52/52: Week 9 – Close to Home, Then and Now (John Oades)

Tags

England, Hampshire, Kenyon, Maternal, Oades, Portsmouth, Southampton, Sweetingham

I have a very, very good reason for missing Week 8 of this challenge: I was “across the pond” doing genealogy research. The theme for Week 9 was even fitting for telling this story; I was not close to my home, but I got the rare opportunity to do overseas genealogical research somewhere that was close to the home of my ancestors: Southampton, Hampshire, England. These are the relatives who, by 1820, were living in Sackets Harbor, Jefferson, New York, which is also my own hometown.

My fifth-great-grandparents were John Oades, a shipwright, and Lucy Sweetingham, both born in Hampshire, England. They are from my mother’s side of the family, related to my Kenyon lines. Until last week, this was nearly all I knew about them, beyond some of their siblings and the names of their parents.

John was born in 1786 in Southampton, to Thomas Oades and Mary Frost and was baptized at St. Mary’s Church, a church that dates back to a Saxon structure when the area was still known as Hamwic, about the year 634. When John was baptized there on Christmas day, 1786, the church was on the fourth renovation (it’s been renovated a total of six times); today all that remains of that iteration of the church happens to be the baptistry, since much of the church was destroyed during the blitz in November 1940. John had three sisters (Elizabeth, Charity, and Mary) and two brothers (Henry Frost and Thomas).

St. Mary’s Church, Southampton. This is not what the church would look like today; all but the tower, bells, and baptistry (small area on the left) were destroyed in the Blitz in November 1940.

Lucy Sweetingham was born 1787 in Southampton, to Hugh Sweetingham and Elizabeth Strugnell. She was baptized on 28 December 1787 at St. Leonard’s church in Bursledon, which is just outside Southampton to the east. Lucy came from a very large family; I have found at least eight brothers and three sisters, although at least one of the brothers died at a very young age.

John and Lucy were married at the parish church in Hound (just south and west of Bursledon) on 25 February 1811, and had three of their six children in Bursledon: Mary (b. 1811, six months after her parents’ wedding), John (b. 1815), and Elizabeth (b. 1817). Around 1818, the family moved to America, first for a couple years in New York City, and then to Sackets Harbor, Jefferson, New York, where John took up his profession as a shipwright.

Why John left for America is still something of a mystery, but learning some things about the climate for work in that area helped put some of this in perspective. The early 1810s were a busy time for shipbuilding in Southampton, as it was one of the major naval shipbuilding yards, and between war with America and war with France, there was plenty of work for shipwrights. However, after both wars ended by 1815, there was a major scaling back of shipbuilding, and thus work dried up quickly. There began to be a lot of discussion on how to bring back the shipbuilding industry, with the focus seeming to go primarily toward the development of steamships capable of handling the more inland waters of the Rivers Hamble and Itchen, as well as the Southampton waters. John Oades build sailing ships, and that’s not where the direction of shipbuilding was going. My guess here is that he went for the reasons many people chose to leave: follow the work.

There is a story that John Oades had a Canadian land grant in reward for his service to the British government, but there is some reason why I doubt this story. I discussed this with the maritime experts at the Southampton city archives, and they agreed with me that this would not have been any kind of usual procedure to reward a shipwright. Shipwrights were rarely formally connected with the British Navy; they worked primarly for private firms or as today’s equivelant of an independent contractor. Only shipwrights or ship’s carpenters assigned to sail out with a particular vessel were officially government workers — and when that meant the British Navy at the time, that was generally a lifetime assignment. What is not in doubt is that there was “a” John Oades who does have record of a land grant in Canada, which is something I plan to look up, but if there is one thing that I learned while I was over there is that John was an exceptionally common name in the Oades family. It’s not clear to me that the John Oades who received the land grant was “my” John Oades. My own research does not indicate that he and his family ever lived in Canada.

I was able to trace the Oades family back to my ninth-great-grandparents, John and Margarett Oades. The Oades family goes back as follows:

John Oades and Lucy Sweetingham (5th ggp)
Thomas Oades and Mary Frost (6th ggp)
Thomas Oades and Elizabeth May (7th ggp)
Thomas Oades and Charity Foster (8th ggp)
John Oades and Margarett — (9th ggp)

What I learned that did surprise me about the Oades family is that they are somewhat recent to Southampton itself. John Oades’ father was the first to arrive in Southampton. His father, grandfather, and great-grandfather were all from Portsmouth. I know for certain that his father Thomas was also a shipwright; I was not only able to discover that he had been apprenticed by indenture to become one, but also found the name of his master (John Bissell) and even the name of the ship for which John Bissell was the master carpenter (the H.M.S. Modeste – yes, it has a Wikipedia page). In addition to Portsmouth, many of the Oades family was also in Winchester.

In fact, my actual Southampton connections are limited only to John Oades and his father. His grandmother May’s relations were also in Portsmouth. Lucy’s Sweetingham family was from Bursledon since the early 1700s, but prior to that was in Alverstoke and Gosport (near Portsmouth), although her Strugnell mother’s family seems to have been in Bursledon as far back as the records go. Her grandmother was a Phillips and her great-grandmother was a Plowman, and both families were from Eling, just across the Southampton water. They were never far from shipbuilding activities and never far from the waters north of the Isle of Wight and the English Channel.

