The Butcher of Kansas City

This headline was too good to pass up for a Halloween post! My subject today is a follow on from the last post on the Barthelsons in New York City. As I noted then, I've been somewhat surprised at the number of people in the family that emigrated to the U.S. Not all of them stayed permanently, but since I started out knowing only about one or two, it's been quite a revelation. This line of inquiry was really instigated by a cousin's query. I'd been burrowing back through the records on Barthelsons, and as I did so I was recording what I found on ancestry.com (if you're interested, I think you can see what I've gathered: it's all under the Johnson Family tree, under the user name baeus2). Anyway, I then received an inquiry about one of the persons I'd recorded, Carl Victor Barthelson (b. 1849) that was mentioned in the last post. That query came from a direct descendant of Carl, Anne Meyer Nordström – so thanks to you, Anne!

The Carl Victor Barthelson in question was born in Västerås, Västmandland, in 1849, son of Per Barthelson and Kjerstin Persdotter. On 5 May 1872 he married Anna Christina Eriksson in Karlstad, a city in the province of Värmland (to the west of Västmanland). Together they had six children: ill-fated twins Anna Christina and Elin Maria (1872-1872), Victor Emanuel (1873?), Carl Johan (1875-?), Anna Viktoria (1877-1877) and Herman Mathias (1879-?). The question marks aren't meant to signify any great mystery, only that I haven't yet had the chance to follow up on those persons in the records. Carl Victor's profession is recorded as “slaktare,” Swedish for butcher or meat-cutter. I understand that this was the family business, and quite a number of Barthelsons have this as their profession in public documents. You may remember that when my great grandmother, Lottie, had her mother committed to the Brooklyn Home for the Aged, the document said that the mother's father was a butcher. Also that our poor lamented August Barthelson had been a well-to-do butcher in Sweden.

For reasons that are as yet unknown, in 1884 Carl Victor Barthelson left his wife and three children in Karlstad and emigrated to the U.S. As far as I know, he never returned. His wife, Anna, lived until 1922. Therein lies a tale, I'm sure. My focus in this posting, though, is was happened to Carl Victor in the States?

If you get on ancestry.com and search for that name, one of the early hits you'll find is a man named Carl Victor Barthelson, living in Kansas City, Missouri. Actually, the name varies a bit, but is still recognizable: Carl Victor, Karl Viktor, Charles V., Charles W. I won't bore you with all the permutations by which supposedly literate American recorders murdered the name Barthelson. Aside from the name itself, this gentleman is particularly attractive as a match for our Swedish emigre because he, too, was a butcher/meat cutter. I'll bet that there was a lot of work for that profession derived from the stockyards of Kansas City.

We're generally in good shape as far as the availability of records goes as well, because the state of Missouri has placed not only the data from their birth, death and marriage records online, but you can also download copies of the documents themselves! We can find, for example, a copy of the marriage license of Charles Barthelson, age 25, resident of Jackson Co., Missouri (= Kansas City) to Miss Emma Erickson, age 26, on 29 June, 1887. Charles/Karl/Carl appears in the KC city directories, beginning in 1886 and continuing uninterrupted until 1911. Barthelson is not such a common name, neither in the U.S. nor in Sweden. Combine that with the fact that Carl Victor in KC is also a butcher, the we have a match, right? Not so fast, my friend.

The glaring inconsistency – undoubtedly noted by the math fiends – is that the Carl Victor in Kansas City was claiming to be substantially younger than the Carl Victor that left Sweden. The latter was born in 1849; the former – both on the basis of his marriage license as well as the censuses of 1900 and 1910 – was born around 1862, a difference of 13 years plus or minus. Now I can understand hedging your age (Jack Benny comes to mind!), but could you really pull off saying that you're 13 years younger than you actually are? Although I might say no, it's impossible to definitively say one way or the other.

As a result of this impasse, I just didn't know what to make of the Kansas City records. But I think I may have broken through the logjam. The break came when I was trying to write an earlier blog post about my 2nd great grandmother, Catharina Charlotta Barthelson. Her father had died and mother remarried, and I was having a bit of trouble trying to track her whereabouts after her father's death. I found her, eventually, in 1861 living in Västerås along with the focal point of this post, her brother Carl Victor. But then I noticed a couple of things in that record. First, above Carl Victor's name was the annotation “Fosterbarnet herren” (I think I've got that right), indicating that the names below were the foster children of those listed above. And above that, as head of the previous family, was a name I didn't recognize: Lars Persson Bartelsson. That surname was too close to be just a coincidence, don't you think?

A couple days of digging revealed that Lars was born the illegitimate son of Catharina's father Per, hence the Persson. I'm not sure how or if he was ever legitimized – yet another trail to follow – but it is clear that he was Catharina's uncle. Not only that, but as you can see in the record, one of the sons of Lars Persson Bartelsson was named Carl Victor Bartelsson. More than that, this Carl Victor was born on 4 September, 1862, and therefore was exactly the same age as the butcher in Kansas City. As with so many others in the family, Carl's father, Lars, was a butcher. Lars died young, a victim of alcoholism and delerium tremors. I haven't seen any record of this Carl being classified as a butcher in the Swedish records, though. He emigrated at the age of 19, unmarried, and destination unspecified other than North America.

What happened to the Carl Victor of Kansas City? Carl and Emma had two children (that I know of), a daughter Hildur born in 1888, and a son Harold born in 1897. Emma was committed to a state hospital in 1906, and she remained a ward of the state until her death of a stroke in 1920. As I noted earlier, Carl Victor is in the KC directories until 1911. A helpful contributor to ancestry from that area posted a transcription of the short notice from the Kansas City when he died at the age of 50 in 1912. Daughter Hildur never married. She was a music teacher in Kansas City until her death in 1942.

Harold served in the U.S. Army in World War I, in 1919 achieving the rank of Corporal, Company H, 63rd Infantry. He eventually settled down in the Bay Area of California, where he married Helen Joyce Holloway in 1921. Joyce was a prominent pianist, and the two met during a visit she made to an army camp where Harold was stationed. The couple divorced sometime between 1928 and 1936, but she retained the use of the name Barthelson for the rest of her career, even after remarrying. Joyce's career was a great success. She studied at the Oakland Technical High School in California, graduating in 1918. She attended the University of California, Berkeley; studied piano with Elizabeth Quaile, Helene Barere and Harold Bauer, composition with Julius Gold, Otto Cesana and Roy Harris, orchestration with Nicolas Flagello, and conducting with Antonia Brico. From 1922-1935 she toured with the Arion Trio, playing with Josephine Holub (violin) and Margaret Avery (cello). In the photo, Joyce is in the center, with Josephine on the left and Margaret on the right (I think!) She was staff pianist NBC radio San Francisco and KGO Oakland, and in 1936-1938 conductor of the Women's Symphony in New York. In 1944, she and Virginia Hoff Greenburg founded the Hoff-Barthelson Music School in Scarsdale, NY. In 1942 she married Benjamin Morris Steigman, but continued to use the name Barthelson through the rest of her life. She died in Scarsdale in 1986.

To briefly go back to Harold, in 1941 or 1942 he married Ardis Sara Olive Jones, a dental hygienist. He was a builder. They continued to live in the Bay Area for many years, and later moved to Magalia, California. Harold died in 1983, and Ardis in 1993. As far as I know, neither had any children.

