The Search for

Anna Hinch Sicher

The story of Anna Hinch Sicher is both mysterious and baffling. We do not know how, when or where William Sicher and she met. We only know that William was living in Wilkes-Barre in 1891 when Anna was only thirteen year’s old living in Nanticoke. William enlisted to serve in the Army for five years, with a projected discharge date of 1896.

Anna's parents had separated and gotten divorced about 1894 and her mother moved her family to Painted Post, Tioga County, New York. For some unknown reason, William received a General Order Discharge in 1894 after serving only three years of his service.

Anna, it is said, was a beautiful girl with red hair. She would most certainly have caught the eye of the handsome William Sicher. Anna, being less than twenty-one years of age would have had to receive permission from her father to marry in the State of Pennsylvania. Either she received that permission and was married in Pennsylvania or the couple ran away to New York State, where the legal age was eighteen years, and married there without parental consent right after her eighteenth birthday in February 1896. The latter presumption seems more logical for there is no marriage record for William and Anna at the Luzerne County Court House.

The 1900 Federal Census found William and Anna married and living on Main Street in the Town of Wyoming in Luzerne County, Pennsylvania. It stated that they were married in 1896 and had one female child, aged two years. There are two possibilities: first, that after her sixteenth birthday in 1894, Anna returned to Nanticoke from Painted Post, New York to care for her father and brother, or secondly that after her parents separation and divorce, Anna had remained with her father and brother Jesse in Nanticoke.

Whatever the case, we do know that William, being a carpenter, was a breaker builder and that he had worked on the breaker in Honey Pot, a section of Nanticoke. It is a good possibility that he may have been working on the breaker at Honey Pot shortly before 1896 and met the acquaintance of Josiah Hinch, who was a miner or even perhaps a laborer on the construction site, and in turn met Anna and Jesse thru him.

Anna and William were married over eleven years and blessed with three beautiful daughters and a handsome son before the marriage broke up shortly after the unfortunate death of their infant daughter Bertha in 1907. The couple became estranged because of an affair William suspected his wife of having while he was away working. It is said that William was a home body. Being away from home the better part of the week with his work, when arriving home he wanted to remain there and not go out on the town.

Ann, on the other hand was just the opposite. She was stuck in the house with the children all week, and when William came home she wanted to go out. William refused and so Ann took up going to the theater during the week and met the acquaintance of a man named Betz who encouraged Anna to go into show business.

When William got word of this affair, he immediately removed his children from their home on Oregon Street in Wilkes-Barre and moved in with his mother on East Market Street. William refused to allow Anna to return to her family and did not allow the children to see their mother. Anna was last seen on the sidewalk talking to William who stood at the top of the steps to their second floor apartment in Wilkes-Barre. Reconciliation was not allowed by William because of his stubborn German nature. Anna strode away, never to be seen again. Her last contact with her family was a post card sent to her oldest daughter Helen post marked from Nanticoke in 1912.

What became of Anna, no one knows. There are rumors that she went to Ohio, to England, to Delaware. There is even a suspicion that her granddaughter Marion, when very young and on an outing to the Delaware Water Gap in Monroe County, Pennsylvania, heard the name 'Mrs. Sicher' called while they were in a tourist shop in that location.

The author located and met the family and descendants of Anna's sister Elizabeth in Sparrows Point, Maryland. That family had much knowledge and many pictures of the Hinch family but they never heard of Anna Hinch Sicher. Interesting, though, was that out of a shoe box full of pictures, they could identify all the individuals pictured, except for one picture, a studio portrait of a very beautiful young woman. Though unknown, this young woman possessed the family traits. There were two additional pictures of this woman taken in later life, perhaps in her mid to upper forties. She was posed in a garden with a gentleman who surprisingly took on all the characteristics of William when he would have been in his early fifties.

These pictures were taken and shown to Anna's daughter Marguerite. Marguerite, without any coaching, was asked if she knew who this lady was. She immediately responded, 'Why, that's my sister Helen.' When advised that this was not a picture of Helen, she looked more closely and said that it might be a picture of her self. He daughter Marion who was also present and looking at the pictures stated that 'that is not you, mom.' Shortly after closer observation and thought, Marguerite leaned close to the author and stated in a soft voice, 'That could be my mother.'

The only tangible evidence of Anna's whereabouts was in the form of a handwritten Post Card received by her then 14 year old daughter Helen. This Card was post marked 1912 from Nanticoke, Luzerne County, Pennsylvania.