Mothers in my family tree - Grandma Rosie

 With last Sunday being Mother's Day here in the US, I wanted to post a little tribute to the mothers in my family tree. I come from many remarkable and amazing women. I wish I had the time to pay adequate tribute to them all, but for now, I'll start with one - my great-grandmother, Rosie (Sitzman) (Wagner) Morris. She was an immigrant from what is now the Czech Republic, where her mother's family had lived for centuries. I still don't know for sure who her father was, as birth records aren't publicly available yet for the year she was born. She grew up in Montana, where she attended Catholic school as a little girl. She married my great-grandfather, Charles Wagner, and moved to Washington state, where they raised their family. After Charles' death, she later remarried to Clarence "Unc" Morris, and moved back to Montana, where she passed away in 1983.

The following two pictures best sum up my impression of her, based on the research I've done, the pictures I've reviewed, and the stories I've heard from family (she passed away when I was a little kid, so I only have one clear memory of her). The first picture is of Rosie and her family visiting the grave of her son, Charles. He died when he was 10 of tuberculosis. Having buried a child myself, I can imagine somewhat the pain and sadness she felt. Her expression, and that of her husband, to me epitomize the grief you feel when you bury a child. There just aren't words for it.

But I equally love this picture (which I think I've shared before on this blog). It was taken many years later, and shows that while she did experience great sorrow and grief at times, she also didn't let those emotions rule her life. She continued to look for joy and happiness. The sheer number of pictures she took (numbering in the thousands!) of her children, and especially her grandchildren, shows me that she found that joy in her family. 

Her daughter, my grandma Blossom, was the same way - family was everything. That love of family carried down to my dad, who has a closeness with his siblings and cousins that I envy. My dad and mom both did their best to instill that love of family in me and my siblings, and I hope I'm doing my best to pass it to my kids as well. Like Gordon B. Hinckley once said, don't let yourself be the weak link in the chain of the generations. Grandma Rosie was, and in many ways still is, a powerful influence in my family. I hope that I can continue to weld links in our family chain with the same strength and love she did.

Update: I tried colorizing the pictures, and the effect is amazing. The picture of Charles's grave is really different when you realize it was a beautiful sunny day. The black and white version captures the feeling better, but the colorized kind of helps me put that emotion in a larger context. The colorized version of the sledding picture almost looks like a still shot from a home movie. I love technology!

Family History Month - post 15

This post is a special one, dedicated to two cousins of mine, two of a set of triplets, that I never got to meet. Their names are Randi Katherine Gibson, and Arianne Rose Gibson. They were born July 10, 1977 in Vancouver, Washington. Randi passed away the following day, and Arianne two days after her sister. I've known of them for many years, but today I went to see if I could find records of their brief lives. I found death records for both of them in Washington state, but also in Oregon state, which surprised me. I guess because Vancouver is so close to the Washington/Oregon border, it was recorded in both states. The records below are from the Oregon indexes.

 

 

Having lost a child myself, I can't imagine the pain of losing two little ones so soon after their birth. Luckily the third daughter survived to adulthood, as did the daughter who followed her. But I wanted to be sure that my cousins Randi and Arianne are not forgotten, and are remebered along with the other relatives that are waiting for us on the other side. Like someone said, history remembers the famous, genealogy remembers everyone. 

Family History Month - post 3

Today's Family History Month post is about my great-great-grandfather, Charles Frederick Wagner. He was the son of Charles Wagner and Friedericka Wendt. He was born around 1870, though I'm not exactly sure where, due to a lot of discrepancies in the records he appears or is mentioned in. I can't recall the exact source, but I learned years ago that he went by the nickname "Ding" for some reason.

Charles Frederick Wagner in 1906

He spent some time in Chicago, and ended up in Mille Lacs County, Minnesota, where he met and married Eldora Shute on 14 April 1898. Charles and Eldora's first child, a son (reportedly named Dewey) was born 6 March 1899, and passed away 9 days later on 15 March 1899. Having buried a son myself, I can only imagine the heartbreak they went through. They went on to have five more children together, a girl named Gertrude, and four boys - Charles, Howard, Ralph, and Donald (who went by Bill).

Sometime after 1910, the family moved to Snohomish County, Washington. According to my grandma Blossom (Charles's granddaughter), he would disappear for days or even weeks at a time, then come back, and then disappear again. No one apparently knew where he went during these absences. It may have been these absences that led Eldora and Charles to divorce by 1920.

