Why do some traditions die out?

In going through my stack of stuff to file, I came across a very humorous story (though I didn't realize that's what it was at first). My great-grandfather Jim Harris had six older brothers (though one died as an infant) and though I have a few census and other records on them and their families, I don't really know too much about them yet. Mostly they're one branch of the family I still have yet to do real research on.

However, today I found a newspaper article about the second-oldest son in the family, William Harris, and his marriage to his second wife, Mary Mazza. The article begins with the normal details - they were married in the rectory of a Catholic church, in a ceremony officiated by Father John P. O'Malley (a good Irish Catholic name if I've heard one). It even gives some details on the bride's gown.

The funny part is what happened after the honeymoon was over. After spending a few days in Butte, they came home to "a charivari ride through the business section of the city on an improvised sulkey made on the back springs of a cart hitched to an automobile, after which a reception was given at their new home in
Parker's addition by their friends."

European sulkies, courtesy of Wikipedia



Being the modern city boy that I am, I had no idea what a "charivari ride" or "sulkey" were. A quick trip to dictionary.com and Wikipedia helped fill me in though. According to dictionary.com, a charivari, or shivaree/chivaree, is a "discordant mock serenade to newlyweds, made with pans, kettles, etc." And Wikipedia had a really good article showing just what a sulky is (the newspaper mispelled it apparently). It's a little carriage usually pulled by a horse, often in races, having only a seat and wheels, but no body.

So, if you reread the article, it sounds like William and Mary came back from their honeymoon, and sat on a little mini-carriage hooked up to a 1930s car, and were pulled through the business district of Philipsburg, while all their friends and neighbors followed banging on pots and pans and singing loudly and purposefully out-of-tune. Which leads me to my question - how do traditions like this ever die out? I think it's an absolutely hilarious way to welcome back a newly-married couple, and would love to be in on a revival of the tradition should one come about. It just goes to show you - people back then sure knew how to have a good time.

Wisdom Wednesday - What I learned about and from Christ Hoffman



Mary and Christ Hoffman

Christ Hoffman (b.1861 in Germany to Gottlieb Hoffman and Kunijnunda Buchner) was the second husband of my great-great-grandmother, Mary Sitzman. I first started learning about him in going through my Grandma Blossom's photo albums, as Grandma Blossom's mother, Rosie Wagner (one of Mary Sitzman's daughters) had taken a lot of pictures of Christ and Mary. Before he was married to my great-great-grandmother, however, he was married to a girl named Annie Clausen, b. abt 1858 in Germany. I think they married in Nebraska, as that's where their oldest surviving child, Christ Hoffman Jr., was born in 1891. I say oldest surviving, because in the little research I've done on the family so far, I've found that of their seven children together, only three lived to adulthood. Two children, whose names I have not yet found, died before 1900. Another child, August, born around 1894, died somewhere between 1900 and 1910. The only death I've found much information on was little Frederick, who died at the age of 2 years and 7 months. His passing was mentioned in a newspaper article in the Anaconda Standard in 1905, which also stated the funeral would be held at the family home. A really touching thank you from Christ and Annie appeared in the Standard a few days later, which said : "We desire to express our heartfelt thanks to our friends and neighbors for their kindness during the illness and death of our beloved son. We also wish to thank our friends for the many floral offerings.
Mr. and Mrs. CHRIST HOFFMAN".
I think it says a lot about Christ and Annie to have responded so quickly to thank their friends and neighbors, even in the midst of their grief.

Christ was also very successful at raising chickens. He won several awards for his Barred Plymouth Rocks and single-comb white Leghorns at the Montana state fair in 1909. He used those wins to his advantage the next year when trying to sell the eggs from his "prize-winners" in the local paper. In another ad he placed in 1912, Christ said he was willing to trade two very large St. Bernard dogs for chickens - a trade which would seem a hefty loss on the part of the dog owner to me, but then, I don't know chickens like Christ did.

One of the most fascinating things I came across was an ad he placed tyring to sell an egg incubator. The model he listed was a 240 X Cypher's Incubator. I got curious as to what that would have looked like, so I did a Google search. I didn't find the exact model, but I did find some pictures from a vintage Cypher's catalog someone was trying to sell online, which included pictures of several other models of Cypher's incubators. The photo at left shows the 360- and 440-egg capacity incubators, so I'm guessing the "240 X" in the model name meant it was a 240-egg capacity incubator. That's a lot of eggs!!

