Helene Henrietta Mutzenbecher

Helena Henrietta Mutzenbecher is on a hand-drawn family tree (see Media) that has come down the family from the early 20th century. This gives her year of birth in Hamburg as 1828, marriage to Daniel Wienholt 1852 and death in Oxford 1906. The tree names her parents and gives a detailed ancestry on her father's side. Another family source gives her birth date as 5 August 1823 and month of death January 1906. However, her gravestone gives her date of death as 20 January 1906, aged 78, which means she cannot have been born in 1823.

The 1861 census has a full household for Helena and her family at 30 Westbourne Park Terrace, Paddington, London (which became Porchester houses in 1912). Her age is given as 29, which would give her year of birth 1832. It confirms she was born in Germany. Living with her and Daniel are all four children, his sister-in-law Emma Bowen (described as a governess), another governess called Agnes Caroline Bowen, and three servants named Mary Anne Deakins, Matilda Milford and Eliza Frederica Schomberg, the latter from Germany. Less than four years later the fortunes of this family had drastically changed after Daniel went to Australia and died there. We know from letters written to Helena in 1865 informing her of Daniel's death that she was by then residing in Hamburg.

In 1898 in the will of Arnold Wienholt, Helene was said to be a widow living at 102, Avenue de Villiers, Paris, with her daughter Magdalena Ellen Bethune and son-in-law Baron Felix Bethune.

She is buried in St Sepulchre’s Cemetery, Oxford, alongside the grave of her eldest daughter and son-in-law. She had been living with them at their home, 6 Broad Street, Oxford. Their son, Robert Gordon Wienholt Stark (1891-1950) described her thus in his memoirs:

"Then of course there was Grandmother, Mother’s mother who latterly (before her death in 1906) lived with us at Oxford. She talked German a good deal, was very musical, but having hurt her hand in some way she had almost given up the piano when we knew her. In her young days she had accompanied some famous musicians in her own or her mother’s private musical drawing-rooms at Hamburgh. She came of a very well known patrician family of Hamburgh, and a wealthy one. Much of her fortune however was lost in the Wienholts Estates Company of Queensland, Australia. She was kind, but suffering and therefore somewhat aloof and nervy. She used on occasions to call us children up into her bedroom and take out stale chocolate or else preserved cherries which she handed to us by sticking them onto the point of a hat pin and putting them thus into our mouths. "