I've probably digressed too far. To summarize, I've pretty much concluded that the butcher of Kansas City probably isn't the Carl Victor Barthelson we'd been searching for. He's likely a relative, but not the target. I would really love to see his death certificate in the hope that his parents' names are listed. He died in a hospital in Kansas City, Kansas, but the state has no documentation for him. They suggested that I check in Kansas City, Missouri where he lived. But the death certificate isn't in their on-line records. I suppose there's a chance that they have the document but, for some reason, it wasn't digitized and placed online. So I'm pretty much back at square one. There is still the unidentified brother of Johan August who was living on West Twenty-sixth Street in Manhattan to find, and that seems like the best bet for progress.

One thing that I've learned from this exercise is that coincidences occur more commonly that I'd thought. We started out looking for a butcher from Sweden named Carl Victor Barthelson. Well, we found one, but it turns out that he wasn't the right one. And I learned that he's not the only one: there was another Carl Victor Barthelson, butcher, who moved from Sweden to Chicago (and later to New York). I'm pretty sure that this isn't the one I'm after, either, since he had a child born in 1882, the same year that the Swedish records say that my Carl left Karlstad for the U.S. The lesson is to get as much corroborative evidence as possible, but still always leave open the possibility that your conclusions will turn out to be wrong!

Barthelsons in NYC

The Swedish side of my family has always been very mysterious to me. I never knew any of the folks who emigrated, nor any of the first generation born in the U.S. My dad's paternal grandparents were Gustav Alfred Westerlund and Johanna Charlotta Barthelson, both of whom arrived in New York in the early 1880s. As I've had a chance to burrow back through the records, I've been finding that they were not the only members of their families to emigrate. My focus in this posting are a few of the Barthelsons who came to and stayed in the New York City area.

My great grandmother, Lottie, was born on 27 December, 1861 in Svedvi, Västmanland, Sweden. Her mother, Catharina Charlotta Barthelson, was unmarried at the time, and Lottie's father is not recorded in the parish archive's record of her birth.(To try to minimize confusion arising from the fact that mother and daughter shared, and seemed to have used the names Charlotta and Lottie, I will refer to my great grandmother as Lottie, and to her mother as Catharina.) Lottie's marriage license claims that her father's name was Oscar Barthelson; so far I've not found anyone by that name, other than a boy who died very young. Catharina actually did not live in Svedvi, but in the city of Vasterås, about 10 miles (16 km) east. At that time Catharina was living with her brother, Carl Victor. Catharina and Carl's father, Per, had died in 1858, and their mother had remarried and lived in Svedvi. Catharina gave birth to Lottie while visiting her mother in Svedvi. Carl Victor will figure in this blog in the future, but I'll have to leave that just as a teaser for now.

It appears that Catharina emigrated to the U.S. on 26 May, 1882, leaving from Stockholm. It's not clear to me if Lottie travelled with her on the same ship, but later census records give the daughter's date of arrival in New York as 1881 (1900 census), 1882 (1920 census) or 1883 (1930 census). In 1888 Catharina married Hermann Maleus Eugen Rundström, ten years her junior. Hermann's occupation in 1888 is given as “detective”, “agent” in the 1890 city directory, “editor” in the New York census of 1892, and in the 1900 national census it's “special policeman.” Catharina and Hermann lived in Brooklyn: in 1888 at 56 Pacific Street and in 1900 at 189 West Ninth Street. Interestingly, in the 1892 census Herman Rundstrom is listed, followed by “Lottie Rundstrom” (= Catharina); then there's a 43 year old waiter from Sweden named Oswald Silverson, and two young girls, Annie Rundstrom (aged 12) and Sarah Rundstrom (aged 8). The names in this census are are just listed and aren't explicitly broken down into families or households, but I would guess the recorder was taking names sequentially so that Oswald, Annie and Sarah are living with Hermann and Catharina. I have no idea who Oswald is or if he has any importance to the family; perhaps he was just a boarder. The marriage with Catharina was Hermann's second, so I presume that Annie and Sarah were his daughters by the previous marriage. I know very little about Hermann's life in Stockholm, so that's a job for the future. Hermann passed away from a stroke at the relatively young age of 51 on 4 July, 1906. The place of death is cited as 298 Clinton Drive, and his occupation at that point as “janitor.” He is buried in Evergreen Cemetery in Brooklyn/Queens.

In an earlier blog I described how later, in 1915, Catharina was committed to the New York City Home for the Aged and Infirm, Brooklyn Division. She doesn't appear in the 1920 census, and I searched in vain for records from the home itself. What I did stumble across, however, was disturbing. It is the death certificate for Charlotte Runstrom, giving the date of death as 25 November, 1915. The certificate wasn't issued in Brookly, though, but in Manhattan at the City Home Hospital. It seems that just a few months after entering the Brooklyn home for the aged, she died of “asphyxiation by submersion in the river.” I've had no success in scouring the newspapers for any account of the accident (or something else?). Was there a police report filed? On the document the coroner states that an inquiry is pending. Actually, I just noticed that little tidbit in writing up this blog, so I'm just starting to see if a report was actually ever produced. So her death remains a mystery for the time being. Catharina was also buried in Evergreen Cemetery. When we visited there earlier this summer I had no idea that there were any other family interments to investigate. I suppose I'll just have to go back.

So, my great great grandmother, Catharina Charlotta Barthelson has a tragic accident and dies in the river. On the scale of bad news, though, I'm afraid that's not the worst story to tell. Let's move on to consider that of other brother, not Carl Victor yet, but Johan August Barthelson.

Perhaps I should stop here and give you an outline of this part of the family, so that we can keep track of who's who. Here are the basic facts as I've been able to reconstruct them. I begin with Per Barthelson and list the next two generations. The plus sign (+) is placed before spouses or unmarried "partner," the numbers indicate the generation (first, second, and third). The names of persons in this blog posting are highlighted.

1. Per Barthelson (1814-1858)
   +Ingeborg Jansdotter (?-?) [never married]
   2. Lars Persson Barthelson (1835-1866)
      +Brita Stina Lundell (1833-1897)
      3. Anna Larsdotter (1856-1857)
      3. Per August Barthelson (1858-?)
      3. Ingeborg Maria Barthelson (1859-1892)
      3. Carl Victor Barthelson (1862-?)
      3. Anna Louisa Barthelson (1864-?)
      3. Christina Charlotta Barthelson (1864-1869)
   +Kjerstin Persdotter (1814-1888) [name also cited as Christina]
   2. Johan August Barthelson (1841-1914)
      +Christina Mathilda Wahlström (1836-1883)
      3. Alma Fredrika Barthelson (1864-?)
      +Emma Gustafva Pettersson (1860-1940) (2nd wife)
      3. Emma Vilma Augusta Barthelson (1892-?)
      3. Harold Carl Barthelson (1895-1944)
   2. Catharina Charlotta Barthelson (1843-1915)
      +Oscar ????
      3. Johanna Charlotta Barthelson (1861-1922)
      +Hermann Maleus Eugen Rundström (1854-1906)
   2. Per Oscar Barthelson (1847-1849)
   2. Carl Victor Barthelson (1849-?)
      +Anna Christina Eriksson (1840-1922)
      3. Anna Christina Barthelson (1872-1872)
      3. Elin Maria Barthelson (1872-1872)
      3. Victor Emanuel Barthelson (1873-?)
      3. Carl Johan Barthelson (1875-?)
      3. Anna Viktoria Barthelson (1877-1877)
      3. Herman Mathias Barthelson (1879-?)