It was a little surreal, standing in places where my relatives worked, went to church, possibly had a pint (two of the pubs I ate in have been in business since the 14th century and are located near the old dockyards), knowing that I may be the first of John and Lucy Oades’ progeny to return to the home soil.

The Duke of Wellington pub was just past the Western Quay and the old docks, near the city wall and about a three minute walk from my hotel. It’s gone through several names; by John Oades’ time it would have been known as the Shipwright Arms and primarily served the shipbuilders. I ate a magnificent fish and chips and toasted the memory of my own shipbuilders’ past with Talisker Storm scotch. Fitting, really.

52/52: Week 7 – Love, or, a picture paints a thousand words

I decided that this week’s 52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks theme, Love, could be expressed in a picture rather than in so many words. I posted this picture before in a thread a couple weeks ago, but it’s always struck me as unusual for a picture for its time.

This picture of Frederic Julien Kellogg with daughter Freda Louise Kellogg and Edith Emeline Hunt was taken about 1900. Most photos, even this late, were stiff affairs without much of any personal expression — they were simply portraits and records of the people. This one is a little different, and I will allow it to speak for itself.

Frederic Julien Kellogg and Edith Emeline Hunt with daughter Freda (abt 1900)

52/52: Week 6 – So far away (Archibald Cole)

Tags

Civil War, Cole, military, Paternal, Townsend

Distance is relative. What may seem like an unbreachable distance to one may be nothing to another in different times and circumstances. When my third-great-grandfather Archibald Cole was mortally wounded in the Battle of Petersburg on 17 June 1864, as far as he and his family were concerned, he might as well have been on the moon. Week 5’s theme is “so far away”, and I could not think of a better example than Archibald Cole.

Archibald Lamont Cole was not a young man when he enlisted in the Second Michigan Infantry. He was born 28 January 1816 in the town of Western in Oneida County, New York, the sixth of eight children born to John Cole and Jennett Lamont. In 1839, at age 23, he moved to Jackson County, Michigan with his father, and shortly thereafter married his first wife, Elizabeth Lane, and had three children, Arthur, Eveline, and Isabelle, before Elizabeth died in 1848. In 1854, he married his second wife, my third-great-grandmother Mary Ann Townsend, and had four more children: Leonard Townsend, Irwin (who died before age two), Winfield William, and Elizabeth, my second-great-grandmother.

Archibald Lamont Cole, probably taken around 1856

On March 28, 1864, Archibald was approached by a recruiter for the Second Michigan Infantry looking for men to fill a new company. In a letter written on 10 October 1889 to an old military friend, Dr. J. W. Stone, a former sergeant of Company D of the 2nd Michigan, wrote:

“I wrote to Leonard T. Cole [oldest son of Archibald and Mary Townsend], of Canton, N.Y., regarding his father who was a member of Capt. Stevenson’s Co. D. in 2d Mich. Inf. I remember him well. Capt. Ricaby was raising his Co. in Hillsdale and sent me to Albion to recruit some men. In those days men were getting scarce and I returned with only one man, Archibald T. [sic] Cole. He was a middle-aged man then and full of patriotic feeling. I remember how he talked to me, that he had stayed out of the service of the country too long but it did not seem as if he could leave home before or even now. He had a quiet dignity about him that made us all respect the man and when we got to the front and were assigned to Co. D, the old veterans of the company soon learned to respect Cole for his few words and his constant presence in the company.”

Archibald Cole was also much older than the typical recruit — in fact, older than they wanted, with three children at home all under ten years of age. in 1864, Archibald was 48 years old, although his enlistment papers and all subsequent military records list his age as 42. All his civilian records, including the family Bible where I obtained his birth date, all agree with his 1816 birth. Early in the Civil War, military units were taking men for as few as three to six month enlistments, sure the war would be over in short order. However, later in the war, most military enlistments were for a minimum of three years, including the 2nd Michigan. Although I have not been able to confirm this fact, I have talked to several Civil War experts who said that many units would not take men if they would be older than a certain age by the end of their enlistment period, and it stands to reason that the 2nd Michigan may have stated that they would not take men who would be older than 45 when their service ended. This would explain why Archibald would declare himself as 42, which is likely the youngest age he could reasonably expect to sell.

Sadly, Archibald’s military career was extremely short. J.W. Stone and Archibald Cole returned to the 2nd Michigan just as they were headed toward the tumultuous Second Battle of Petersburg in Petersburg, Virginia, 700 miles from his home in Albion, Michigan. 17 June 1864 was “a day of uncoordinated Union attacks”, including a charge from the 2nd Michigan:

“…when after the fearful charge of the old 2d across the corn field on the afternoon of June 17, 1864 … I found [Archibald] sitting leaning against a tree, waiting for the carriers to take him to the surgeons, who were already busy …. Among it all I remember Cole’s telling me in his quiet way that it was all up with him. He knew that his wound would be fatal but it was for the old flag and it was all right. I think I wrote a letter for him, or got one written. I know I promised to see his family but when years after I was in Albion I could find nothing of them.”

By 20 June 1864, Archibald was transported by train to a military hospital in Washington, D.C., having taken a Minie ball to the chest.

