Wedding Wednesday - one bride, two husbands, and some twisted branches in the family tree

Just a quick but interesting thing I discovered/rediscovered this week. In going through the files of my Wagner and connected families, I came across a census I had mislabeled. I had thought it was George Greenfield with his first wife Cala and their kids, Boyd, Clarence, Iva, and Charles. The fact that the husband's name was given as W O Greenfield didn't really register as a problem, as census takers do get things wrong sometimes, and George's middle name was Oliver, so I figured the census taker had just gotten the first initial wrong. However, I noticed in going through the census records for George that he had a brother named William, and I found in my notes that Cala had married William Greenfield at some point (didn't know for sure when, but it was before 1930). I had totally forgotten that my great-great-grandmother's second husband had a sister-in-law that at one point had been his wife! I haven't yet dug deep enough to know what became of all the kids, though I did find the three younger children, Boyd, Clarence and Iva, were living with Cala and William, along with a Charles Greenfield, born around June 1919, and I presume the child of the two of them. That would make Charles both the half-sibling and cousin of the other kids in the house, since their mother was his mother, and their father was his uncle. I wonder what that will mean for their kids' relationships?
One other thing that kind of complicated the Greenfield tree was the names of the boys in George and William's family. After going through the censuses I've collected so far on them - 1880 Federal, 1885 and 1887 Washington state censuses - there were three boys whose names got a bit confusing. It worked out like this:

1880 - George C. (3) and Oliver (1)
1885 WA - Charles (8), George (6), and C. (2)
1887 WA - C.G. (10), George (8), and Charles (4)

So between the three boys, there are two Georges, two Charles', and an Oliver. How in the world did the boys know who was being called, when each of them shared one name with another brother? The oldest and youngest of the three were likely named for their father, Charles Greenfield, but I don't know why they felt two sons also deserved the name George. Just one of those unexpected quirks that makes unraveling our family history that much more interesting and intriguing, and at times, head-scratchingly odd.

Marriage Monday - Samuel Joseph and Juliana Lorentz

I got the civil record for Sam Joseph's marriage to Juliana Lorentz! It came a while ago, but I've been too swamped to blog about until now. But this record definitely identifies the groom as my great-great-grandfather, Samuel Joseph, son of Ludwig Joseph and Justine (Witt) Joseph. His marital status is widower, which he had been for four years by that point, his age puts him born about 1865, and religion is Lutheran. It all fits. The most interesting bit of information was his residence, which was listed as S22 T18 R12 in - Manitoba! This was supposedly four years after his move to Montana. When I saw that residence, I remembered that the Tracks of Time book I picked up on eBay had some undated maps of several townships in the Glenella, Manitoba area. I looked them up, and there actually is a map of S22 T18 R12 there! I looked through the map, and found a plot of land owned by none other than Gottlieb Joseph, Sam's brother. Kinda makes me wonder if Sam really lived there, or if he just crashed there to get married. Particularly because his bride gives the same address.
As for Juliana, the marriage record confirms that she was a widow, so that means Lorentz wasn't her maiden name. It also says her father, Gottlieb Kublick, was deceased, though it gives no information as to where she or her parents were born. I was kind of hoping for birth information to help me locate Juliana in other records, so I guess I'll have to keep searching. I probably just need to sit down and look up what kind of records exist for Manitoba, aside from the census and vital records I already know about.
One avenue I still need to pursue is ordering the death record for Juliana. I'm pretty sure it's her, as the last name is Lorntz-Joseph (no given name listed), born about 1852 (compared to 1859 as given in the marriage records for Juliana), and decedent is female. If that document doesn't pan out, I'm gonna have to do a lot more digging to find more on Juliana.
All in all, the civil copy of the marriage record was worth what I spent - it confirms all the details of the church's version, and gives me the added info regarding Juliana's widowhood (if that's a word). I'll post a follow-up with what info the death record has, and what I think it means for my future research.

Just when you think you know someone...

I finished going through all the church records I got from Christ Lutheran Church in Manitoba, and boy, what an education! Most of the records were for Gottlieb Joseph's family, as they seemed to stay closest to the church, and for the longest length of time. I did get to see some of my direct ancestors in the records, though, and that was really neat to see. Here's some of what I found:

My great-grandmother Augusta was a witness for her older sister Olga's wedding to Gustav Hoeft (also spelled Haft, Heft, and Hoft) at her wedding in 1906.
Of the five children in the family, only Augusta and her sister Lydia were confirmed in the church. Augusta was confirmed in 1906, just a few months after her arrival in Canada, and Lydia in 1907.
Augusta was a witness at the marriage of her cousin Olga Joseph (yes, same exact name as her sister) to Philipp Oswald in 1908.
Also in 1908, my great-great-grandfather, Samuel Joseph, was named godfather to his nephew, Helmut Joseph (the only time Samuel appeared in a record that didn't directly involve him).
Augusta was also godmother to her cousin, Wilhelmina Magdalena Liona Siegel, when her cousin was baptized in 1912. That suggests that she stayed in contact with her family up there, maybe even made some trips.