So back to Johan August. As you can see from the tree, Johan had a wife and child in Sweden. However, his wife Christina died of uterine cancer in 1883, and three years later his only daughter Alma was married. That same year Johan emigrated to America, to New York where his sister Catharina already lived. There he remarried, to another Swedish emigre named Emma Gustafva Pettersson. Togther they had two children, Emma and Harold.

While my story here has been presented in chronological order, that's not how it came to me. It would be far, far too confusing to try to lead you through that maze, even if I could remember every step along the way. But I actually came across Johan long before I had any idea of his relationship to me, and I'd tossed those records aside as not being relevant to the search. Part of the problem with tracing him in America is the inconsistent anglicization of his name: sometimes he was in the records as John, sometimes as August, and of course the last name was spelled in a lot of different ways. But just as my initial encounter with him in America was discarded because I didn't identify him correctly, that's is just what happened that lead to his untimely demise.

Here's the story, as reported on the front pages of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle and several other newspapers in the city. It seems that the Barthelson family had come upon hard times around 1913. Johan was getting on in age (he was in his seventies at the time), and so on August 14, 1913 his wife arranged to have him live in the Swedish Augustana Home for the Aged in Brooklyn. He was a resident, not committed to the institution, so he was free to come and go as he pleased. Well, on the night of 15 December, 1913 he so pleased. He left the home, telling the staff that he was going to spend the night with his brother who lived in Manhattan. He never arrived.

Aside: Who was this brother? He is not named in the papers, but it was said that he lived on West 26th Street. I've gone through all of the households on that street in the 1915 New York census, just a year after all this came down. No sign of anyone that I recognize. It could be that the papers simply got the facts wrong: maybe it wasn't his brother, but his wife's. Maybe it was a brother from some sort of fraternal society. Maybe they got the address wrong. But if it was a brother, then the only candidate I have is Carl Victor Barthelson. This is the second tease: I sure hope I'll have a story to tell you about him very soon. (End of aside.)

On December 20 Mrs. Barthelson was told that her husband had left the home and not returned, and she began the search for him. The family told the police at the local Bath Beach station, and a general alarm was issued on December 22. Johan's daughter twice visited the Kings County hospitals, asking if someone with his name or general description had been admitted. Results? Nothing. It was only on January 15 that Mrs. Barthelson was contacted by a worker that there was a body in the morgue that might be her husband. Of course, it was.

According to the Daily Eagle: "Evidently he had wandered about for three days without food or shelter, for at 3:25 on the morning of December 19 he was picked up in a dazed condition, with a broken arm at Third avenue and Ninth street, by Patrolman Thomas Maloney of the 145th Precinct. An ambulance from the Methodist Episcopal Hospital removed him to the Kings County Hospital. He gave his name as August Dotelson, of 135 Nelson street. This happened on Friday, and the alarm was not sent out until Monday." Apparently the name that Johan gave to the staff and that they recorded changed through time, from August Berchelseon to Dotelson, to Dalase. He gave his home address with the correct street name, but incorrect number. Through all of this, no connection was made by either the police or the hospital staff that a missing 74-year old man named Barthelson might actually be the same as the 74-year old man named Berchelson in the hospital. To top it off, quoting the Daily Eagle's story of the trip to the morgue: "'We went to view it.'said Mrs. Barthelson, 'and it was he. There, on a tag attached to his sleeve, his name was written "August Barthelson."' Yet for nearly a month he lay there in the hospital while the police of the city had his description. He gave his first name correctly and his last name only slight wrong. He had the name of the street correct, too, although the house number was incorrect. And yet no one, out of the many through whose hands this case passed, was able to see any possible connection between this poor unidentified sufferer and the August Barthelson named in the general alarm sent out nearly a month previously." Johan August Barthelson was buried in Evergreens Cemetery.

Three police officers were charged with neglect of duty as a result of this fiasco. It also resulted in a reform of procedures to facilitate communications between hospitals and the police in regard to missing persons. How, you may ask, can I connect this story of August Barthelson in Brooklyn with Johan August Barthelson from Karlstad? The age is the same; both were butchers by profession; there is a census record of John Barthelson with wife Emma and son Harold; and that same record has them living next door to Hermann and Lottie Rundström in Brooklyn; finally, the death certificate cites his parents as Pierre Barthelson (= Per) and Christiana (= Christina). These and a few more similar little tidbits, I think, are pretty good evidence that the men are, in fact, one and the same person

Four-leaf clover

In the past few weeks I haven't ventured yet into the relatives of my maternal grandfather, Patrick Harrigan. This is partly because that's the side of the family about which we knew the most as I began. My mother's cousin, Ann Morgan, had been one of the major folks filling the role of family historian, and this has since been taken over by her daughter, Florence Gillman of San Diego. I've included Ann's picture here, as a nod to her efforts to keep track of our heritage. So a lot of the low-hanging fruit had been plucked, and what remained to be discovered was going to be more difficult. Also, although I was working with a Harrigan family tree that Florence gave to my mom when she was getting ready for a trip to Ireland, I'm sure there's much more in her files that I haven't yet learned. But, accepting the risk that I'm merely re-plowing well-known ground, let me describe what I've been up to over the past couple of weeks in exploring the Harrigan clan.

When Hanora O'Connell passed away in 1918, unmarried and with no children, she had little in the way of assets. She had only about $200 in cash and a piece of property in Little Falls, NY. She died without a will, and therefore her executors – her sister Abigail (O'Connell) Harding and Abby's daughter Mary – publicly advertised to all known relatives that her estate was being settled. These ads, published in newspapers in Little Falls and Utica, are a veritable who's who of the O'Connells. The Harrigan connection comes in with another of Nora's sisters, Julia, who married Denis Harrigan. Some of the family branches listed in the ads we know pretty well, while others are little more than a name.

While we were visiting central New York in May, one of the things that I wanted to do was to go to the surrogate's court in Herkimer and try to find out what information existed in the probate records for Nora. A little bit ago, I was skimming through the copies we'd made, and one item jumped out at me. One of the named relatives of Nora was her niece, Margaret Sullivan (daughter of Denis and Julia Harrigan), and what caught my attention was that the documents said they she lived in Boston. I didn't know that, so I thought I'd look a little closer. And that is how you go down a rabbit hole!

First, what background information did we already have for Margaret? To start with, you can't be too picky about spelling: Harrigan, Horrigan, and Horgan were all used by the family, sometimes more than one by the same person. Second, the family tree from Florence had Margaret Horgan (born 1863), husband Daniel Sullivan, and six children: Mame, Gene, Alice, Nellie, Joe and Peggy. I knew that it would be foolhardy to go looking in Boston with only Margaret's name, but I thought that I had a reasonable chance of success with all of these other people associated with her.

Boston is a pretty big town and, I'm not sure if you've heard this before, but there's quite a number of Irishmen living in it. So my audacious goal was to find one particular Irish family in the city, and this was going to be a family with very typical Irish names. (Hence, the mixed metaphor title of this post, since I felt like I was trying to find a needle in a haystack or a four-leaf clover.) The easy place to begin was with the U.S. Censuses.

A search for Daniel Sullivan in Boston, born plus or minus 5 years of 1863 (his wife's year of birth), and with wife name Margaret results in a mere 11 hits on ancestry.com. You have to take this with a grain of salt, though, since it's quite possible that the Margaret actually didn't use that name, but used her middle name instead. Folks in the past seem to do this much more freely than today.

