In that old post I described my pet theory: he changed his name in order to avoid the anti-German sentiments that were common in the U.S. during the years of the First World War. Those sentiments were real enough, but I no longer believe that that was his reason.
Where is this coming from? For several months now, I’ve been following the trail of the families of the mother of my maternal grandmother, the Driscolls and the Collins from West Cork in Ireland. One of the intriguing – and frustrating – parts of this has been trying to figure out how some DNA matches fit into the family. These matches involve three adopted children, two of which are connected (the same mother), but the third somehow is a separate story. Last week I was looking at some folks from Bayonne, New Jersey (yes, Jersey!). Anyway, one of them was born on Long Island. That led me to remember my grandfather. His draft record said that he had been born in East Hempstead, but I had been unable to obtain a birth certificate. But that was before I knew his original name, and maybe in my earlier searches I hadn’t used the name Arthur Westerlund. So I ran another search.
What I found was a marriage record. We know that Fred Johnson married Nellie White in 1919, but this wasn’t Nellie. This was a 1914 marriage between Arthur Westerlund and a person named Helen Agnes Tucker! Coincidence? No: the father of the groom was named Alfred and the mother was named Hannah Bottleson. My Fred/Arthur’s parents were Gustaf Alfred Westerlund and Johanna Charlotta Barthelsson. There was also a small notice published in a Brooklyn paper called “The Chat” listing marriage licenses issued in which the address of Arthur Westerlund, age 25, was given as 494 Elton Street. I have several records that confirm that this was where my Westerlunds were living.
It is at this point that alarm bells started going off in my head. What do we know about Helen Tucker? In the transcription of the marriage license (I haven’t gotten a copy of the original yet), her parents are cited as Elom Leroy Tucker and Mary Delany. Further investigation showed that her father’s name was actually Alvin Leroy Tucker. This marriage record gives Helen’s age as 18. This is not true: Helen Tucker was born on 27 Feb 1898, in the Bronx. Therefore, she was only 16 years old when she married Arthur.
That prompted me to try to do a little research on the question of the minimum legal age at which a woman (a girl?) could marry. What I found was, frankly, disturbing. Leave aside for the moment the question of what the laws were in 1914. Today, in the year 2021, the minimum age at which a girl can marry in the state of Massachusetts is 12, yes, twelve, years old. Prior to 2017, the minimum age in New York was 14. Looking back to the 19th century, the age of consent in the state of Delaware in 1880 was … wait for it … seven. I have tried to avoid applying 21st century morals to people living centuries earlier, but I must admit that this pushes me close to my limits.
Let's continue following the timeline. In the 1915 New York state census, we find Helen listed as Helen Westerlund, but living with her parents at 373 Cleveland Street in Brooklyn, about 3 ½ blocks from the Westerlund home on Elton Street. But there’s no Arthur living there. In fact, the Westerlunds seem to be entirely missing from that census. I worked through the records, page by page, following the census taker as he walked the blocks: he goes straight from 492 Elton to 496 Elton. I guess that either no one answered the door when he knocked, or he didn't even recognize it as a separate dwelling.
The next record of Arthur Westerlund/Fred Johnson is in the 1917 WWI draft registration. He was then living on Railroad Street (now Central Ave) in Ilion under his new name. A year later he is in the army, in the Syracuse Recruit Camp, in 1918, Fred then married Nellie on 01 Nov 1919 in Ilion. As I mentioned earlier, Fred listed his parents as Alfred Johnson and Charlotte Rumstrom. Alfred was, indeed, his father’s name; Swedes often go by either their first, second, or even third given names in everyday life. Charlotte Rumstrom is a mangled form of his mother’s name. Although her real maiden name was Barthelsson, her mother in 1888 had married a private detective in New York named Herman Maleus Eugene Olausson Rundström. I suppose that if we squint a bit, Fred didn’t really falsify the names of his parents.
If the names of his parents were reasonably close, though, what about his own name change? There is, and was at the time, a legal process for changing one’s name. All this involves is filing a form with a court and paying a fee. That filing then becomes a public record. I haven’t actually done the research, but I doubt that Fred bothered to go through with this. I’ll explain why in the next paragraph. But if you think about the times, Fred had never traveled abroad (to my knowledge), and I’m not even sure how widely passports were in use at the time. In the 1910 Federal census Arthur’s occupation is said to be a driver for a private family. Whether he drove a motorcar or some sort of horse-drawn conveyance is not clear. But driver’s licenses were not mandated in New York City until 1919. So, I’m left wondering what kind of personal identification people would generally be using at the time. I suspect that there was none at all. I can easily imagine that if you moved from one place to another, your name was what you said it was, no questions asked.
On Jan 26, 1920 in Portsmouth, Virginia, Helen Westerlund divorced Arthur on grounds of desertion. I’m sure you’ve done the arithmetic in your head already: that leaves a period of nearly three months in which Arthur Westerlund aka Fred Johnson is legally married to two different women. To me, then, a likely scenario is that Arthur married Helen and almost immediately abandoned her. He then scuttled north to central New York under a new name, presumably to avoid being discovered. When his father died in 1923 (his mother had died the year earlier) Fred returned to Brooklyn to sign away any claim to the estate. Thus, it seems likely that at least his sister Wilma (the only other heir) knew where he was living so that he could return to Brooklyn to take care of the paperwork.
To wrap up some loose ends, Arthur Westerlund and Helen Tucker – to the best of my knowledge – had no children together. After divorcing Arthur in January of 1920, Helen married Charles Aloysius Angley on 18 Jun 1920. Angley’s father had died when he was only 8 years old. This is another ugly story, with charges of his father regularly beating his mother showing up in the local papers. His mother subsequently remarried to a man named John James Campbell. As a result, Charles appears in the records under both the name Angley and Campbell. By 1930 Helen and Charles Angley/Campbell were divorced, and she then married Jacob Stelling sometime before 1940. They stay together until he passed in 1969 and she died in 1986. Helen apparently never had any children of her own. I have found her nephew on Ancestry.com, and, in a biography of his grandfather, he wrote that Helen and Jacob raised a grand-niece from the time she was a baby. I have reached out with a message to this nephew, but he is now in his mid 80s, and I haven’t heard back from him yet.
By the time that I discovered the Westerlund to Johnson name conversion, only one of the children of Fred and Nellie Johnson was still living, my aunt Phyllis Dickenson. I had a chance to chat with her about the name change, and she somewhat wryly said that she suspected that her family was being suspiciously secretive and that there might have been something untoward or illegal going on (gasp!). Maybe her intuition was right all along. I’m also reminded that Nellie’s sister, Kathryn (Kaddie) Squire, was extraordinarily reluctant to talk about family history. I wonder if this story of abandonment and bigamy was involved. I also shudder to think that that is only the tip of this particular iceberg. Obviously, I haven’t answered all the questions with which I began this post, but I think we’ve taken a few steps toward in that direction. I wonder where the path will lead us.
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