It was fascinating for me to see these records. The other records I've found of my great-grandmother - censuses, passenger lists, even her marriage records - seemed more of a "here I am" stamp, showing me her location at one point in time. These chuch records just bring her to life for me. They show her being involved in a church community, staying interested and involved in important events in her family's lives. It's also interesting that her siblings (with the exception of Lydia's confirmation and Olga's wedding) are totally absent from all of the church records. I know Augusta's brother Elmer ended up marrying an Irish Catholic girl named Julia Barrett, and her sister Helena married Jack Walsh, who was also Catholic. The aforementioned Olga Joseph (Augusta's sister, not cousin) married Gustav Hoeft, who came from an active Lutheran family, and a couple of their children were baptized into the Lutheran church. But after Gus died in 1949, she married Michael McKeown, an Irish Catholic (notice a trend here?). Lydia married Jacob Reitnauer, an active Lutheran German, and stayed Lutheran once they moved to South Dakota (per the South Dakota state censuses I've found so far). And Augusta's first husband was Charles Steffan, who might have been Lutheran as well; I don't know for sure if he was, but I do know they were married in St. Mark's Lutheran Church in Butte. It's just intriguing to see a trend like that - those who were in the church records stayed active, and those who weren't, didn't.

But as for the title of the post, it's more in reference to a couple of things that I've come across recently. One is a church record that my great-great-grandfather, Samuel Joseph, appears in. I knew that his first wife, Pauline, died 6 January 1909, and that he moved with his five kids to Anaconda, Montana, in April that same year. So far as I knew, he lived with his kids until they all married off, and then with one or the other of them after they'd all gotten married until he died in 1955. However, in going through the church records, I found one that pointed to a chapter of Sam's life none of us knew about - his second marriage.

According to the marriage record Sam married a woman named Juliana Lorentz, daughter of Gottlieb Kublick and Christine (nee Klein). Her name is interesting because it suggests that this wasn't her first marriage either, and because Sam's brother Ludwig/Louis married Seraphina Lorenz, who could have been a relative. I plan on following up on this, once I get the marriage certificate for Sam and Juliana (which I ordered a couple weeks ago, and should be getting in the mail any day now). I'll need to order the marriage certificate for Louis and Seraphina as well, but first I want to find out more about this mystery wife.

Since I discovered the existence of this second marriage, I've tried to find more about Juliana, but she doesn't appear in the 1911 or 1916 Canadian censuses, and a general search of Ancestry.ca turned up nothing. Nor could I find her in the 1930 Montana census where Sam is living with his daughter Augusta, son-in-law Frederic Gibson, and grandson (and my grandfather) Frederick. In that census Sam's marital status is widowed, which I'd always taken to be a reference to Pauline, his first wife. Now it might actually be referring to Juliana.

The other interesting tidbit from the marriage record is that (if I am reading the German correctly) it says that Sam was living in Waldersee at the time of his marriage, which was 26 December 1913. Did Sam move to the States, then move back to Canada? It might help explain why I can't find him in the 1920 census. But neither can I find him in the 1916 Canadian census. The time between 1913 and 1930 is kind of a "lost period" for Sam. I'll have to do more digging to see what happened to him during this period. But for now, I'm still getting over the shock of the second marriage. I wonder what other surprises I'll find?

Turns out, I've already found a couple! We had a family reunion for my grandma Blossom's Wagner family a couple weeks ago, and on the way to the reunion, we stopped at my grandparents' house for breakfast. While we were there, my dad thought it'd be a good idea to bring the Wagner pedigree chart we printed a few years ago, just in case the chance to talk genealogy ever came up (it never did, sadly). While looking for it, I came across a notebook on the Josephs my mom had put together for my grandpa, which everyone had forgotten about. In it were mostly just some pedigree and descendancy charts (which I've filled out quite a bit more in the 11 years since they were created), but towards the back were some pictures I'd never seen before. One of them was a photo of Sam Joseph and four of his kids. Papa Fred recognized three of them, but didn't know the fourth (I think it's Lydia, the daughter who married  Jacob Reitnauer). If I'm right, then those in the photo are  (l-r, b-f) Augusta, Lydia, Helena, Sam, and Elmer Joseph. The lower right corner of the matte board is stamped Hunter, which  I'm assuming is the photography studio that took the photo. It has Anaconda, Montana stamped underneath it, so that would date the photo to sometime around 1909-1910 (between when they moved to Anaconda and when Augusta got married to Charles Steffan). There's a handwritten note on the back that says "Mrs. Olga Haft" so I think they took the photo and gave it to Olga (who isn't in the picture). I just couldn't believe there was another photo of Sam and the kids. I was (and still am) ecstatic. It gives me hope that there might be other pictures floating around out there.