The number one hit had Daniel J. and Margaret E. Sullivan and children Mary (maybe that's Mame?), Ellen (Nellie!), Catherine, and John (both new names). So half of the kids in this family, if I'm generous, were included in our original tree. Number two hit from the census? Daniel and Margaret, Mary (again, maybe that's Mame?), Julia (new), Ellen (Nellie!), Cornelius (new), Dennis J. (new), Eugene (Gene!), and Margaret (Peggy!). That's four hits, but three new names. I don't know how you want to score that, but it's not an exact match. We could go through the other nine Sullivan families, but I think you can see my problem. And maybe an exact match is too much to hope for: it wouldn't be surprising if some of the children in the family tree I had were born after 1900.

I was about to despair at this point, because I felt that I'd need some other tidbit of information to help me to distinguish the right family. I never have found the smoking gun, but evidence and suggestions did build up gradually. Remember hit #2 in the earlier paragraph? I noticed that the three oldest children in that family – Mary, Julia and Ellen – weren't born in Massachusetts like the others, but were born in New York state. One of the things that I've learned is that immigrants, when they first arrived in the U.S., often would first go to live with or near relatives who were already in the country, and then later on they or their children would spread out to other parts. Little Falls seems to have been just such a center for the Harrigans and O'Connells. Most of my relatives worked either for the railroad (men) or for the spinning factories (women) in Little Falls. Abby Harding and Nora O'Connell did so, as did a number of others. Textiles seems to have been an industry that offered employment and wages to women, probably something relatively unusual in the late 19th Century.

Again, the little tidbits of gossip published in local papers came in handy:

• 7 Sep 1903, Utica Herald-Dispatch: Miss Julia Sullivan of Boston is the guest of Mr. and Mrs. Owen Sullivan in Burrell [sic] street.
• 13 Sep 1914, Utica Daily Press: Miss Margaret Sullivan has returned to Boston after spending the summer at Owen Sullivan's on Burwell street.
• 24 Aug 1915, Journal and Courier (Little Falls, NY): Mrs. Daniel Sullivan and daughter of Boston are guests at Owen Sullivan's on Burwell street.

These link Mrs. Daniel Sullivan and the young misses Margaret and Julia, all of Boston, to another Sullivan, Owen, living in Little Falls. Further digging reveals that Owen was born around 1854, nine years before the Daniel I was searching for. I presume, therefore, that he was a brother or a cousin. At the end of the day, though, all I've done is found suggestive evidence, the three women being linked to an area that the Harrigans came from.

So let's follow this Boston family forward in time and see if anything becomes clearer (spoiler alert: I think it does). In the 1910 census they're living at 27 Litchfield Street in Allston (a part of the greater Boston area), and the clan has grown. The census lists parents Daniel and Margaret, and children Mary, Julia, Nellie, Cornelius, Dennis J., Eugene, Margaret, Alice and Gertrude. So of my original list of children, I now have four of the five names accounted for (Mame, Gene, Alice, Nellie and Peggy), one missing (Joe), and four extras (Julia, Cornelius, Dennis and Gertrude). It's looking better at this point, but I think you'll agree, it's not really definitive.

Father Daniel Sullivan died in 1918, and here we get a first good piece of evidence linking this family in Boston to where we started, the Harrigans. The death notice published in the Boston Post on 28 Dec 1918: “Sullivan – In Brighton, Dec. 25, Daniel, beloved husband of Margaret Sullivan (nee Horrigan).” Brighton and Allston are adjoining regions, and now Allston appears to be subsumed within Brighton. To jump ahead a bit, one other obituary that I found early on was for Gertrude. When she died in 1982 her obit also confirmed that her mother's maiden name was Horrigan. Dan Sullivan was 56 years old when he died, and his profession was described as a laborer for the City of Boston.

At this point I just tried following every lead I could find on the kids of the family, hoping to find some reference back to their parents, or earlier, that would shore up my presumption that these were the people I was looking for. The resolution of the missing child, Joe, turned out to be a dope-slap. I first found him in the draft records for World War I: he's there, Joseph D. Sullivan, home address 27 Litchfield Street, Brighton. At this point he was 22 years old (in 1917). So if he were born in 1895 then he probably had to enroll in the old-man's draft in World War II and, sure enough, I found him, at a different address, but still in Brighton, and living with his sister Julia. The head slap comes because he gives his name as Dennis Joseph Sullivan! I'd had him all along, and just didn't notice.

In conclusion here, I was able to match up everything in my original family tree with this family in Boston. There are a few extra people, Julia, Cornelius and Gertrude, but that doesn't concern me too much. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Mother Margaret appears to have passed away on 25 Jul, 1925, but I haven't yet been able to find any notice published in one of the local papers. Mary (Mame) married a man named Noyes, and lived in Natick, Massachusetts, finally passing away in June of 1971. I haven't been able yet to find any further details, so I don't know if she ever had any children or who the mysterious Mr. Noyes was. In the 1940 census six of the remaining Sullivan kids are living together, all unmarried. As far as I've been able to tell, none of them ever did get married.

So, a dead end for the Sullivans? Well, we haven't accounted for Cornelius. He did get married, to Julia Hooley. He worked for the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority as a conductor and operator, of streetcars, I presume. When he died in 1967 and Julia in 1972 they had 9 children (one adopted) and were survived by 37 grandchildren! The adopted daughter, Dorothy, was actually Julia's niece. That resulted in a lot of confusion in my records, before I was rescued by a new acquaintance through the Internet, Pat Callahan, who explained that relationship to me. Pat lives just a short ways from here in southwestern Ohio, near Cincinnati, and, of course, neither of us had any idea that the other existed. Of the other children, Joseph Sullivan (1916-2003) worked for the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Office for a while. The rest seem to have stayed in Massachusetts. Both Daniel (1920-2005) and Robert (1928-2014) worked for the Boston Fire Department (see portrait).

I've been able to track down basic information for all but one of the nine children, that one being John P. Sullivan of Cambridge and Brighton, Mass. I'll keep digging, but with a name like that, I'm going to have to get lucky again in order to figure out which John Sullivan is my four-leaf clover.

Eureka - or not

Whether it's Archimedes in the bath, or a personal epiphany, the eureka moment is usually a fraud. Rather than an instantaneous revelation, my experience is that it's more of a Homer Simpson “Doh!” It's right there in plain sight, if only you could see it!

All this is to report some progress on following the story of Mary Elizabeth White back a bit in time. In my last posting I'd been lamenting about how the trail seemed to stop with Elizabeth (died 1956) and her husband Luke (died 1928). Well, I'm happy to report a few cracks in the metaphorical brick wall. I don't have a well-rounded story yet, but there are some tidbits that are very enticing. Here we go.

After writing about my experiences trying to dig into the White line, I tried digging a little further into the newspapers. I don't know why or how I came to it, but I tried searching on the fultonhistory.com website for “Lillian White.” As you no doubt recall, Aunt Lillian (1902 – 1952) was the second child of Elizabeth and Luke. The fultonhistory.com website has a large number of newspapers from New York state that you can search on-line. Recently he's started to delve into papers outside of the state as well. My search for Lillian turned up three interesting snippets. These all come from the columns in which small tidbits of news of local residents is reported in the papers. Here are the first two:

Mrs. Elizabeth White and daughter, Lillian White of Ilion are visiting Mrs. Kate Fitzpatrick." Schenectady Gazette, 14 Jul 1930.

Voorheesville Notes. ... Mrs. Kate Fitzpatrick entertained Sunday Mrs. Elizabeth White and daughter, Miss Lillian White, Mrs. Ella Farley, and daughter Miss Margaret Farley, and Mr. and Mrs. Clifford Spraker, all of Ilion, and Mr. and Mrs. J. A. Spraker of Cherry Valley." Schenectady Gazette, 12 Aug 1930.