I don't know much about his life after the divorce. He sent postcards to his son Charles (whom he called Charlie) with unusual messages, like:

You would make a St. Pat, if you had a girl just like me - Dad

Rem[em]ber the Sea - See
hoping to See Sea - you aga[i]n - Seen  (Dad)

He spent his later years in a nursing home until he became really sick, at which point he called Gertrude (who was living with her family in California) and went to live with her until his death on 13 November 1934.

Mystery Monday - The confusing family of David Pattee

While going through another batch of record matches from MyHeritage, I came across an interesting hit on my Harris side. It was for Lucinda (Harris) Fulkerson, the older sister of my 2nd-great-grandfather Frank Benjamin Harris. Lucinda was listed as a member of the Society of Montana Pioneers in their 1899 volume Society of Montana Pioneers: Constitution, Members, and Officers, with portraits and maps.

 

 

A quick glance at the page showed me that Lucinda wasn't the only member of her family in the society - her father Thomas W. Harris, uncle Benjamin Harris, and brother Frank B. Harris were also listed as members. It made me stop and think for a minute - this was not a society of descendants of pioneers. This was a society of the pioneers themselves. I don't think I've come across another society (not counting military groups) that was built to honor the deeds and doings of the living generation. Makes me wonder what they did at their meetings (assuming they had them). I also saw that Thomas served as an officer for the society, representing Ravalli County in 1894, just three years before his death.

 

Seeing Thomas and his kids in the society, I got to wondering - what about his brother-in-law David Pattee? David married Thomas's sister Emma, who had come up from Missouri with her mother Lucinda and brother Benjamin some years after Thomas moved there in 1852. David and Emma married sometime around 1865, so that should have been early enough for him to count as a pioneer as well, I figured. A jumped a few pages forward, and sure enough, he was listed as a member of the society as well.

 

 

He didn't get quite as full a treatment as the Harrises did, but he was in there. But his last address really caught my attention: Tacoma, Washington. That is literally fifteen minutes from my house! I suddenly had to know more about him.

 

I already knew David was born about 1828 in New Hampshire, and had moved to Montana in the 1850s or 60s, where he met and married Emma. They had five children together - Cyrena, Maud, Benjamin, Lucinda, and David. My previous research on him had stopped about 1880, when his family was still in Montana. I had no info on their having lived in Washington state. Some quick digging showed me they lived in Pierce County (which includes Tacoma) in 1889, then moved to Chehalis County (later Grays Harbor County) by 1894. In the 1900 census, David was living with his daughter Cyrena "Rena" Bell and her three kids.

 

I find it very interesting that David had lived on opposite ends of the country in an age where crossing the country was not an easy thing to do at all. The transcontinental railroad wasn't completed until 1869, years after he was already in Montana. How did he get there? What drove him to leave the Northeast, and why pick Montana of all places? What drove him to leave Montana and go even further west? These are probably questions I'll never have answers to, but it helps me see him and his family as real, 3-dimensional people.

 

Finding information about this family in and after 1900 was complicated by conflicting information. In the 1900 census, David was listed as a widower, suggesting that Emma had died between the 1894 and 1900 censuses. However, David's obituary from 1901 says he was survived by "a wife and two children at Los Angeles, Cal., a daughter, Mrs. BELL, at Elma, and a son at Westport". Did David and Emma separate? Why would his obituary list Emma as his wife, and the census say she had died? I have no answer to that so far. I found a listing for "Pattee, Emma (wid David)" in the 1901 Los Angeles city directory that seems to indicate she was alive when he died. As for the kids mentioned in the obituary, the 1900 census shows their children David A. Pattee and Lulu (Lucinda/Luda) Pattee as roomers with a Bowman family in Los Angeles. That would mean the son in Westport would be Benjamin, though I can't find any records on him after 1894.

 

I kept searching, and could find no death record for Emma. Benjamin and Maud disappear after 1880 and 1894 respectively. I did find more information on Rena though. In 1900, Rena was a 33-year-old double widow; her first husband William John Woods died between 1892-1895, and her second husband James Bell died between 1895 and 1900. That kind of loss must have been very painful for her and her children. She remarried in June 1901 to Edwin/Edward Hunter, just three months before her father passed away (which makes the obituary more confusing, as she should have been listed as Mrs. Hunter, not Mrs. Bell). The 1910 census lists her children with their fathers' surnames of Woods and Bell, which both helped me verify that I had the right family, and made me wonder why she never changed them. That census also shows that she bore four children, three of whom were living. I can't find any record of the fourth child, and with three husbands in two states, it won't be easy to find him/her. Rena and Edward were married for 19 years, until Edward died in 1920 just five months after the census taker enumerated them in Aberdeen, Washington. It made my heart ache for this poor woman, who had now buried her third husband, a child, and her father. She remained single until her own death in 1943 in Seattle. She's buried in Seattle, about 30 miles north of here.

