Ursula Elisabeth (Blank) Chiu (April 6, 1925, to April 11, 2024). Born in Solingen, Germany on April 6, 1925, Ursula lived through World War II as a teenager. She spent her high school years at the Ursuline convent in Duderstadt, Germany, to avoid the National Socialist (Nazi) education program. Following the war, she graduated college and soon found herself the recipient of a
teacher's fellowship in Chicago, where she met her husband Alec Chiu (of Taiwan, who preceded her in death in 1995). She spent most of her life in La Crosse, Wisconsin, where she and Alec raised three children: Marcel, Monica, and Michael, in that order, and all surviving her. In La Crosse, Ursula worked as a Special Education teacher in an elementary school; as an extra-curricular activity, she taught after-school lessons in French, culminating in short, all-French plays for their parents. She spoke to her dentist in French; translated Spanish to English when on a trip with Monica's family to Costa Rica; and chatted in German with friends and relatives
overseas.

As a creative soul, she wrote and published stories, poems, a book of fairytales for her grandchildren, her own autobiography, as well as a biography of Alec Chiu, assembling information as she could from memories, letters, and photographs. She spent hours at various dining room tables crafting, using skills she learned from her goldsmith father, including carving wooden birds and making necklaces by drilling holes into stones and shells. Her grandchildren, ushered into lots of project with grandma, remember painting rocks with her, making board
games on opened filing folders, baking cookies and cakes, adding pressed flowers-plucked from around the neighborhood on short walks-to their pictures.

Ursula moved to Somerville in 2013, where she could be closer to all five of her grandchildren. Fiercely independent, she lived in her own apartment, below the family of her younger son Michael and his wife Maren, and with some domesticated parakeets for a time. She adored birds; as she slowed down in life, the feeders outside her windows provided hours of viewing entertainment. And well into her 90s, she continued to take inspiration from all manner of bird observation and drawings—from art books and photographs—to make the greeting cards she distributed among friends and to the church as gifts for those whom she called "elderly." She harbored a deep spirituality through her Catholic faith, assisting her through World War II, her parents' and husband's passings and in the final years and days of her life. Her children and friends remember this remarkable woman of many talents, languages, creative impulses, and interests; a teacher, a wife, a mother, a friend; a woman who talked with anybody, found good in everybody, and forgave everything. Always the optimist, we remember her with all our love.

Ursula is survived by her three children and five grandchildren: Marcel Chiu of Rockford, IL; Monica Chiu (Brian Locke) of Durham, NH (Elizabeth Locke and Roland Locke); Michael Chiu (Maren Chiu) of Somerville, MA (Owen Chiu, Leo Chiu, Adeline Chiu).

In lieu of flowers, please send donations to either of the following organizations:
The Place of Grace - A Catholic Worker Community,
919 Hood Street, La Crosse WI 54601.
Phone: 608-782-6224.
https://www.facebook.com/placeofgraceWI

Somerville Homeless Coalition,
1 Davis Square, Somerville, MA 02144 Phone:
617-623-6111.
somervillehomelesscoalition.org