Christ married my great-great-grandmother on 1 July 1919, and they stayed married until his death in 1942 at the age of 80. He had a very interesting life, and I look forward to learning more and more about him and his descendants.

Things I've Learned Lately

Sorry for the absence the last two weeks, I've been trying to get caught up on my pile of stuff. I've made a LOT of progress in the last week, having spent 5 hours at the Heritage Quest Research Library last Saturday just going full tilt at cataloging, documenting, and filing. It was awesome! I finally made it through the first batch of marriage records I'd downloaded, as well as the pile of Craddock documents from my grandma's cousin Carol, the Pushard documents I found and blogged about back in February, and some other odds and ends that I've been collecting. Here's a couple of things I've learned going through these documents:

1. My uncle Ralph Mahlen (who passed away a few years ago) came from a BIG family. He came from a family of six kids, four boys and two girls, none of which I can recall ever meeting. His dad, Joel Mahlen, came from a bigger family of seven girls and four boys. I can't imagine how many grandchildren and great-grandchildren Joel's parents had!

2. I got my first look at a court record. It was a write-up of a divorce hearing back in the 50s. Apparently the husband didn't even come to court, and was divorced in absentia, with his wife getting full custody of their kids. What surprised me was the fact that the court order gave him visitation rights, as long as the visits were done at reasonable times, and he was "sober and well behaved." Interesting language.

3. Ruth Young, second wife of my great-grandfather James Harris, had another sister. I had found marriage records for Annabelle Young, and seen a sister named Ada in the 1930 census, born around the same time. My first thought was that these were the same girl. But after going through the marriage records more closely, and documenting an obituary for Ruth's third husband, Rudolph McCaslin, I found they were different people. The key was the obituary. It listed sisters-in-law for Rudolph named Mrs. R.L. Storm and Mrs. John [Joseph] Sterle. I didn't know who R.L. Storm was, but a little research led me to find out it was Ada, with Mrs. Sterle being Annabelle.

4. Loring Pushard, great-great-grandfather of my cousin Jimmy, enlisted in the Union Army during the Civil War at the ripe-old age of 17 as a private on 23 January 1862. He was discharged two years and two days later, on 25 January 1864, as a Corporal, at the age of 19. I don't know much yet about how the army was organized back then, or the distance in rank between a Private and a Corporal, but I do think it's very impressive that a 17-year-old kids could advance to a Corporal in two years. Especially given what most 17-year-olds do with their time these days. He got married about three years after leaving the Army, worked as a piano maker, and lived to be 62 years old. Just an average man, but such an interesting average man. It makes me wish he was a closer relative.

It still amazes me how much of peoples' lives we're able to reconstruct with a few documents. Some people, like Loring Pushard, just seem to come together so easily. Some, like my great-great-grandma Lena, you have to work and work and dig up every scrap just to try and piece the basic picture together. No two stories are even close to the same.

Family coincidences

I've been making a little progress on my pile of stuff to file this week. (I'd make more if I could stop myself from going after more while I'm supposed to be working on what I have, but you and I both know that's not gonna happen). While I was working through some marriage licenses, I noticed I didn't have a lot of background on one spouse of my great-grandmother's sister Grace Craddock, a guy named Edward Cote. I'd found some newspaper articles on him and Grace, mostly about them visiting Ed's parent's for dinner over the weekend (imagine that, a weekend visit for dinner was considered news for the community!) but I didn't really have much on him beyond that, except for the marriage license for his first marriage, to Glenna Ruth Brown. The license said Ed was born in Alder, Montana, which led me to wonder whether his parents had married in Montana as well. After a few minutes, I found a marriage license for Ed's parents, Charles Cote and Nora Munster (and, interestingly enough, the marriage record Charles' sister Alice as well, as it was on the same page as Charles'). Charles's parents were listed as Odilon Cote and Frances Thiebault, and Charles was said to have been born in Butte, Montana. I thought a name like Odilon Cote would be easy enough to find, so I searched for his marriage record to Frances, and soon found it as well. I was now back to 1889! Odilon gave his birthplace as Canada, so I figured Odilon's parents, Desire Cote and J. Turgeon, were not likely to have married in Montana. I was pretty happy though, having gone back three generations from Ed Cote, I now knew a lot more about his family than I did just a couple hours before.