Nearly two weeks after his injury, on 1 July 1864, Archibald Cole died of his wounds and was buried in a newly-opened military cemetery on the outskirts of the city. By this point in the war, most of the capitol’s cemeteries were full to bursting. In a nose-thumbing gesture to Gen. Robert E. Lee, they appropriated the grounds of property belonging to his wife to create a new cemetery, originally for common soldiers such as Archibald whose families were too poor to pay to have their remains shipped home for burial (at this time, this was the financial responsibility of the families). By war’s end over 4,000 Union soldiers had joined him under plain wooden markers, most of which rotted to unreadability, so years later when the government finally financed permanent markers, they could only positively identify about 1/4 of the soldiers buried there. In an unusual stroke of genealogical luck, Archibald Cole was identified, even though his marker has the wrong date of death (which, as a direct descendent, I can apply to have fixed. Filing the proper paperwork is one of my planned projects this year).

Archibald Cole’s grave marker. The unit and company are right, but the date is off by almost a month.

The cemetery is now known as Arlington National Cemetery, after the name of the estate belonging to the family of General Lee’s wife, Mary Custis Lee. Creating a cemetery on the mansion’s grounds was intended to make the mansion undesirable for anyone from that Confederate family to reclaim, although they didn’t count on her determination. Shortly after the end of the war Mary Custis Lee began the bitter fight to reclaim the mansion and have the bodies removed from the grounds, but in 1870, Congress voted overwhelmingly to deny the home and grounds’ return. The fight had one major effect: it elevated the status of Arlington from a burying ground of indigent soldiers to one of the most prized and prestigious pieces of real estate for the dead in the United States.

There is no evidence Mary Ann Townsend Cole came to Washington D.C. to be with her husband in his final days; likely she did not even find out about his death until after it was over. I could not find the exact prices of trains in 1864, but it was almost certainly well out of reach of a young farmer’s wife with three small children.

Family line: Archibald Cole (1816-1864) and Mary Ann Townsend (1833-1868); Elizabeth Cole (1861-1927) and Theodore Frank Snyder (1861-1905); Ruth Adele Snyder and William Marcus Curtis; William Curtis and Helen Austin (my paternal grandparents).

52/52: Week 5 – Plowing through (Frank Snyder)

Tags

brickwall, Cole, Edson, Paternal, Snyder

There are some issues in genealogy that require years of beating, prodding, and poking before you break through them. We call these “brick walls”. While there are some brick walls that are more stubborn than others, and some that have stood for over twenty years, I recently plowed through a big one which may lead to some interesting work proving Mayflower ancestry. This involves finding the parents of my paternal second-great-grandfather, Theodore “Frank” Snyder.

Frank Snyder was the husband of Elizabeth “Libbie” Cole, and the father of Ruth Adele Snyder Curtis, my great-grandmother. Unfortunately, Grandma Ruth died in 1982, long before I had an interest in genealogy. Apparently she spoke to no one about her family, as interviews with my father and other relatives on that side of the family yielded absolutely no clues. Most of them didn’t even know her parents’ names — in fact, I don’t remember any of them did. I could at least tell them that, as I had their names on Ruth’s 1896 birth certificate. Finding Libbie and her parents was the subject of my first professional genealogy article in FAMILY CHRONICLE magazine, as this was also an odyssey.

I started out with only a few small pieces of information about Frank:

1. He was born in August 1861 in Marilla, Erie, New York (Ruth’s birth certificate)

2. His given name was possibly Theodore (notes on a very old copy of a short family tree my paternal grandfather had put together years ago).

3. According to Grandma Ruth, he was buried in North Collins, Erie, New York, as was her mother. One of her last wishes was to be buried with them, but she was buried in Rockland County with her daughter instead.

This wasn’t much to go on, and the few records I could find were not helpful.

I did find a Theodore Snyder born about 1861 in Marilla, New York, a son of Isaac and Martha Snyder. He was in the 1865 and 1875 state census records, and the 1870 federal census, in this household in Marilla. However, he was always listed as Theodore, never as Frank — not even Theodore F., for that matter. I could not be sure this Theodore was my Frank.

Frank and Libbie Cole married in late November or early December 1880, which is a pity because the state had only just enacted the law requiring towns to keep track of vital records and the vast majority were not in compliance yet. The only record of their marriage was an exceedingly brief and incomplete notice in the Le Roy Gazette newspaper on 8 December 1880:

SNYDER-COLE: In Morganville, Mr. — Snyder, of Alexander,to Miss Libbie Cole of Le Roy.

I mean, for heaven’s sake, they didn’t even know his first name.

I also found Frank Snyder living with his wife Libbie in the 1892 state census in North Collins with their son Lester (never have found out what happened to Lester), and in the 1900 federal census in North Collins with Libbie and daughter Ruth. But I found little connection between this Frank and the previous Theodore.

In the 1905 North Collins census, he’s gone. Libbie and Ruth are there, and Libbie was listed as a widow. However, as I pointed out in my Week 1 blog entry about the informal divorce, I was not taking Frank’s death at face value. He would have only been in his early forties, so I counted it equally possible he was “over grass” rather than “under sod”.

Add to this that both Isaac and Martha, his purported parents, also seem to disappear. Isaac dropped from sight after the 1875 census. While it was easy to assume him dead, Martha was enumerated living with her children in the 1892 census, and although she was alone, she was listed as married, not widowed.