For those of us, like me, ignorant of New York geography, the village of Voorheesville is in the township of New Scotland in Albany county. This picture below, lifted from Panoramio.com, is a view from John Boyd Thatcher State Park east toward the town. According to Wikipedia, it is a suburb of modern Albany and part of the city's historical metropolitan area. This agreed with the information from Elizabeth's obituary that she was born and married in Albany. But I wasn't familiar with any of the people mentioned other than Elizabeth and Lillian. I also was wondering how they got from Ilion to Voorheesville, a distance of roughly 70 miles. Train? Bus? Car?

The third little note was a bombshell for me:

Mrs. Kate Fitzpatrick has moved from this place to Utica, where she will reside with her daughter, Mrs. Elizabeth White." Schenectady Gazette, 17 Jun 1931.

At this point I had to stand up, get away from the computer, and make sure that I was accurately understanding what I'd just found. If Kate Fitzpatrick is Elizabeth White's mother, then this must be the Catherine McGuire mentioned in Elizabeth's obituary! The bit about moving to Utica, as opposed to Ilion, I chalked up to ignorance on the part of the Schenectady reporter. The big discrepancy to be resolved, though, is the surname. Elizabeth White's maiden name was Farnham (there's lot of leeway here on the exact spelling). If Catherine Farnham and Kate Fitzpatrick are one and the same, well, in the words of Ricky Ricardo, I got some 'splainin' to do.

A straightforward explanation of the difference would be that Kate's first husband, Barney Farnham (according to Elizabeth's obituary) had died, and that she remarried Mr. Fitzpatrick. The easy part is to deal with Fitzpatrick first. The critical clue here is that when Elizabeth and Lillian travelled to visit Kate, she was living in Voorheesville. Censuses for that area, in particular the township of New Scotland, have records for a Kate Fitzpatrick in 1930, 1925, 1920, and 1915, but all for Kate alone as a widow. Her spouse, John Fitzpatrick appears in the 1910, 1905, and 1900 censuses (the image below is the listing in 1900). He was substantially older than Kate: she was born in 1854, he in 1830. The census records also indicate that they were married sometime around 1890. That should be taken with some caution, though, as many “facts” in the census turn out to be wrong. I raise that point now because while John Fitzpatrick appears in the 1892 census of New York, Kate is not listed with him. I don't know if that's significant, because there are quite a few illegible entries in the copy of that census that I saw.

So none of these census records had any children for Kate. I was hoping that the 1892 census would have something to definitively link this Kate with Grandma White, but no such luck. So let's step back a little further in time. Earlier I'd looked for Barney and Catherine Farnham in Albany and had had no success. Perhaps, they weren't exactly in the city limits of Albany, but rather in New Scotland.

To figure this out, because I had no confidence in how the name Farnham might be spelled, I simply went through the censuses for 1880, 1875 and 1870 the hard way, from front to back. Thankfully, New Scotland was fairly small at that time, something like 2000 people in total. Just as a reminder, here's what I “knew” as I started. Elizabeth White was born in 1878. The censuses for Kate Fitzpatrick, her mother, gave her birth date as sometime around 1854 plus or minus. They also said that she'd immigrated into the U.S. Around 1870. I had no dates for her husband, Barney Farnham, and “Barney” didn't sound like a traditional Christian name for the times. It was probably a nickname, but a nickname for what I didn't know. Bernard, maybe.

The 1870 census for New Scotland (see the picture), amazingly, records the presence of a 16-year old girl, Catharine Mcguire, working as a domestic servant! The only other information is that she was born in Ireland, both of her parents were of foreign birth, and she could neither read nor write. It's amazing to me that I would be able to pick up a record of her so soon after she arrived in the U.S. She must have headed directly for New Scotland upon arriving. It looks like she was living in the household of George and Elizabeth Reid. His occupation is “keeping hotel.” I'm guessing that in those days the word “hotel” was a combination of sleeping accommodations for travellers as well as the local watering hole. Perhaps the Reids had advertised for some help, and Kate responded to that(?). [You know, as I was writing this my eyes strayed upward on the 1870 census sheet. In the household listed just above the Reids there is another domestic servant named Margaret Mcguire, aged 23. Coincidence? I wonder, and I wonder how to tell if it is or not. Probably I should check ships' passenger lists to see if I can find Margaret and Catharine McGuire travelling together.]

So 1870's a hit! What about the next two censuses? In 1875 Elizabeth Reid is still running the hotel, although there's no record of George. (There is a George Reid, 19 years older than the one in 1875 and listed as a boarder. Perhaps the father?) Included with the household is our target Catherine, 21 years old, and now she's married. Her husband is Michael Farnan – not Barney! He's listed as a farmer and 42 years old. They also have a child, Joseph, 8 months old. In an exchange on Facebook recently, Aunt Phyllis said she thought that Elizabeth Farnham had a couple of brothers who'd died young. Apparently, this is one of them. In addition, the 1910 census notes that Kate had had four children, only one of whom had survived to that point.

In 1880 Michael and Kate have moved from the Reid household, but still in New Scotland. No sign of Joseph, but Elizabeth appears in the record. Now the census says that Michael is 39 years old: so in the passing of five years his age decreased by 3 years. Maybe he's our Benjamin Button? Occupations: he's a farm laborer, she keeps house. The surname in this record is spelled Farnaim. When I think about it, though, this spelling inconsistency shouldn't be surprising. If you can't read or write yourself, I don't suppose you'd care very much about how someone else chooses to spell your name, would you? So far, this is the last record I have of Michael (= Barney) Farnham. The next record of Kate doesn't appear for 20 years, in the 1900 national census.

So who was Kate's second husband, John Fitzpatrick? He was born in 1830 in Ireland, so he was 24 years older than Kate. He arrived in the U.S. in 1847, hot on the end of the Irish potato famine. It's very hard to trace single men in the records: they keep moving around as their work takes them, and having a common name like John Fitzpatrick just makes it next to impossible. John – I think it's the right one – appears in the 1892 census in New Scotland, but he's alone and not linked with Kate. John is a Civil War veteran: he served in the 91st Regiment of New York Volunteers, Company C. This regiment was recruited in 1861 and shipped out, first, to Governor's Island, then to Key West for four months of training. They then transferred to Pensacola, Florida and then to New Orleans. They eventually headed north and participated in the siege of Port Hudson, Louisiana which lasted from May 22 – July 9, 1863. The Ninety-first eventually came home in July, 1864, then was sent to participate in the closing battles of the war in Virginia. They were finally mustered out on July 3, 1865. John died on 9 Oct, 1911.

Apparently, in the following years Kate received a widow's pension, I presume on the basis of John's service in the Civil War. There is a newpaper article in 1928 in which some of the widows living in the Utica area receive an increase in their pension. Kate is mentioned by name, with her address given as 132 West Clark Street in Ilion. Her pension is increased to $50 per month. It's still a mystery to me why this address is given, when the censuses and newspapers indicate she was living in New Scotland.