It was then that I noticed the names at the bottom of Odilon and Frances' marriage license. I didn't recognize the witnesses, Alex Martineau or Annie Theobald (though I still think Annie is probably a relative of Frances' somehow), but the officiating judge's name I did recognize - Caleb E. Irvine. A cousin of mine, Bob Fulkerson, has published portions of my (our) great-great-great-grandfather Thomas W. Harris' journal online, and in that journal, Thomas talks several times about Caleb Irvine. Caleb lived and worked with Thomas at Fort Owen, one of the earliest settlements in Montana, and later worked as a probate judge. But to see his name on a marriage license was just - very surprising. It kind of brought it home that Montana was a very small world, and seeing a connection between my Harris and Craddock families, even a bit remote like this one, was really a neat thing for me.

Then I found another interesting connection. Thinking I was done digging up info on the Cotes, I moved on to a marriage record from 1946 for my great-grandfather James Harris and his second wife, Ruth. Ruth gave her last name as Colesaric, but listed her parents as Holly Young and Frances (Knight) Cote. Another Cote! And with Ruth's last name obviously so different than her father's, and her mother's married name being different as well, that told me there were at least three marriages involved in these names:
Ruth Young married to someone surnamed Colesaric
Holly Young (formerly) married to Frances Knight
Frances (Knight) Young married to someone surnamed Cote

I took a crack at finding more marriage records (I'm telling you, this FamilySearch database on Montana marriages is a GOLDMINE) and soon found more than I bargained for. I discovered that Ruth was married several more times - her first marriage was in 1930 to Joe Barbieri. The marriage didn't last long, because in the 1937 Butte city directory she appears as Ruth McCaslin, wife of Rudolph McCaslin (Ruth McCaslin was actually the name my grandma Sally Crawford gave me for her). Rudolph passed away on 28 Jun 1941, leaving Ruth a widow, but not for long, as she marred Edward Colesaric on 27 Feb, 1943. I'd finally found the Colesaric marriage that was hinted at in Ruth's marriage to my great-grandfather. Her marriage to Edward Colesaric ended in divorce, according to the marriage license for her and James Harris, making James Harris her fourth husband.

Now that I'd solved the Colesaric mystery, I wanted to get some closure and figure out who the Cote was Ruth's mother Frances was married to. I went to find Ruth and her family in the 1930 census, and did so pretty quickly, living with her six siblings, her mother Frances, and - a new husband for the mother named George Duncan. I am still just taken aback with how many marriages this one family is a part of! I went back to FamilySearch, and found Frances Young and George Duncan were married in 1929, just in time for the 1930 census. Frances now had three marriages that I was aware of:
Holly Young, sometime around 1913, probably in Nebraska where most of their children were born
George Duncan, 18 Sep 1929
someone named Cote between 1930 and 1946

I went back to FamilySearch, and tried looking for Frances Duncan marrying a Cote, but with no luck. I then tried Frances Young, and hit paydirt. Frances Young married Orval Cote on 11 Aug 1938, after having divorced from George Duncan. Orval listed his parents as Joseph Cote and Florence Pearson, and said he was born in Butte. I confirmed this by finding him in the 1930 census (with his name spelled Orville), living with his parents Joseph and Florence and four siblings. All the children were born in Montana, so (you guessed it) I went looking for Joseph and Florence's marriage record.

In no time at all, I had it. Joseph and Florence were married on 5 June 1907 in Butte. But best of all - Joseph parents were listed, and I had my connection at last! Joseph's parents were none other than D. Cote and Julia Turgeon - the same Desire Cote and J. Turgeon listed for Odilon Cote, grandfather of Edward Cote. In short - Edward Cote and Orville Cote were first cousins once removed.

If your head is spinning after all this, don't worry. It took me a little while to sort it all out myself. Here's a simple graph of how it all works:

 The fun part comes in realizing that Ed Cote's second wife Grace Craddock was a sister of my great-grandmother Edna Craddock. Edna's first husband was James Harris, the 4th husband of Ruth Young, the daughter of Orville's wife Frances (Knight) (Young) Duncan, and that Ed's grandfather (and Orville's uncle) Odilon was the one whose marriage was performed by a close friend of James Harris' grandfather.

Clear as mud?

Are we Ire-man, or Germ-ish?

I've been working through a couple of the marriage licenses in my "stuff to file" folder, and I came across an interesting phenomenon. I was looking at the marriage for Hazel (Craddock) Heard and John W. Kaufman, and wanted to get a little background info on John for my database. He said was born about 1901, his parents were John E. Kaufman and Rose Warren, and that he was from Iola, Kansas. I went digging, and found his family in the 1910 census, living in Humboldt, Kansas. It turns out both cities are in Allen County, Kansas, and aren't very far apart. John and Rosa had a fairly young family at the time - they'd only been married about 8 years, and had for kids, ranging from 8 years to 10 months (John W. was the 2nd youngest, at 3, so he was a little off on his birthdate on his marriage license to Hazel).

