she was widowed in 1911. Three years later World War I started. By that time Mrs. Dubief and the children had moved to a suburb south of Paris where she had a home built. There she ran a small café, having thought she could do a better job of raising the children by being home.
During the war, financial consideration forced her to go outside the home to work. Part of this work consisted of tooling shells in a munitions factory. Some of these shells were half as big as she was. She had another job at an ink factory across the street from her home at the same time, also running her home and the café.
In spite of all these hardships, the family kept well and gay. Everybody else was having hard times too.
An airfield was nearby and Germaine met an American soldier and married him and soon followed him to this country. Mrs. Dubief decided then to join her here and she and her other two daughters soon were living in Indianapolis, Indiania.
In 1924, after her daughter Fernande's marriage to Ralph Silver of this city, Mrs. Dubief and daughter Leone moved to New York, to be near her oldest daughter again. There she took out her citizenship papers and became an American citizen.
She also lived in Lamoni from early 1934 to 1937 and made a host of friends. From here she moved to California to live with her oldest daughter until her death in 1941, after which she went back to New York, lived there until 1945, and moved back to California.
She suffered a stroke in 1952 and then made her home with her youngest daughter Leone, in Glendale, Calif., until late 1962, when she came back to Lamoni to live with Fernande until her death at the Decatur county hospital, in Leon, Sunday morning Oct. 31, at the age of 86 years, 7 months and 14 days.
She had outlived her parents, brothers, and sisters. She leaves to mourn her two daughters and sons-in-law; seven grandchildren; 27 great-grandchildren, and four great-great-grandchildren as well as relatives in France, and a host of friends, from coast to coast who will always remember her gay disposition and delightful sense of humor.
Source: The Lamoni Chronicle, published in Lamoni, Iowa on Thursday, November 4th, 1965, pg. 4
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