So this is as far as I'd made it as of yesterday (Friday, 12 Sep 2014). Then I received a letter from the Herkimer County Historical Society. If you recall from the beginning of this post, the Schenectady paper said that in 1931 Kate was moving to live with her daughter. The 1930 census has her still living in New Scotland, as expected, and at that time she would have been 76 years old. She is not listed in the 1940 census nor in the 1936 directory of Ilion, Herkimer and surrounding towns. I did everything I could think of on fultonhistory.com, but could not find anything about her. So I wrote to the Historical Society asking if they could check their records of obituaries in the Herkimer Evening Telegram, looking for Kate sometime between 1931 and 1936. On Friday they responded that they'd found the obituary I was hoping for, dated 18 Mar, 1935. Here's the text:

Mrs. Fitzpatrick, 80, passes away in Ilion.

Ilion - Mrs. Catherine Fitzpatrick, 80, widow of John Fitzpatrick, died unexpectedly at her home, 132 West Clark street, on Sunday.

Dr. C.C. Whittemore, this village, coroner, who was called, said death resulted from complications.

Mrs. Fitzpatrick was born in Ireland, June 16, 1854, and came to this country 64 years ago. She had been a resident of Ilion for about 40 years and was a member of the Church of Annunciation. She leaves one daughter, Mrs. Elizabeth White, Ilion; five grandchildren and five great-grandchildren.

Funeral will be held Wednesday at 9 a. m. from the home, and at 9:30 from the Church of Annunciation.

I think the 40 years in Ilion is just incorrect. Maybe the reporter got mixed up with her daughter(?). It also looks like something got left out of the coroner's statement. The next step for me, I guess, is to write to the Ilion town clerk and request a copy of the death certificate. And let's count: the five grandchildren would have been Nellie, Lillian, Ed, Mary and Kaddie White. The five great-grandchildren would have been Nellie's children Alfred, Ed, Joe, Phyllis and Norman Johnson. I would also guess that Kate is buried in St. Agnes Cemetery, and I wouldn't be at all surprised if her grave is in the same area as that of her daughter, son-in-law and granddaughter. I probably looked right at it this spring without recognizing it. Something else to do next time I'm in the valley.

I need to give out a couple of prizes (sorry, no cash awards) as a result of responses to my last post. Bryan receives second prize for recalling – somehow – that Fitzpatrick was the surname of a female ancestor, although he came up one generation short. Maybe third prize should go to Michelle Keogh: she'd taken notes from conversations with Uncle Joe and had recorded that Grandma White's mother's name was Fitz.... gerald or ...patrick. But first prize goes to Aunt Phyllis who pointed out that Elizabeth's Farnham's mother's name was Fitzpatrick. Amazing what information we all have tucked away, if only someone would ask the right questions!

The fading trail of the Whites

Today I'd like to focus a bit on my father's maternal grandparents, in other words the parents of my Grandma Nellie. This should have been, could have been a long discussion, for when Nellie's mother, Mary Elizabeth White, died in 1956, her obituary was full of the types of details needed to trace a family back in time.

Mary Elizabeth White – Grandma White, I've been told – was born July 23, 1878 in Albany, New York to Barney Farnham and Catherine McGuire. She married Luke White in Albany on September 19, 1899. Their first child, Grandma Nellie, whose full name was Ellen Theresa White, was born on June 25, 1900. The other children were Lillian (born September 4, 1902), Edward (born April 15, 1907), Mary (born March 8, 1911) and Kathryn (born April 17, 1913). I'm happy to say that I knew all of these kids, superficially of course. However, Grandma White died when I was about 2½ years old, so I have no recollection of her. Although it looks like the family started in the Albany area, by the time of her death Elizabeth had lived in Ilion for 45 years.

[A quick aside: the name Kathryn appears in the records with lots of different spellings. I really don't know how Aunt Kaddie spelled her name, either the name Kathryn or Kaddie. If anyone knows, please pass it on!]

Those kinds of details are real gold nuggets, providing solid evidence to build upon as we trace back through the historical records. In fact, though, the oldest record I've been able to find so far is from the 1900 national census. I've not been able to corroborate anything prior to that time, not her wedding date, birth date, or her parents. More on that a bit later.

Luke White was born on May 14, 1873 in Ireland, and he emigrated to the U.S. In 1892. In the 1900 census his occupation was recorded as a railroad track laborer, in 1910 he was a section head for the railroad, 1915 the section boss. Between those last two records the family had moved from Montgomery County to German Flatts. In 1920 he was working as a laborer in business equipment, which his obituary clarifies is that he worked for the Library Bureau. Both his daughter Nellie and her husband, Fred Johnson, also worked for the Library Bureau. This was not, as I had thought, a branch of Remington such as the typewriter company or the Rand. Rather, it was a separate company that built library and office equipment: files, desks, etc. Finally, Luke's death certificate (the information coming from his wife) says that he was a wood worker.

The death certificate raises another point of interesting inconsistency. Both it and the earliest census records say that Luke was born in Ireland, and one of the latter even specifies that he arrived in 1892. I have found a Luke White, aged 20, on the passenger list for the ship Germanica, which arrived in New York on 29 April, 1892 from Liverpool and Queenstown, Ireland. Queenstown was the old name for the port of Cobh (pronounced “cove”) in County Cork. The list says that this Luke White was from Dublin; I think we need to view that record with a bit of skepticism, as Dublin may only have been the last place he lived before emigrating and not the place where he was born. Actually, even more caution is probably needed: White is a very common surname, and the given name Luke isn't really that unusual either. That, plus the fact that the age is a little off (at that time Luke would have been just a month short of his 19th birthday, not 20) leads me to consider this record as a suggestive possibility, and not as anything solid.

Luke White died in 1928 at the age of 55. He had suffered for 14 months before finally succumbing to liver cancer. I have no picture of him, but in 1918 he registered for the draft in World War I (at the age of 44). On that document he is described as being of medium build, brown eyes, brown hair, height 5'4½” (under the tall category!). I'll bet that the signature at the bottom of the first page is his.

I don't know too much about Lillian (in picture with Grandma White outside their house at 132 West Clark Street in Ilion). She never married and suffered from ill health. I believe that I remember my dad telling me that because of her severe arthritis he would carry her from one room to another. I'm sure some of you have a better knowledge and memory of the facts; I'd love to learn what you know. The two things that stick out in my memory of Uncle Ed were that (1) he attended all of the Ilion home football games, and (2) he used to play semi-pro baseball. Mary ended up living in Watertown, where she was a clothing buyer for one of the local department stores. As I wrote those sentences, I was really hit by just how scanty my knowledge is. Please folks, help me fill in the gaps!

Luke and Elizabeth White are both buried in St. Agnes Cemetery, a small graveyard “nestled” between Route 5 and the New York Thruway just north across the Mohawk River from Ilion. As you drive up the hill to the cemetery, they're in the back in the eastern corner, where you can also find the grave of their daughter Lillian and son-in-law Fred Johnson (aka Arthur Westerlund). At the western end of the hill are the graves of their daughter Nellie, grandson Alfred, and Alfred's second wife Emma. During our visit to the Mohawk Valley in May I took a brush and water to the gravestones and was able to clear away most of the lichens that had grown on them. Emma's stone has sloughed over, I think because the cement slab on which it's set has cracked and broken, but otherwise everything looks in pretty good shape.