 

Once again, a "quick search" to find one record on someone snowballed into a lot more research on a hitherto unexplored branch of my tree. I'm glad I found Rena's story, and feel so bad that she had to endure so much loss. Her story is sad, but that makes it worth remembering. Hopefully her descendants know something of what she endured in raising her family. It makes me appreciate the time I get with my wife kids, and makes me want to make better use of the time I have with them. I think I'll take a trip sometime up to Rena's grave, to pay my respects to this cousin of mine who endured so much.

Tombstone Tuesday - Another Brennan family tragedy

As I was wrapping up my post about Frances Alvira Brennan yesterday, I went looking for a little more information on Frances' parents and siblings. I found that her father, David D. Brennan, was a World War I veteran, having served as a medical officer in France from 1918-1919. I also found that he and his wife Clara Bergstad had several more children besides Ellen, Betty, and Frances. There were also Thelma, Violet Mae, Daniel, and Ida. Crazy that out of seven total children, only one was a boy.



Violet Mae Brennan memorial, Findagrave.com

David died in 1968, and was buried in Belfield Lutheran Cemetery in Belfield, North Dakota. I searched Findagrave.com to see if any other Brennans were buried there, and found David's wife Clara and daughter Violet. Violet's record stuck out because she was only 20 at the time of her death in 1954. I thought there had to be a story there, so I went looking. I soon found her death record, but from an unusual place - Washington state. How did she die in Washington when the rest of her family was in North Dakota?

I figured the best way to find out the rest of the story (if it could be found) would be in digitized newspapers, so I hit up Newspaper Archive (which I have a free subscription to thanks to my local library). I soon found what I was looking for: a death announcement from November 9, 1954.

 

 

The article said Violet (who was apparently living in Washington state at the time) fell out of a vehicle being driven by a Glenn Lamb, and that Lamb was subsequently charged with negligent homicide. That phrase really jumped out - negligent homicide. Glenn wasn't charged with outright murder, but it wasn't manslaughter either. The car was moving at 30-40 miles an hour when she "fell out". I thought there had to have been more going on, so I kept searching. Soon I found another article from a Spokane newspaper dated November 8, the day Violet died. It gave a little more information.

 

Spokane Daily Chronicle article about Violet's death

The additional information in this article was this - that Glenn Lamb and Violet Brennan had (according to an eyewitness) been having an argument and Violet had fallen out of the car during the argument. I don't know anyone who was sitting on the front porch of a café (like the eyewitness was) and watching cars go by (which he must have been) could have known there was an argument between two people in a car going 30-40 miles an hour, unless there was something very obvious about that argument. And for Violet to "fall out" of the car during an argument suggests that, unless something really unusual was going on, she fell out because of something the driver did - maybe a punch, slap, push, or wild swerve? At any rate, it seems that things got out of control, and as a result, Violet lost her life. 

 

It was really heartbreaking to discover a second tragedy to hit David and Clara's family (third if you count the house fire and Frances' death as separate). I wonder how they coped with the losses. I'm also curious to find out what happened to Glenn Lamb, and see whether he was convicted on the charges of negligent homicide. Maybe on my next trip out to Spokane I'll head up to the Pend Oreille county courthouse and see if I can find out. I'd kind of like to know what happened to the rest of the Brennan kids, just to see if any of them had a happy ending. I sure hope they did.



Family History Adventures with Ash and Leah

I've known for several years that my 3rd-great-grandparents, Paul Groff and Susana (Garlinghouse) Groff were buried not too far from where I live, in Thurston County, Washington. For a long time, I was content to have pictures of their graves that I found on Findagrave.com. But earlier this week, I had an idea - I could take my family down to visit their graves, and on the way down, tell them Paul and Susana's story, to make finding their graves more meaningful. This weekend seemed the perfect time to do it - I wasn't busy, my wife had no plans, and the weather was supposed to be nice and sunny (a rare thing for western Washington in February). I told my wife of my plans, and she was fully supportive. It was gonna be great!

