Maria Magdalena "Mattie" (Baur) Ruembeli (born 1850)

In 1850, in the year that Maria Magdalena "Mattie" (Baur) Ruembeli was born, on June 1st, the 1850 census was conducted. The population of the US was counted as 23,191,876 - which included 3,204,313 slaves. It was the first census in the US to count every person of a household - including women, children, and slaves - and to ask the place of birth of household members.

In 1864, on October 5th, a cyclone killed 70,000 people in Calcutta, India. Calcutta is in a "very high damage risk" cyclone zone, although this was an especially powerful one.

In 1875, on February 18th, the Mason County War, also called the Hoodoo War, began. In central Texas, a German-American mob broke into a jail with a battering ram and lynched two suspected cattle rustlers. Thus began a year of vigilante "justice."

In 1907, radiometric dating, a recently discovered technology that could date rocks, found that the earth was 2.2 billion years old which was dramatically older than previously thought. Later refinements and advancements in science would date the age of the earth at over 4.5 billion years.

In 1950, in February, Joe McCarthy gave a speech alleging that he had a list of "members of the Communist Party and members of a spy ring" who worked in the State Department. He went on to chair a committee that investigated not only the State Department but also the administration of President Harry S. Truman, the Voice of America, and the U.S. Army for communist spies - until he was condemned by the U.S. Senate in 1954.