What caught my eye about this family is the fact that John E. Kaufman's father was German, and his mother was from Pennsylvania, where there were a lot of Germans. Rosa (Warren) Kaufman's parents were both from Ireland. This combination of Irish and German appears several times in other places in my family tree:

Augusta Joseph (my great-grandmother, German) married John F. Gibson (my great-grandfather, whose parents and grandparents were all Irish)
Elmer Joseph (Augusta's only brother) married Julia Barrett (daughter of Irish immigrants)
Olga (Joseph) Haft (Augusta's oldest sister) married Michael McKeown (an Irish immigrant)
Helena Joseph (Augusta's youngest sister) married John "Jack" Walsh (son of Irish immigrants)

Maybe it was just the Joseph family, but it's interesting to me to see German immigrants (or their children) marrying Irish immigrants (or their children) so often. Was there something that they saw in each others' heritage that rang a bell? Was it just chance that they all happened to go for someone with that background? Once again, more research leads to more questions for more research. :)

You like me! You really like me!!

Ok, so that line's been used and reused ad nauseum, but it expresses how I felt when I got an award for my blog today!

I received the "One Lovely Blog" award from Joanne, author of the Keeper of the Records blog. This award was originally created by Sara at Works of Art by Sara. Her original award looks like this:



A great big THANK YOU to Joanne, and all the other readers of my blog. I sometimes feel I'm writing this solely for my own benefit, but it's great to know that others out there enjoy it too.
Sara says:

"Here are the rules that MUST be followed:

1. Add the logo to your blog.
2. Link to the person from whom you received this award
3. Nominate 7 or more blogs
4. Leave a message on their blog, letting them know they are "One Lovely Blog!"

As for nominations, I put forth the following (and not all genealogy-related):

Elyse at Elyse's Genealogy Blog
Casey at Perfectly Crazy
Natalia at Once in Lifetime Love
The Generations Project
Kate Klim at You Can't Help But Read It

That's all I can think of at the mo. Thanks for reading!

Treasure chest Thursday - a little bit more Beilstein history

This will be a short post (probably), as time is of the essence today. I finally started in on my pile of stuff to file, beginning with the marriage license for my great-great-grandmother Lena Beilstein's first marriage, to David Marion Briscoe. While I was looking at the license, I went through and noted the names of everyone mentioned - Lena and her parents, Jacob Beilstein and Amelia Wachter; David and his parents, Thomas Briscoe and Martha Ann Barney (spelled Barny in the license). I then saw that the witnesses were David Barney and Mrs. Susan Barney. Given David Briscoe's mother's maiden name of Barney, I figured they were probably relatives, and did a little digging. Before long, I found some records (Ancestral File, and some census records) that showed David Barney was the brother of Martha (Barney) Briscoe, and Susan was his wife. Isn't that what genealogy speakers/teachers always say - check the witnesses' names for relatives? Once again, they are right.

I was about to close the license, but thought I'd check to see if it was a minister that performed the marriage or a justice (just out of curiosity). The officiator turned out to be a "minister of the Gospel," who says he performed the marriage at his own residence. I found that pretty interesting, as I don't think I've ever seen that noted on a marriage license before. I then looked at the minister's name - Arthur Barney. It seemed a little too coincidental to have another Barney involved. I went back and found him in Ancestral File, which listed him as another brother to Martha and David. I also found him in the 1900 census living in Carbon county, Montana, where the marriage was performed, and his family members listed in the census matched those listed in Ancestral file. So not only was the marriage witnessed by family of the groom, the ceremony was performed by a minister who also happened to be the groom's uncle.

I still don't know anything about how Lena and David Briscoe met. But it's interesting that David's family was so involved in their wedding, especially since Lena's family was probably still in Nebraska at the time. It's also kind of sad, since she and David were only married for a couple years (she married her second husband, Clarence Johnson, in 1907). But it adds a little more dimension to the wedding, to think of at least some family there to celebrate. Maybe David Briscoe's immediate family was in attendance as well, as they lived in the same city. I wonder what they thought of this 19-year-old young man, marrying a 15-year-old girl who lived so far from the rest of her family. Maybe one day I'll find the answer.