Schwester Lotharia Müller (1868 - 1962)

Sister Lotharia Müller was born 12 August 1868 in Unterweschnegg, Baden near St. Blasien. She became a member of the School Sisters of St Francis (SSSF) in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, USA in 1891. The roots of the congregation, founded in the USA in 1874, date back to Rheinmünster bei Bühl where there is a children's home and school run by Franciscan nuns. In 1873, the ordained women emigrated to the USA. Müller stayed in the German Reich until 1895 whereupon she returned to the motherhouse in Milwaukee. From here she travelled to the South Pacific as a missionary for the order in 1909. During her time at the mission station Melekeok on the Palau Islands of Koror and Babeldaob, she was engaged as a missionary and taught at a girls’ school. Due to the expulsion of US American religious orders by the German colonial administration, Müller returned to the USA in 1913. During a stay in Germany in 1914, Müller sold a collection of ethnological artefacts to the museum that she had collected during her time in the South Pacific. It is not known how she obtained the objects. However, a letter addressed to the motherhouse exists in which Müller shares ethnographic observations drawn from her surroundings. Lotharia Müller died on 6 September 1962 in Campbellsport, Wisconsin.