Martha Klawinski (1888 - 1980)

Refresh this page to see various historical events that occurred during Martha's lifetime.

In 1888, in the year that Martha Klawinski was born, on August 7th, the body of a prostitute was found in the Whitechapel section of London. Martha Tabram had been stabbed 39 times - a possible but not confirmed victim of Jack the Ripper. On August 31st, the body of Mary Ann Nichols was found - stabbed and mutilated. On September 8th, the body of Annie Chapman was found - throat slit and disemboweled. On September 30th, Elizabeth Stride, also a prostitute in Whitechapel, was found dead from a slit throat. Within an hour, another body was discovered - Catherine Eddowes'. She was far more savagely murdered and it is thought that the Ripper had more time with her. Then, on November 9th, the body of prostitute Mary Jane Kelly was found in a boarding room in Whitechapel. Considered to be the probable fifth, and last, of Jack the Ripper's victims, Kelly's was the most savage of his murders.

In 1891, at the age of merely 3 years old, Martha was alive when on June 25th, in the July issue of The Strand Magazine in London, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's character Sherlock Holmes appeared in a series of short stories for the first time. Doyle eventually wrote 4 novels and 56 short stories with Holmes as the main character.

In 1906, when she was 18 years old, abolitionist and suffragette leader Susan B. Anthony died, before women's right to vote nationally was realized (in 1920). She, along with Elizabeth Cady Stanton, founded the National American Woman Suffrage Association which later became the League of Women Voters. She died at the age of 86 of heart failure and pneumonia in her home in New York.

In 1919, Martha was 31 years old when in Norfolk Virginia, the first rotary dial telephones were introduced by the American Telephone and Telegraph Company (AT&T), making it easier to make a call without an operator.

In 1980, in the year of Martha Klawinski's passing, on December 8th, ex-Beatle John Lennon was shot and killed by Mark David Chapman in front of his home - the Dakota - in New York City. Chapman was found guilty of murder and still remains in jail.