Add to this that even after extensive searches of the New York State Vital Records Index, I could find no record of deaths for Frank, Isaac, or Martha, nor could I find any records of their burials. If Frank is in North Collins, his grave is unmarked.

Just a few months ago, however, I decided to expand my search for Isaac, and what I found really surprised the heck out of me.

Isaac was born in 1819 in Ontario, Canada, and judging from information about his siblings, had probably been born near the present-day town of Bertie in Welland, near Fort Erie and just over the border from Buffalo. And in 1891, I found an Isaac Snyder, aged 72, living in Bertie with a widowed female cousin named Magdelene Edsall twenty years his junior. He was listed in the 1891 Census of Canada, and his religion was listed as “United Brethren”.

The United Brethren was a Mennonite order founded near a settlement that turns out to have been called Snyder — with good reason. Isaac’s parents, Peter and Jane Snyder, had moved from Albany County, New York to this part of Ontario to help set up this church, which apparently also had some ties to the Methodist Church. Isaac was born here and lived there until he was in his late teens or early twenties. He was enumerated again living with the same widowed cousin in the 1901 census — and in both instances, she was listed as widowed and he was listed as married. So apparently, at some time between 1875 and 1891, Isaac Snyder left his wife and (by this time grown) children back in the States and went to live with the religious community that he had lived with growing up. But both Martha and Isaac apparently considered themselves still married, even though Martha did not go with him.

(Aside: Magdalena’s maiden name was Johnson, the same last name as Isaac’s paternal grandmother. So this was another possible confirmation, although Johnson is hardly an unusual name).

While interesting, however, this did not solve the question: where and when did Frank, Martha, and Isaac die, and could their death certificates prove the relationship between them?

It was actually Isaac’s proximity to Buffalo that got me thinking: what if one or more of them had died in the city limits of Buffalo?

The New York State Vital Records Index (VRI) lists all births, marriages, and deaths recorded in New York State after June 1880, although it took several years for towns to comply fully with the law. I had searched the VRI for their records to no avail. It was possible this wasn’t “my” Isaac living in Canada and he’d really died prior to it being recorded, but the Canadian Isaac was looking pretty good at this point.

However, there were a few exceptions — and Buffalo was one of them. Buffalo actually started keeping some records as early as 1852, but here’s the kicker — they didn’t start sending them to New York State until 1914. Any Buffalo death records prior to 1914 would not show up in the VRI.

So in December 2014, I headed over to Buffalo to the Inactive Records Office, hoping to find at least one of them — and I found all three.

Martha Snyder died first, on 20 Jun 1901 in Buffalo. It listed her address as 152 N. Delewan Avenue, and listed her parents as Theodore and Eliza Edson. I had known her parents’ names, but it definitely confirmed I had the right person.

Isaac Snyder died 22 May 1902 in Buffalo. It listed also his address as 152 N. Delewan Avenue, but that he had only been living there for a year. It did not list his parents, but that was all right with me because I had positively identified his parents years ago (although I still have not found his mother Jane’s maiden name).

I used the Buffalo city directories to find who was living at 152 N. Delewan Avenue in 1901 and 1902. Neither Martha nor Isaac Snyder were listed, but for just a few years it was the residence of Homer D. Sprague, who was husband to Viola Adell Snyder, Isaac and Martha’s third daughter. It appears that Martha had lived with Homer and Viola for some time, but either shortly before or shortly after Martha’s death, Isaac had rejoined the household and lived there until his own death eleven months later.

Frank’s death certificate was both a confirmation and an extra puzzle. He died on 21 November 1905, having spent the last six months in Erie County Hospital from complications of diabetes. He was listed as “Frank Snider” (not Theodore) and it confirmed his place and year of birth. More importantly, it listed his parents as Isaac and Martha “Snider” (they were at least consistent about misspelling the name).

So why was it a puzzle? Because of Libbie’s answer to her marital status in the 1905 state census. Every census has an official date, and the census reports the status of a household on a particular date. The census is usually taken about that time, although they can’t be there on the exact date everywhere in their district. The date of the 1905 census was 1 June 1905 — and yet Libbie reported herself a widow, even though Frank did not die until the end of November. It’s conceivable that the census taker was VERY late that year (almost half a year late) and didn’t make it clear that it was supposed to have enumerated everyone who was alive on 1 June 1905. However, that would be a lot later than is usual.

So had I thought to look for their deaths in Buffalo, I would have “plowed through” this problem a lot sooner. However, given that none of them had ever lived in Buffalo or even that close to it (both Marilla and North Collins are a little over 20 miles away), it makes sense in retrospect. Two aged parents die at the home of a daughter, and one man has a lingering illness requiring long hospitalization — which required going to the largest local city.

Frank’s death certificate did confirm he is buried somewhere in North Collins, but did not say which cemetery. Part of him apparently still wants to keep his secrets.

52/52 Week 4: Closest to my birthday, or, being your own cousin

Tags

cousins, Gates, Kellogg, Kenyon, Lady Jane Grey, Maternal

On the face of it, this week’s challenge (“Closest to your birthday”) was a toughie, and I was digging for material. Thankfully, my family tree software can pull date reports so I could easily see the people in my tree who shared my birthday. There were five, but only one direct ancestor; the rest were siblings of very-far-back great-grandparents, including a set of twins (Hannah and Samuel Curtice) who would be celebrating their 303rd birthdays this year. I checked who was married on my birthday and who died on my birthday – nothing else came to mind. I even checked the birthdays of my sister, my mother, and my father — nothing. To all appearances, it looked like we were the most interesting things to happen on those days.

