Margaret Onsager (nee Engel)

Margaret Onsager was a member of Trinity Lutheran in Waukesha since 1986. She died on March 24, 2025 of cancer. She was 91 and is survived by her brother Alan, 5 children (David and Jenny Onsager, Bruce and Tracie Onsager, Paul and Yvonne Onsager, and Jason and Linda Deeken), 14 grandchildren and 2 great grandchildren.

She was born in 1933 in her parent’s country farmhouse outside Fountain City, Wisconsin. She was baptized in 1934 and confirmed in 1948. She walked about two miles to a one-room school each day, and went through all eight grades with a boy named Ralph in her grade. She was in a class of 15 in Fountain City High School’s class of 1952. She studied in a one-year secretarial program in Winona, Minnesota and achieved 90 words per minute on a manual typewriter . . . a skill she never lost.

Her mom wanted her to stay in the Fountain City area but she wanted a new adventure and went to Madison in 1953, working as a medical secretary in an eye, ear, nose and throat clinic at the University of Wisconsin Hospital. She lived with three other young women in a rented flat one block from the clinic and always described that period as the part of her life she enjoyed the most. The four of them went on a bus trip to New York City as one of their adventures.

She met the Ralph she would marry in the choir of the Lutheran church in Madison when he was a senior at the University of Wisconsin. They were married on June 6, 1959 and embarked on a journey in which she spent 18 years in Phoenix, 4 years in upstate New York and more than 40 years in Brookfield. She always said, “We were two peas in a pod”.

She poured herself into raising five children born over the course of sixteen years in Phoenix. All of them grew up with a confidence in her love for them and clarity about her expectations for their behavior. She mastered an elegantly simple way of instilling in her children an essential respect for God’s and parents’ authority as well as a fully-internalized desire to live up to expectations set for them. But she did this in a way that encouraged their individual curiosities and personalities to blossom in their own very different ways. It’s an almost unheard of accomplishment in parenting! That worked well for everyone. Her home was a place of peace, joy and satisfaction in the everyday for each unique person living there.

Her favorite place on earth was her home and neighborhood in Brookfield. Each day was another opportunity to do diligently whatever needed to be done in that day without greed for anything more than the life she lived or fear for the future. She wanted to live out her days in that home and accomplished that. She moved almost directly from there to the mansion her Savior, Jesus, prepared for her with him. She lives on in the lives of her children as a force so essential to their lives and how they think that they don’t even realize it’s there.

Visitation will be held on Sunday, March 30, 2025 from 3:00 p.m. until the 4:00 p.m. funeral service at Trinity Lutheran Church, 1052 Whiterock Ave., Waukesha, WI 53186. A second visitation will be held on Monday, March 31st from 10:30 a.m. until 11:30 a.m. at St. Michael’s Ev. Lutheran Church, 38 S. Hill Street, Fountain City, WI 54629. Graveside services will follow at 12:00 noon at Fountain City Public Cemetery.

Memorial contributions in Margaret’s name are appreciated to Trinity Lutheran Church, Waukesha. For those who wish to send flowers on either Sunday or Monday, please have them sent directly to the respective churches.