So for the White family, I feel like we have a fairly good handle on the basic facts from recent history, but I just haven't been able to break through from the 20th into the 19th century. Grandma White's parent's names are Barney Farnham (Farnum?) and Catherine McGuire. I can't find anyone in the greater Albany area by those names in the late 1870s. Is Barney a nickname for Bernard or something else, or just a nickname (like Butch)? I had hoped that Luke White's death certificate would provide clues on where to look for him in Ireland, but his wife didn't know where he was born, other than in Ireland, or what his parents' names were. I can find no record in the Albany newspapers for the marriage of Luke White and Mary Elizabeth Farnham in 1899. That's not too unusual for newspapers of that time, though. The Catholic Church has simply ignored my inquiry. My current hope is that their marriage license will provide some kind of breakthrough. The bride and groom are supposed to give the names of their parents, and this will have the advantage over, say, an obituary or a death certificate because Luke and Elizabeth would have provided the information themselves and not some grieving relative. I requested a copy of the license from Albany in July, and I'm checking the mail every day now in hopes that it arrives. But so far, no luck.

Thanks to Ron Johnson for copies of the photos of people in this post. I also understand that some of you are having problems adding comments to the blog. This I don't understand: the settings should allow anonymous commenters and the text should appear in-line. I'll continue to try to figure out what's wrong and hope to straightened it out. In the meantime, you can always email comments to me directly at baeus2-at-yahoo.com (substitute the @ symbol for -at-).

The Blacksmith

In this post I'm going to shift to my mother's side of the family, and specifically to her maternal grandfather, Frank Burns. Frank – if I may be so familiar – died on Mar 5 1954, just four months before I was born. So I never knew him, and almost everything that I've learned has either come from conversations with my mother and Aunt Nancy (Harrigan), or is information from newspapers.

Let's start where I began, with his obituary. This one was published in the Utica Daily Press:

Frank Burns, 86, of 5 Church, Mohawk, died Mar. 5, 1954 in Herkimer Hospital after a long illness. This address is familiar to me as the house where my grandmother, Kathryn Frances Burns, lived.

Mr. Burns was born Sept. 10, 1867, at Grand Rapids, Mich., a son of Patrick and Bridget McLoughlin Burns. In recent years he lived in Oswego and later came to Mohawk to live with a daughter. He had followed the trade of blacksmith but had been retired for some time.

That was a really loaded paragraph, and it provided months and months of fodder for research. A record of Frank should appear in the 1870 census – remember, this was just six years after the end of the Civil War, and sure enough there he was. We find him living in the township of Wyoming, Kent Co. Michigan with father Patrick, mother Bridget, and a younger brother Dennis. Patrick is 30, so he was born around 1840 in Ireland. Bridget is 25, also born in Ireland. Neither parent can read or write, and Patrick's occupation is given as day laborer.

That was easy. Now, where is the family in 1880? This was one of the early roadblocks: there is no family with those people in the Grand Rapids area in 1880. The obituary said that Frank lived in Oswego, so what about there? Again, no dice. Eventually Frank and Dennis Burns are clearly identifiable in the national census, but this isn't until 1900, leaving a big gap of 30 years in his history.

Back to the obituary: He [Frank] leaves a brother Daniel, Wisconsin; three sisters, Miss Gertrude Burns, Wisconsin, Mrs. Elizabeth Prendergast, Michigan, and Mrs. Patrick Harrigan, Mohawk, and five grandchildren. The last is bogus, as Mrs. Patrick Harrigan was actually Frank's daughter. But holy procreation, Batman, where did those other people come from?

Well, I don't think that I can accurately tell the story any longer of how this was resolved in my research. All the various threads are now so thoroughly entwined, that I confused myself as I tried to remember. But there were a few important elements to the resolution. First, my mom and Aunt Nancy corroborated details in the obituary. They remember an Aunt Gertrude and Aunt Elizabeth. My mother even recalls going to Grand Rapids in the '40s with Gertrude. Then there were two “luck of the Irish” finds on the Internet. One was a record of the death of a Miss Gertrude Burns. This was in, of all places, Alabama! The second was finding an abandoned family tree on the web, one with a patriarch named Patrick Connel Burns along with a raft of children, and among them were the same names from Frank Burns's obituary. Particularly compelling was the name Elizabeth Prendergast. Come on, what were the odds?

So here's how this chapter in Frank's life seems to have turned out. After the 1870 census his mother, Bridget McLoughlin disappears from the records. I have no proof of why, but likely she died sometime between 1869 and 1873. His father was remarried to a woman named Mary Elisabeth Gallagher. That union produced a total of eight children. This family does show up in the 1880 census. Remember that I said that the Burns family wasn't found in the 1880 census in Oswego? Well, not the family, but there is a Frank and Dennis of the correct age, living with two separate families named McLaughlin! My interpretation is that their mother died, and their father sent them back to Oswego to live with relatives, one with their grandfather and the other with their uncle.

Now let's fast-forward to 1900, the year my grandmothers were born as well as another national census. Do we find a Burns family? Well, no: we only find the two brothers Frank and Dennis listed as boarders at 90 East Fifth Street in Oswego. But now, Frank is already listed as a widower. I haven't yet found the precise date of the wedding, but in sometime in 1898 Frank had married a young immigrant from Skibbereen, Ireland named Hannah Driscoll. Skibbereen in notorious as one of the areas most severely hit by the Irish potato famine in the 1840's. My Grandma Burnsy was born on 11 Apr 1900, and then Hannah died about two weeks later on 24 April. The family story is that in the short run the baby Kathryn Frances was put up in an orphanage, hence the census record showing the two “bachelor” brothers.

Sometime before 1910 Frank was remarried to Helena McCarthy. She was essentially my grandmother's mother and was called that. Another story that Aunt Nancy relates is that Burnsey's grandmother, Ellen Driscoll who also lived in Oswego, would call to her as she passed on the street saying that the woman she lived with was not her real mother! I can see the finger wagging in the air. Helena also died young, in 1923, at the age of 48. There is a poignant letter that Aunt Nancy has in which Gertrude Burns (Frank's half-sister, see portrait) consoles my grandmother on her loss and offers to fill the place of mother.

One of the fascinating aspects of Frank Burns's life is that we can follow so much of it through the accounts in the local newspapers like the Oswego Palladium. Frank's blacksmith shop was close by a fire station, and he was paid a fee every year by the city to shoe the station's horses (and, probably, other blacksmithing chores). Those payments are recorded in the papers. When we visited Oswego last year I tried to track down the exact site. The old firehouse is the Firehouse Complex at 112 E Bridge Street. Going west, toward the river, you go past A&J Music, and then there's a little garage set off the street a bit. That's where the blacksmith shop was, maybe not the same building, but I'll bet it is. Now it's a little detached garage next to the house on the corner. In the newspapers – especially if you read between the lines – you can learn a lot about everyday life. You can find Frank and Dennis attending local union, political and Irish expat meetings. There's an account of when he was hit by a car in Oswego – no damage done, apparently. When Frank retired blacksmithing, you can find the advertisements that his cousin placed in the paper to sell his tools. And there's a thought: what was it like to be a blacksmith during that period in history when horses were being replaced by automobiles?

Frank Burns (second from right) outside the blacksmith's shop.

It's possible to follow this history through the papers as a result of a fairly unique resource: the fultonhistory.com website. Tom Tryniski, of Fulton, NY (hey, I know someone else who lives in Fulton!) has taken up the task to scan, OCR, and provide search tools to browse through over 26 million pages from newspapers in New York state. These include a number of important sources to me like the Little Falls Evening Times, Oswego Palladium, Utica Observer Dispatch and the Utica Daily Times. This is a monumental effort, and I really appreciate it most when my research takes me to other states. I find that the interface is sometimes difficult to work with, but there's still gold in them thar hills!

