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.