So I decided to take a look at Stephen Gates — my 9th great-grandfather on my mother’s side, born on my birthday in  1665. It didn’t look very promising until I realized that this Gates family didn’t hook into my lines where I expected it to. I had known about a Gates connection through my Kellogg relatives for many years; Alvira Gates (1810-1875) was my fourth-great-grandmother, married to Henry J. Rich (1809-1874); they are buried as “Mother” and “Father” Rich in Carthage. Their daughter Angela (1839-1908) married Henry James Kellogg (1831-1894), and they were parents of Frederic Julien Kellogg (1861-1935), my second-great-grandfather and father of my great-grandmother Freda.

But this Stephen Gates (b.1665) was not a forefather of this Gates line. So where does he hook in? His line goes on a meandering trip, and then ends up right back in the Kelloggs.

This is far better explained with a diagram than with a narrative:

Stephen Gates (1600-1662) and his wife Ann Veare (1602-1683) had several children, among them two boys: Stephen Jr. (b. 1638) and Simon (b. 1645). As it turned out, both brothers are my direct ancestors. Simon’s line went down to Frederic Kellogg; Stephen Jr.’s line went down to Edith Emeline Hunt. Due to the fact that Simon’s line tended to consist of the younger children of older parents, the generations are longer and there are fewer steps.

When Frederic Kellogg and Edith Emeline Hunt married and had their only daughter, Freda, she was both the 6th-great-granddaughter and 8th-great-granddaughter of Stephen Gates Sr, as well as a distant cousin to herself.

Kissin’ Gates cousins: Frederic Julien Kellogg and Edith Emeline Hunt with daughter Freda (abt 1900)

If you happen to be from mostly old colonial roots, this is going to happen repeatedly. This is not the only case where I am my own cousin. I am also my own cousin from both sides of the family, meaning that my parents are also distant cousins (the one example I can think of from the top of my head is that my father is also related to the same family of Rhode Island Kenyons, albeit much farther back in that genealogy than in my mother’s, whose mother was a Kenyon). I share at least four sets of eighth- to tenth-great-grandparents with my husband, who is also from mostly old colonial roots. Some of the twists are quite recent; my Edson relatives from my dad’s side of the family often married first and second cousins, even cousins who were both Edsons at the time of marriage (saves from having to change names or monograms on the silver).

From what I have been able to tell, the vast majority of my family lines on both sides arrived in America between 1620 and 1650. Several of these came on the Mayflower, and the Fortune, which arrived the following year. By 1650, the estimated European population of America was a bit over 50,000 people. Given that this the range of my 8th-10th great grandparents, and by the time you get there you have 1,024 8th, 2,048 9th and 4,096 10th great grandparents, that starts to be a significant percentage of the general population. If you’re primarily old colonial, you have to be related to yourself, and repeatedly.

Interesting side historical note on the Gates family:

Stephen Gates (1600-1662) and his wife Ann Veare (1602-1683) both immigrated to America aboard the ship Diligent in 1638, settling in Hingham, Massachusetts. Their family was unusual in that the Gates family was landed and titled, although being the youngest son of a series of younger sons probably prompted Stephen to take his chances elsewhere. His most famous (or infamous) relative was Sir John Gates, brother to Stephen’s second great-grandfather Geoffrey; Sir John Gates became a principal participant in the 1553 plot to put Lady Jane Grey on the throne of England instead of Mary Tudor. Here is a Wikipedia article on his history and exploits.

During my last visit to London, I visited the chapel at St. Peter ad Vincula inside the Tower of London, where Sir John had recanted his Protestant faith, and stood in the spot in the little green traffic park that marked where the scaffold stood on Tower Hill, where John was executed on the same day, 22 August 1553. The brother of a 13th-great-grandfather is not genetically a close relationship, but given that it was more than 461 years ago, it’s as close as most people are likely to get. It was pretty chilling nonetheless.

52/52 Week 3: “The aunts, the dolls, and the babies she had lost” (Tough Woman)

Tags

Epidemic, Gaskill, Maternal, Wells

This could equally be dedicated to a “tough man”, her husband and my second-great-grandfather Charles Eddy Wells, but the category this week was “tough woman”. I’m not sure there is any tougher thing to have to deal with than the death of one child — and Lena Minerva Gaskill Wells, my maternal second-great-grandmother, had to deal with losing far more than that.

Lena (whose given name was Laney) was born on 2 May 1860 on what was once called Wells Island*, now Wellseley Island, to William Henry Gaskill, a blacksmith and justice of the peace, and Elizabeth Staring.

She was one of three children, with a brother named George, and a sister Delia who died at age eight. There’s a fairly creepy picture of the three children together taken about 1870; because of the slow shutter speeds and the near impossibility of getting a toddler to stand still for that long, the image of Delia comes out as a total blur.

It’s hard not to imagine foreshadowing in this  picture.

Lena married Charles Eddy Wells on 2 January 1883. Six months later, she gave birth to their first child, Arlouine Mary. This happened a lot more in the past than people care to admit; one study showed that by mid-1700s, more than 40% of women bore their first child less than eight months after marriage. Although it’s tempting to see a baby bump in her wedding picture, she was, in fact, only about three months’ pregnant at the time.