Now I'd like to enlist your help by giving me your opinion on the possible identity of people in a couple of pictures. In the next picture below is a wedding picture. That's Frank with his wife. But the question is: which wife? After that, the next picture is of the second wife, Helena McCarthy. Is the bride in the earlier picture Helena? Or could it possibly be the first wife, Bridget McLaughlin? (We have a split opinion here, so what do you think?)

Second, my aunt had the following picture of two young men in the scrapbooks from my grandmother. There's no writing on it to indicate the identity of the duo, but as I was writing this blog - literally - I suddenly had the thought: could this be an early picture of Frank along with his brother Dennis? I would guess just by the posing that the one sitting is the elder of the two, which would be Frank (if that's who these two are). Try comparing the picture with the other images I have here of Frank. It's not an easy call, I know, but I'm curious to hear your thoughts. See any resemblance?

From Johnson to Westerlund (and back)

When I started looking into family history I knew practically nothing about the Johnson family beyond those relatives that I'd actually known. I did know that my dad's dad's name was Frederick (right, thanks to Ron Johnson for the image), and that he'd died when my dad was very young. I think that was pretty much the extent of it. When I got going on the research I quickly found records of the family in the national censuses of 1940, 1930, and 1920, as well as the New York state census of 1925. I even got a copy of Fred's draft registration card for World War I (see below). He was tall, of medium build, with blue eyes and light brown hair, and born in E. Hempstead, New York.

A visit to the Herkimer County Historical Society early on gave a couple of good hits: the obituary for Fredrick Johnson in the Evening Telegram and a copy of the marriage license for Fredrick and Nellie White (below left). This marriage license was the first indication I had of the names of my great-grandparents. For Nellie, this was straightforward: Luke White and Elizabeth Farnum. For Fred, the parents were given as Alfred Johnson and Charlotte Rumstorn. Spoiler alert: two of the first red herrings! While we were in the Valley, I applied for a copy of Fred's death certificate from the Ilion village office. That arrived a few weeks later, but it gave his parents as Alfred Johnson and Hannah Barthelson (below right). So, the names of his mother don't agree; that's something that would have to be resolved.

But then a roadblock: although I "knew" the names of his parents, I was unable to find anything about the family in the available censuses. They should have shown up at least in the 1892 and 1905 New York censuses and the 1900 and 1910 national censuses (Fred was born in 1888, but the 1890 census data was almost entirely lost in a fire in 1921). Also, a request for the birth certificate of Fredrick Arthur Johnson, born June 9, 1888 in Hempstead came up empty. So here I was, stymied, for quite a while.

Following up on other leads, Fred's obituary said that he was survived by his wife, five children, and a sister, Mrs. William Coperwitch of Woodhaven, L.I. My mom had told me that dad had an Aunt Wilma, and that her husband was a cop in New York City. This was all news to me. Some of you, I know, actually knew Aunt Wilma, but she was a total mystery to me. I could find them in the census records, though.

Eventually, I hit on the idea of writing to the New York City Police Department and asking if they had any information on William Coperwitch that they could share with me. The NYPD came through bigtime, sending me a thick packet of records of his assignments, promotion, pension records, even a photograph of him (see at right). Since Wilma was covered in his pension, there were even a few documents relating to her. And this was the critical record, although it took many months for me to finally put two and two together. On the pension card for Wilma it gives the date that she married Bill Coperwitch: 29 April, 1923. When the light clicked on, I requested a copy of their marriage license from the City of New York. When it came ... wait for it ... it gave her maiden name as Wilma Westerlund and her parents as Alfred (no last name given) and Charlotta Borthelson. Now it seemed like one of those situations where you take two steps forward and one step back. Wilma Coperwitch as Fred Johnson's sister agrees with the obituary and with family recollection. The names "Alfred," "Charlotta" and "Borthelson" are consistent with the Johnson/White marriage license and Fred's death certificate. But Alfred's surname was given as Johnson in both documents, and Charlotta almost matches the marriage license, while it's Borthelson that almost matches the death certificate. So although I got all excited about this finding, the number of discrepancies really made me worry.

What resolutions of these problems that I've been able to make have come in small snippets. First, a search through census records for a Westerlund family with father Alfred turned up, as expected, records for 1892, 1900, 1905, 1910 and 1920. (Somehow, they were missed entirely in the 1905 census. I traced the census takers' steps and they just skipped the building they were living in at the time!) One of the children is a boy named Arthur, born in 1888 (same year as Fred). Another is a daughter named Wilma. The mother's name is given as Hannah C. (1892, 1900), Hanna (1905), Charlotte (1910), and Hannah (1920). So if her name was Hannah Charlotta or something similar, then the first names on the documents I had would be consistent.

Now the question became, is Fred Johnson, living in Ilion, the same person as Arthur Westerlund, formerly living in Brooklyn? I don't have a smoking gun, something like a legal name change document. But here's the best I have so far. When Alfred passed away in 1923, he died intestate, that is, without a will. As a result, the surrogate's court held hearings to formally give Wilma the authority to deal with outstanding debts and property. Those probate records are online, although they're not indexed! So I slogged through hundreds of cases from the Queens surrogate court until I finally found those relating to the estate of Arthur Westerlund. He had two heirs, daughter Wilma and son Arthur. Arthur travelled to Queens to formally sign away any claims he had to the estate. On these records it shows that Arthur Westerlund was then living in Ilion, New York.

Where did the name Rumstorn on the Johnson/White marriage license come from? Another lucky hit from ancestry.com solved part of that question. In 1915 a Mrs. Westerlund of 494 Elton St. in Brooklyn signed the papers to commit her mother to the New York City Home for the Aged and Infirm, Brooklyn Division. This is the address given for our Westerlunds in the 1912 Brooklyn city directory. The reason for the committal was given as "Dest"(itution). The mother's name was Charlotte Rundstrom. I've since found the marriage license for Hermann Runström and Charlotte Barthelsson. So Rumstorn on the Johnson/White marriage license was really Rundström, and it wasn't Fred's mother, but his grandmother! The question I still can't answer is how or why her name was put on the license. That's one that's yet to be solved. Any ideas?

Of course, the last question is why or how did Arthur Westerlund come up with the name Fredrick Arthur Johnson? For that I have no good answer. Fred's paternal grandfather was Johan Erik Westerlund, so perhaps it was a throwback to the old Scandinavian patronymic naming system: the surname of the son of Lars Andersson is Larsson while the surname of the daughter would be Larsdotter. In fact, if you go back to the early 1800's there is a Westerlund ancestor named Lars Jansson. Other than that, though, I have nothing to go on. But beyond the question of why did he choose to change his name to Johnson is the question of why he chose to change his name at all? My pet theory is that it may be related to the anti-German sentiment that was widespread in the U.S. around the time of World War I. People, companies and even towns changed their names. For example, the town of Berlin, Michigan changed its name to Marne. I mention this because my mother's great-grandfather, Patrick Connel Burns, lived and is buried in Marne. To be sure, Westerlund is not a German name, but would the distinction have been understood by the people in upstate New York? I would hope so, especially considering the large numbers of Germans that lived in the area - remember, the township name is German Flatts - but who knows?

So that's the story of the change from Westerlund to Johnson. There are still a few holes in the evidence and some unanswered questions remain. Maybe we'll get lucky and come up with some correspondence between Fred and his family in Brooklyn/Queens that will answer those questions. Do any such letters exist? Check your attics, bibles, and scrapbooks!

As a final note, I'd like to ask for your help. I'm still experimenting and learning this blogging software, and while the layout looks OK on my computer, you may be seeing something very different. So please let me know if there are problems with the display, size of images, anything that you find annoying. Thanks.