The last thing I found out about was another picture in the same notebook on the Josephs, which led to the other reason for the title of this post. There was a picture of four people, one of which I recognized right off to be my great-grandfather, Fred Gibson Sr. On the back someone had written "Freddie, Vera, Emma & Fred  Deer Lodge, Mont 1938." I asked my grandpa about it, and he said it was him, his dad, his dad's second wife Emma, and his step-sister Vera. I about choked when he said step-sister! I had no idea he even had a stepsister! I never thought to check if Emma had any children from her previous marriage (I can't remember who she was married to, I'll have to follow up on that). I've never heard anyone mention Vera before, so I'll see if I can get more info on her. But to think of my grandpa having a step-sister is just mind-boggling. He's always been an only child in my mind, so this really shakes things up a lot.

In short, it's been a very eventful, very paradigm-shifting couple of weeks. My grandparents are in town today, so hopefully I'll be able to mine a few more details about some of these new facts.

Treasure Chest Thursday - Finally into the church records!

After several months, I've finally waded through all the stuff in my "Stuff to file" folder! Now I'm into the church records I ordered from Christ Lutheran Church in Manitoba, Canada. I've only read through six of the 48 so far, but I ran across one that just tugged at the heartstrings a bit. My great-great-grandfather, Samuel Joseph, came from a family of seven children, of which he was the second-oldest. Some (most? I still haven't done the timeline yet) of his family got to Manitoba before he did, in late 1905, including his older brother Gottlieb and his family, and his parents Ludwig and Justine (Witt) Joseph. But the record I reviewed today was the death record for Samuel's youngest brother, Michael, who died at age 21 on 21 April 1905. Michael's death occurred just six months before Samuel and his family landed in Quebec, so I wonder if they even knew of the death before arriving in Manitoba. That would be one of the worst things to have happen - to travel thousands of miles to be with your family, only to find out your littlest brother died just months before you got there.

I'm not sure how they used this, but there's a scripture noted in the death record (it's a church record, after all). The verse is 2 Samuel 1:26, which reads: "I am distressed for thee, my brother Jonathan: very pleasant hast thou been unto me: thy love to me was wonderful, passing the love of women." The verse is very fitting, and shows the love the family members had for each other. I can't imagine Ludwig and Justine's heartbreak at losing a son just before their family would have been reunited after many years apart.

Divorce in the Joseph family

I've got two interesting tales of divorce to chronicle today - one involving stolen fruit, and one that was part of an epidemic. First up, the fruit. My first cousin three times removed, Louise Leistiko, was born in Montana around 1912. I recently found a marriage license for her at FamilySearch, stating that she married a man named Arthur Popham, another native Montanan a few years older than she was, on 16 Feb 1929 . I also found another marriage license, linking her to Harold Dunville, dated just nine months after her marriage to Arthur, while also stating that she had not been previously married. This caught my attention - either there was a case of mistaken identity on my part, or there was a story here that would explain this situation. I figured newspapers would be my best source for quickly answering the question, so I went looking for more information on NewspaperArchive.com. A few clicks later and they had answered my questions - there was indeed a story!

The first article I found showed me what probably led to the breakup of Louise and Arthur. In May 1929, while the two were on a trip to Saint Maries, Idaho with a friend named Louis Helm, something happened, I'm not sure exactly what, that caused the three of them to be arrested for stealing 50 bushels of fruit. My city-based upbringing leaves me completely ignorant of what exactly a bushel is in terms of size or weight. Wikipedia helped out greatly the last time I had a question like this, so I went back to them. Wikipedia's definition was one bushel equals four pecks. Ok, what's a peck? 8.81 litres or 297 fl. oz, or apparently two of those white paper bags of apples with the handles on them. All right, so eight of those white bags is one bushel, and Arthur and company were arrested for stealing 50 bushels? That's a LOT of fruit, so there's no way this was a case of walking away from a farm with an extra apple in his pocket. Again, I don't have all the details of who did what, but obviously something happened. The article covering the incident also mentioned that Arthur was an "old offender." He'd apparently already done time for grand larceny and forgery, and just finished a parole term when the fruit incident happened.