Charles and Lena’s wedding picture, January 1883.

In all, Lena and Charles had eleven children: my great-grandfather William Harrison Sr. (1886), Edward (1887), Elizabeth (1890), Frank (1891), Mary Ruth (1892), Edna Laura (1894), Charles Jr. (1896), Marjorie (1899), Dorothy (1902) and Carl (1904).

Only three of her children had children of their own – William, Mary Ruth, and Carl. And only three – William, Dorothy, and Carl – lived past their twenty-fourth birthday.

Elizabeth died at just over a year old in September 1891, just a couple months after the birth of her brother Frank; he died the next year at nine months, in March 1892.  Edna died at nine months in 1895. Charles Jr. was born in 1896 and died at a year and a half in 1897. The community donated a four-sided small obelisk monument to four babies in the Clayton Cemetery. The familiy lore has it that all four died of diphtheria, although I have only confirmed this with Edna. It is likely that diphtheria or another epidemic disease such as scarlet fever was the culprit.

Arlie Wells, age 12 (about 1895). She died of a throat infection at age 16.

Arlouine, or “Arlie”, as her family called her, was sixteen in 1899 when she succumbed to a throat illness, perhaps a strep infection. A family letter from her aunt Leila Woodcock Wells described it to her own aunt (spelling intact):

“But I must tell you such sad news. Arlie Wells is dead; she was buried two weeks ago to day. Oh, Aunt Jane, does it seem possible that such a strong, healthy girl could die so sudden. She was sick only a few days; it was sore throat that killed her, but the Doctors said it was not diphera [diphtheria] and Charley + his wife was all tired out being up nights with Arlie and the children for they all were sick of the same thing and they wanted me to come over and help them, so of corse I went. We had not been in the house two hours before poor Arlie died.” – 12 October 1899

Eddie Wells, about 1905. He was killed three years later in a boating accident that made statewide headlines and nearly took his brother as well.

Edward Wells, Eddie to his family, was twenty in 1908 when his death made headlines across the state.

Eddie, his brother William, and their two girlfriends were returning to Round Island from the mainland at night after a date when the small boat they were using was struck by a speeding motorboat. None of them could swim; William and Nancy were saved but Eddie and Lulu, in the end of the boat with the heavy motor, sank and the bodies were not recovered til morning.

The sensational story made headlines, the motorboat drivers were charged in the first known case in New York State of vehicular manslaughter with a boat. Partly because the families did not wish the men punished for what they felt was a horrible accident, the men were acquitted.

Marjorie, who had been two months old when her sister Arlouine died, succumbed to consumption (probably tuberculosis) at age thirteen, in 1912. According to her obituary, she had been sick for about two years.

The next year, 1913, Mary Ruth married Jasper Perrigo, and in 1914 and 1915 bore her daughters Marjorie and Doris. Mary Ruth died of pneumonia in January 1916; her youngest daughter was only five months old.

Caretaker’s porch on Round Island. Top: William Patterson Wells (father of Charles), Charles and Lena Wells. Middle: Mary Ruth, Marjorie, Mary Isobel (William’s wife) and William. Bottom: Carl and Dorothy. This is the last known picture of Marjorie before her death at 13; Mary Ruth would follow in a few years. Out of the Wells children, only William, Carl, and Dorothy lived past age twenty-four.

Even for high infant mortality at the time, and an average life expectancy of 48 years in 1900, the Wells children did poorly. The average life expectancy works out to be about 24 years, half the national average. It’s one of the examples I use when anyone comes out as anti-vaccine; I am sure my great-great-grandmother Lena would have gladly given her own limbs to save even one of her children from the dread diseases of the time.

In 33 years of marriage, Lena had lost eight of her eleven children, seven to disease, one from a terrible accident. My grandfather used to write a column for a local paper, one of which contained some remembrances of his grandmother Lena. She had a collection of dolls that had belonged to “the aunts”, and he remembered how part of her was always sad about the babies she had lost.

“the aunts, the dolls, and the babies she had lost” (Marjorie and Mary Ruth Wells. Marjorie lived to be 13; Mary Ruth died at age 23, leaving behind two small girls of her own)

Lena died the day after her birthday, 3 May 1938, in Clayton, two years before her husband Charles. She was seventy-eight years old, and had suffered more loss in her lifetime than most of us can begin to imagine. Yet, my grandfather fondly recalled her sweetness and love of family.

52/52 Week 2: It’s (Sometimes) Good to Be the King

Tags

Austin, Paternal, Waite, Williams

Week 2’s theme is “King”, in honor of Elvis’ birthday week. For me this was an easy choice, because I have something of a “gimme”: my third-great-grandfather on my father’s side is named King Austin.

Why would anyone give their kid a name like “King”, without having aspirations of some kind of incredible music or sports career? King Austin was born near Christmas (27 December 1805, in Dutchess County, New York), so perhaps it had religious significance, being born so close to Jesus’ assigned birthday? The answer, alas, is more prosaic. King’s father Jonathan Austin had a stepmother named Ann King, and he likely named his youngest son (child #12) in honor of her.

King’s story isn’t unusual – in fact, it’s pretty representative of stories from 19th century New York. Families moved around to get better land. Men married and had children; women bore children and often died in the process.

