Places in a Life
Follow recorded birthplaces and homes through the years. Numbers connect the map to dated records; gold marks a birthplace. Markers show approximate towns or regions, not exact houses. A recorded year does not establish an uninterrupted stay.
Milly Hilpert
Dated entries correspond to the numbered places. Enable JavaScript to select entries and zoom.
Profile explicitly records Milwaukee birth.
Source for this placePeter’s linked biography dates the household move to 1896; Milly’s own profile describes the same childhood moves.
Source for this placeIda’s linked biography says the grandparents joined Milly and Otto’s Hilpert household in 1929. This documents their established home by 1929; it is not their move-in year. Marker precision: town area; farm sites are not pinpointed.
Source for this place
Boulder and Denver homes/work are real but undated in this profile. Her Denver wedding in 1918 is not used to establish residence.
Present-day coastline: Natural Earth. Historical place names are retained in the records. The map and dated list also remain available without JavaScript.
The Hilpert family
Milly Hilpert
Milly was Otto Hilpert’s wife and Eileen Townsend’s mother. In the family book, Eileen tells of Milly’s work in a Denver telephone office, a trip to the Pacific Northwest, and the letters that brought Milly and Otto together.
- Parents
- Jen Peter Dortzbach & Ida Falkenrath
- Spouse
- Otto Hilpert
- Siblings
- Annie · George Karl · Karl George
- Children
- Eileen Marie Hilpert Townsend
Their letters
Read and listen to Otto and Milly’s correspondence, from their first exchanges through their married life.
In the family album
Explore the photographs and memories in The Lives of Otto and Milly.
More photographs and stories will be added as we bring the family’s collection together.
Share a memoryMilly’s parents and their families
Jen Peter Dortzbach and Ida Falkenrath connect the family stories of Schleswig, Racine, Colorado and Washington.
From the written family history
Milly was born in Milwaukee on February 1, 1890, the eldest child of Peter Dortzbach and Ida Falkenrath. Peter explained that her name honored her grandmothers, Emilie Pleis and Kjesten Schmidt. She grew up as the family moved from Wisconsin to Colorado, where her parents ran shoe shops and took in boarders.
Peter remembered Milly and Annie helping their mother run a hotel in Boulder. Both sisters became ill with typhoid fever, after which the family left the hotel and moved to Denver. In later years, Peter and Ida made their home with Milly and Otto in Centralia; Eileen’s memories of that household preserve much of their story.
Sources: Peter P. Dortzbach’s biography, recorded by Eileen Townsend; The Falkenrath Family, compiled by Dawn Kelm (2010); Descendants of Carl F. “Charles” Falkenrath.