The next article I found seemed to indicate Louise and Louis (the friend) were not found guilty. It was from July 1929, so it was two months after the fruit incident and five months after the wedding. It stated Louise was then filing for divorce "on the grounds that her husband was convicted of a felony on charges of grand larceny in May and that he was given a five-year term in the state penitentiary." Shortly afterward, the divorce was granted, and Louise was ok to resume using her maiden name of Leistiko. Within a couple months of the divorce, she married Harold Dunville and (to my knowledge) lived happily ever after. That's a lot to have gone through in just one year's time!
The second tale of divorce comes from the life of John Levick, the second husband of my second-great-grandaunt (and Louise's mother), Justine "Tina" (Joseph) Leistiko. Years before he married Tina, John married his first wife, Natly "Nettie" Moliniak (no relation to Megan Smolenyak, I already checked). I had been told previously that Nettie had died about a year after marrying John (sometime around 1903), but hadn't found any corresponding records confirming the story. I went on FamilySearch and found Nettie and John's marriage record, confirming they were married on 11 Aug 1902. However, I found another marriage for John dated 26 Apr 1904, less than two years later. This marriage was to Mary Zylick, a name I'd not heard before, and someone had written on the license that John Levick had been married before but had been divorced. Obviously both stories - the death and the divorce - couldn't be true, so I went back to NewspaperArchive.com and did some more digging. A few minutes later, I'd found several articles about John and Nettie's divorce proceedings. The divorce was filed sometime around Oct-Nov 1903 (after the death date I'd been given for Nettie, so that showed me the death info was incorrect), and was being heard by Judge Napton of the local court. One article even stated that John was not considered likely to attend the hearing, meaning Nettie would just need to bring her proofs and she'd be free and clear. John must have changed his mind, or the reporter was just misinformed, as the case did continue through December, when Judge Napton postponed judgment on it indefinitely.

You're probably wondering by now how this divorce was part of an epidemic. John and Nettie's divorce was apparently one of many lawsuits then going on in the area. The article that announced the finalization of the divorce listed many other rulings and status updates of other cases, and the article was titled "LEGAL EPIDEMIC HERE." Many other people were suing for various things (there was even another lawsuit of John Levick against Nettie and a guy named George B. Winston, though I don't know anything about that case yet). But eventually, in January 1904, the judge ruled them divorced and told them "to go on their way rejoicing. I'm not sure that's what I'd tell a divorcing couple, but maybe they were happy to have their marriage ended by that point. At any rate, it freed John up to marry Mary Zylick in April, three months after his divorce from Nettie was finalized.
The two cases are interesting to me not because they involve divorce, which seems to have been a fairly common occurrence in Montana even then. It's interesting because of the shortness of the two marriages - one lasted a few months, the other a year and a half; also because of the unusual circumstances Arthur and Louise's divorce - theirs is the only marriage I know of that ended because of fruit theft. As for John and Nettie, I wonder if they got caught up in the "legal epidemic" or just happened to drift apart at the same time all those other lawsuits were going on. I don't know that there's any way to ever know, but it's intriguing to think about.

More interesting connections

My grandmother, Sally Crawford, has some deep Montana roots. She's descended from Thomas W. Harris, one of the first white settlers of western Montana, who came to Montana in the 1850s. Sally married Jim Crawford back in 1993, and started researching his genealogy soon thereafter. She discovered that among his ancestors were the Colcords, with his most recent Colcord ancestor being his great-grandmother Mary Eleanor Colcord, daughter of Thomas Colcord and Eleanor Davis.

I mention these details because tonight I discovered that my grandmother's wedding was not the first Harris-Colcord wedding. It turns out, George Harris, brother of my grandmother's grandfather Frank Harris, married Leona Colcord, daughter of John Colcord and Effie Williams, in 1911. Leona is Jim's first cousin twice removed (ie Jim's grandmother Eleanor Knapp was Leona's first cousin). Which makes the children of this marriage (there were two that I know of Dorothy and Ralph Harris) both a first cousin once removed to Sally, and a second cousin once removed to Jim. So while Sally and Jim aren't directly related by blood, they do share some cousins. Pretty interesting, no?

A quick funny

I saw this and thought I had to post it. I've been going through Montana marriage licenses like nobody's business (it still amazes me just how many relatives of mine lived their whole lives, or at least a good portion of them, in Montana). The form that was filed on the state level for the marriage certificate requires the officiating party to state where the marriage took place - usually just the city and county, though sometimes the person filling out the form has listed the address of the building or residence where the marriage was performed. However, in looking at my great-great-granduncle James Harris' wedding to Florence Irene Thomas on 21 Sep 1927, the officiator wrote something I've never seen in this field - the time. Where most officiators wrote the name of the city the marriage was performed in, J.D. Wasson, a minister, wrote 9 o'clock P.M.

I think that's very interesting, mostly because I don't know anyone personally who got married that late at night. (The reception for my own wedding was well underway by then). To me, it's just one more example that you really can't take anything for granted as to what your ancestors did and when - not even the time of day for a wedding.