King’s family moved from Beekman, Dutchess, New York and settled in the area of Harrisburg, Lewis, New York, sometime between 1800 and 1810. There is a even a family cemetery called Austin Cemetery near present-day Denmark which houses not only King’s parents Jonathan Austin and Mercy Goodspeed,  where more than half the cemetery is comprised of related Austins. Jonathan was a veteran of the Revolutionary War, serving as a private in Captain James Maline’s militia (not to be confused with a much more well-heeled major from Boston of the same name).

King was married first to Catherine Mellen, probably in Harrisburg, Lewis, New York, in the early 1830s. She was the daughter of Henry Mellon and Mary Koch. They had one son, Nehemiah, born 16 April 1834 in Harrisburg, but tragically Catherine died one week later. Nehemiah was born star-crossed; around the age of nineteen, in 1853, he disappeared. It was the middle of the California gold rush, and family legend had it that he went west to try to strike it rich, but was never heard from again.

The next year, King married Matilda Hodge, and this marriage lasted fifteen years and produced six children: Harriet, Catherine, Palmer, Charles, Edgar, and George. However, history may have repeated itself with George’s birth on 14 April 1850, as Matilda died nearly two months later, on 20 July of the same year. For the second time, King was a widower, but this time with seven children under the age of sixteen to look after.

His last marriage was to my third-great-grandmother, Eliza Williams, daughter of William Williams (let’s hear it for naming originality) and his wife Eunice, whose surname I have not yet determined but was actually likely Williams as well. Eliza was born 13 September 1813 in Pittstown, Rensselaer, New York — a matter which has caused genealogical controversy as my identification of Pittstown goes against “conventional wisdom”. Her only son, Dempster Christie Austin (20 Dec 1853-7 March 1927) wrote a big essay in a major genealogical book about his mother and identified her place of origin as Patterson, New York, located in Putnam County. I won’t bore everyone with the details, but trust me: Dempster was mistaken. He was in his eighties and wrote the essay more than fifty years after his mother’s death. It’s Pittstown. If you want to be bored, please contact me and I’ll be happy to regale you with my flights of genealogical reasoning.

Eliza, as it turns out, was also a widow. She had been married to Matthew Greene and had six children by him, four of whom lived past early childhood. Matthew Green had died before 1850 and Eliza still had two young children living at home with her. On 3 Nov 1851, she and King married.

Thankfully, Eliza broke King’s streak of losing wives to childbirth complications, and lived until 5 February 1885, outliving King by four years. King himself died in 1881 at age 79. Both are buried in Elmwood Cemetery in Adams.

Sadly, my second-great-grandfather Dempster Christie Austin had similar luck his father in regard to wives. My second-great-grandmother Emma Waite died giving birth to her third child on 5 September 1880. His second wife Emma Saunders died a week after giving birth to her second child in April 1892. His third wife Louisa Bristol had no children and while she died seven years before Dempster, they were married for 37 years. And even more sadly, their experiences in this arena were not uncommon for the day.

52/52 Week #1: Fresh Start (Lillian Love Hall Searles Rude)

Tags

Adoption, Divorce, Hall, Paternal, Rude, Searles, Separation

The 52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks challenge is one of those blogging challenges I have probably started at least a time or two but never stuck with. As much as I like to write, blogging has somehow eluded me, at least in part. But this year’s challenge is themed, which may give me some better directions other than just the “pick 52 ancestors”, and may help me keep on better track.

The theme for week 1, January 1-7, is “Fresh Start”.

I thought about this for a long time before I decided what to write about. Any immigrant ancestor would qualify as a “fresh start”. I did have a few recent lines that were recent immigrants (if you count the 1850s as “recent”), but most of them are from old Colonial lines from before 1650. The most extreme examples of “fresh start” would be my four Mayflower passenger ancestors. Would I want a “fresh start” on researching any particular person? Couldn’t think of anything there, or any research I’d want to erase.

But then it occurred to me which “fresh start” I wanted to address. It’s not necessarily a person, although I have two good examples from within two generations of the same family. Rather, it’s a fairly common practice at the time before there was good identification and solid record keeping: the “fresh start” of the casual illegal divorce.

We think of divorce as a fairly modern concept, but in fact divorce goes back nearly as far as marriage. It’s just that it lacks the stigma today that it used to have. My own parents divorced when I was eleven, and I look back on it as a relatively benign period in my life. On the other hand, my great-grandmother Ruth Adele (Snyder) Curtis (1896-1982) legally divorced my great-grandfather William Marcus Curtis (1876-1950) back in the 1920s, and because she was a schoolteacher, she had to lie about her marital status and tell employers she was a widow.

There was an old saying from the late 1800s/early 1900s, a tactful way of asking a young widow about her true marital status: grass or sod? The expanded version of this was asking if her husband was “over grass or under sod”, meaning “is he alive or dead”? It was so common for women, and sometimes men, to refer to themselves as widows/widowers when they actually meant divorced that I always look at self-proclaimed widows under the age of 70 or so prior to the early 1900s with a jaundiced eye, until I can verify the actual deaths.

The two most vivid examples in my own family tree of the informal? casual? illegal divorce came from two generations on my father’s side of the family. The first case is that of my third-great-grandmother, Fanny (Calkins) Rude Dewell Houghtaling (1832-1899), but I think I will save her for another time.