And then, life happened.

My wife got sick Friday night, and by Saturday morning, she was feeling no better. But she was still supportive of me taking the older kids on the adventure, as she called it. I felt bad she had to miss out, but I thought the three of us could still have a good experience, so after a quick stop at McDonald's for lunch, we were off.

I didn't tell the kids where we were going, and they were happy just to be going somewhere. I put on their music CD (a kids' music group called the Not-Its) until we were about 20 minutes away, when I told them I was going to tell them a story. I think it helped that I told them ahead of time that I'd play their music for part of the trip, and tell them a story for the rest of the trip down, so they knew it was coming.

I told them the story I was going to tell them was all true. It was about a man named Paul who was born in New York. He had a mom named Hannah, a little brother named Isaac, and a sister whose name I didn't know. He grew up and worked as a mason, making bricks and building bridges and buildings with them. He joined the Army and went all over the place - Mexico, Missouri, lots of far away places. While he was gone, his mom got sick and his little brother broke his leg. His mom wanted him to come home, but he couldn't because he was in the Army. So she wrote to the President of the United States asking him to let her son come home. But the President said no. So Paul stayed with the Army until he was allowed to go home.

When he went home, he took care of his mom and brother, and eventually he married a girl named Charlotte. They had a little girl named Sophronia, and everything seemed to be going well. But then Charlotte got sick and then died. He needed someone to take care of Sophronia while he went out and worked on his farm, so he married again. His second wife was a girl named Susana, and they had eight more kids (they actually had 10, I couldn't remember the actual number). Their kids all grew up and got married and moved away. Paul wanted to live near one of his kids, so he and Susana packed up and moved out to Washington to live near his first daughter Sophronia. Soon after they got to Washington, Paul's wife Susana got sick and died. So Paul lived with Sophronia and her family until he died in 1912.

Once I finished relating Paul's story (and they listened much better than I thought they would) I told them that Paul had a daughter named Mary, who had a daughter named Dora, who had a son named Charles, who had a daughter named Blossom. Then asked them if they knew anyone named Blossom. Leah said "Yeah, Grandma Blossom!" I said "that's right! This story was about Grandma Blossom's great-grandpa, Paul Groff!" The kids couldn't believe the story was about someone in their family. One of them asked me how I knew so much about Paul. I said "remember all those nights I spent doing genealogy? I was finding things that told me the stories of our family." They both said "ooooooh." It was a really cool moment.

Right as I finished the story, we got to the cemetery (talk about perfect timing!). As mentioned before, I had a picture of the graves thanks to Findagrave.com, so I had some idea of what to look for. The cemetery was a lot bigger than I thought it was going to be, so we ended up hiking around most of it in big circles for close to a half hour. I showed the kids the picture, and they were really helpful in finding stones that looked like it. After a while, with the cold wind blowing in our faces for so long, the kids were getting pretty worn out of tromping around looking for a grave we couldn't find, when suddenly I spotted it. Well, them. There were two of them, one for Paul, one for Susana, right next to each other. One thing we noticed right away, and which had made the graves harder to find was the lack of the tree/bush right behind the graves, as is shown in the Findagrave picture. All that's left now is a little stump, which you can see poking out from behind Paul's stone on the left below.

  

Paul's stone is still in really good condition. The writing was nice and legible, and the designs on the top and bottom were pretty easily seen. Susana's stone has not weathered as well. The picture on her Findagrave memorial shows a bit more of the wording than I could see on the grave now. I could still read "Susana, wife of Groff" (the P. was no longer visible) and "born" and "died" but the dates weren't really legible. The top of the stone looked like it broke off at the anchor and was glued back on. Glad it's still standing though. 

On our way out, Leah found a stone with the name Asher on it. We stopped, and found a whole family plot, with a man named Asher, and an apparent grandson right next to him named Asher as well. The kids got a kick out of seeing someone with the same name as my son. We looked around the plot, and found there were four or five generations of this family all right next to each other. We talked about how cool it will be on resurrection day to have this whole family all together there.  I've noticed that family plots are a pretty rare thing in my family, so it was really neat to see a family all together like that. 

We had a fun time, and the trip back home was over before we knew it. The only thing that could have made it better would have been my wife and baby being there with us. We'll have to take another family history trip. Where should we go next time?