The second case involves my great-great grandparents on my father’s side: Fanny’s son Norman Hebron Rude (1854-1936) and his wife Lillian Love (Hall) Rude (1853-1932). Lillian was Norman’s first wife, but Lillian had been married before.

Lillian Love Hall Searles Rude, taken about 1880 after her marriage to Norman

Lillian Love Hall was born in 1853 in Toledo, Lucas, Ohio, to Charles Bowen Hall (1826-1880) and Mary Converse or Convis (1831-1871). When she was just sixteen years old, on 15 March 1870,  Lillian married Charles Henry Searles, a widower (yes, a real widower) twenty years her senior, who had three daughters from his brief marriage to Lucy Allen, before her death in 1862. Charles’ oldest daughter, Frances, was only four years younger than Lillian.

Lillian and Charles’ marriage record

On 2 December 1871, in Arbela, Tuscola, Michigan, Lillian gave birth to their son, John Lowell Searles.

There really isn’t a way to know what happened when, or when the marriage between Lillian and Charles started to break down, or why. According to Lillian’s obituary in the 18 February 1932 issue of the Mexico Independent (Mexico, Oswego, New York), Lillian and Norman married on 26 October 1876. By the 1880 census, Lillian, Norman, and John Searles (listed as Norman’s stepson) were living together in Bay City, Bay, Michigan. Many people here would assume that her first husband Charles had died prior to her marriage to Norman.

They would be wrong.

Charles Searles is also enumerated in the 1880 census, in Arbela, Tuscola, Michigan, where his son John had been born. Everything about him appears consistent with previous information; he was 47 years old in 1880, a farmer, born in Massachusetts and parents born in Massachusetts. Under the checkboxes for single, married, or widowed, the last box, widowed, is marked.

I continued following this Charles Searles until his death in 7 June 1913 in Arbela. He is buried in Pine Grove Cemetery in nearby Millington, in the same cemetery with daughters Frances and Annette, and the same town as his daughter Emma (Imogene). His daughter Frances was the reporter on his death certificate. So he was quite definitely alive through 37 years of Lillian’s marriage to Norman Rude.

Charles also remarried a third time, to a woman named Elizabeth Ash, the widow (real) of Roswell Brooks. Charles and Elizabeth married on 19 November 1892 in Tuscola.

However, there is absolutely no evidence I have found to date that Charles and Lillian legally ended their marriage. I traded research services with a good researcher in Michigan, who searched the divorce records in the supreme courts filed not only in Tuscola County, but also in the neighboring counties, and found nothing under their names. It’s further complicated by the fact that Michigan did not require recording divorces on the county level until 1897, so it was necessary to search on the court level. The researcher knew which supreme court had covered Tuscola County and had checked that one first with no results.

In short, it appears both Lillian and Charles may have been legally bigamists.

This situation was not that uncommon. Divorce was no more free then than it is now, and quite a bit harder to get. Usually there had to be significant grounds even to obtain a divorce, and the process was very costly by the average income standards at the time. Divorce was disproportionately practiced among the wealthy; poor people simply stopped being married in their own eyes, if not in the eyes of the law. Without records, it was simply a matter of moving on and hoping you didn’t get caught.

However, the other reason I strongly believe this was a “poor man’s divorce” was the fact that there was a rumor among my relatives on that side of the family that there was a big, dark secret hanging over that family that Nobody Talked About.

At some point in his life, John Searles, son of Lillian and Charles Searles, became John Rude and dropped the name Searles altogether. He married twice, a tragically short marriage to Louisa Ludrick in 1899 (they married 13 December 1899; she died eight months later), followed by a long and fruitful 53-year marriage to Mertie Weaver in 13 March 1901, which produced twelve children. Both his marriage certificates, as well as his death certificate on 14 October 1935, as well as the corresponding newspaper announcements, listed his parents as Norman Rude and Lillian Hall. He became a Rude by tradition, though not by birth.

Ironically, John Searles is likely the only “legitimate” child of Lillian Love Hall. She went on to have five more children with Norman Rude, including her youngest, my own great-grandmother Bessie Hope (Rude) Austin, but due to the fact she was probably never legally married to Norman, those five are technically illegitimate. In fact, depending on the laws in some states, they would legally be Charles Searles’ children, if she was in fact still married to him!

Lillian Love Hall Searles Rude, taken about 1920

I can see why this would be seen as a Big Terrible Horrible Secret back in the day, but in our more relaxed mores of today, this can be seen in its proper light. Two people married at very different points in their lives, a sixteen year old girl and a thirty-six year old widower with three children. The marriage, for whatever reason, did not work. They went their separate ways, perhaps amicably, perhaps not. My opinion is it was possibly amicable because Lillian got to keep their son (given laws regarding custody at the time, Charles was legally entitled to keep his child and she was not). She married and moved away, and he stayed behind. Eventually, he found a third wife, and perhaps love and companionship. Norman and Lillian moved back to New York State sometime in the 1890s and, by all accounts, had something of a hardscrabble existence as farmers, but extensive family pictures show a large and companionable family. It seems it all worked out well in the end, so who really cares about the whole issue of “legitimacy”? The many descendents of John Searles Rude’s large family are still blood cousins through Lillian, and heart cousins through Norman. What matters is that it seemed to result in, if not a fairytale happy ending, at least contentment.