Dying Branches and Family Trees

I can’t help myself—I have to write about this family I’ve been researching, even though I wrote about them just yesterday. They deserve a memorial, because this branch might be dying out. Here’s the story.

John and Barbara grew up a few streets apart in a suburb of Manchester, England. They were the same age and both sets of parents worked in the cloth manufacturing industry at the very dawn of the industrial age. Probably the parents had started as cottage weavers, but with the invention of steam power and things being mechanized as fast as inventors could figure out a way to do it, they moved into town and began to specialize. John and Barbara had a little schooling and by their mid-teens were working alongside their parents.

Money was probably pretty scarce for the families. John and Barbara were not able to marry until they were 23 years old, and within a few months they spent their hard-earned money to buy emigrants’ passage to New York. Their eldest son was born a few months after they had arrived and had gotten work in a cotton and woolen mill near Philadelphia. Barbara was busy with babies every two years for ten years, and John got work in various mills, moving the family within Pennsylvania, to Massachusetts, back to Pennsylvania, to Maryland, and finally to New Jersey. The boy born in Massachusetts had died when he was about ten months old, so they had four children. The Civil War came along, and John served as a First Lieutenant in the New Jersey 1st Cavalry Volunteers, Company D. Before the war was over, the last daughter was born, six years after her next older brother.

John decided they must try the West, and he made his way across the country with a wagon train, ending up in Oregon. There he founded a woolen mill in Brownsville, and Barbara and the five children, and several friends who wanted to work in the mill, prepared to join him there. They sailed from New Jersey to Panama, crossed the Isthmus on mule back, and sailed up to Coos Bay, stopping at San Francisco on the way. Sadly, Barbara contracted malaria in Panama and died a few weeks after getting the children safely to their father in Brownsville, Oregon. She was only 38. John lost heart and left the mill. He moved the children to that little town on the Columbia River where eventually his three remaining sons would be buried. He became the town’s photographer. He lived only nine more years, dying when he was only 48.

His eldest son, William, never married. He is the one I talked about yesterday, who worked as a laborer until his death when he was 67.

The next son, Benjamin, had that very odd marriage to Felicia who left him after 31 years and married someone else (I found the second husband after writing about them). Ben and Felicia had two sons, Ralph and Paul. Paul died at the age of four. Ben died at the age of 75. His son Ralph died at the age of 58, leaving two sons. Ralph’s sons, Don and John, died at the ages of 50 and 54, respectively. Wow. Did these men have short-lived genes or what? I don’t know whether Don and John had children. I think at least one of them did, because in the hazy part of my memory when we used to visit Ralph’s widow once a year (our yearly trip across the Golden Gate Bridge!), I think I remember meeting her two grandchildren once, children about my age or a little older.

The next sibling was Sarah, who married Clark and had two daughters and then a son. The second daughter, Beatrice, died at the age of five. The eldest daughter, Claudia, became a music teacher and never married or had children. The son, Clint, was epileptic and cared for his widowed mother until she died at the age of 74. Clint died soon after their mother, when he was 45. He had not married nor had children. Claudia died when she was 79.

After Sarah came Joseph. He’s the one who married for the first time when he was 56, to a woman who was about 50, and they didn’t have children together. He died when he was 81 years old.

Finally there was Laura. She married Ferdinand, and they had two daughters, Beatrice and Ruth. The elder married when she was in her mid-thirties; the younger never married. Beatrice had one son and died when she was 49. Laura died ten years later, when she was nearly 83. Ruth was a nurse and lived to be 83. Beatrice’s son had six children. I’m one of them.

If Ben’s grandsons, Don and Ralph, had children, then they and we are the last of this family. There are probably only eight of us in my generation, and from six of us there are only four more in the next generation. A shrinking branch!

In summary, John and Barbara had six children, seven grandchildren, three great-grandchildren, eight great-great grandchildren, and four great-great-great grandchildren. The trend doesn’t seem to be toward growth in the family tree. Where are all the branches? This tree seems to be growing like a bumpy shrub or something. Maybe the next generation will have only two in it, full circle back to John and Barbara’s generation. And then the tree will disappear. Is that sad?

Naaaaah.

Speaking of dying trees, or not, you should see two of my trees in the front yard. A couple years ago, our next door neighbors left and the man who owned the house came and sprayed the weeds from time to time that summer. He used this powerful herbicide that is supposed to keep anything from growing for years. The wind blows all the time here, and that stuff blew over the little fence and through the west half of the Macintosh apple tree. It hit the new little honey locust tree that our daughter and granddaughter gave my husband for his birthday. By the end of the summer, the two trees looked pretty darned sick. A year ago in the spring, the honey locust looked dead, and the apple tree was having a very hard time of it. It put out sick-looking little leaves that withered but somehow didn’t quite die until winter. We cut off the honey locust and trained up one of the suckers out of the roots to make a new tree. It's skinny, but it's doing well. This spring only half the apple tree leafed out, and those leaves look sick. A local expert told my neighbor to tell us to cut out all the dead stuff and not give up hope. This week we cut out all the dead stuff, and now we have a half a Macintosh apple tree. It looks terrible! We’re hoping to train some suckers to become branches out the west side of the tree. I decided I’d better put fertilizer on it every week—talk to it encouragingly every morning after my walk—you know, whatever I can think of to give it every chance to recover.

Like we did with the apple tree and the honey locust when it looked like they were dead, when your family is severely stressed, you sometimes do something radical and you always pray. If your family is dying out, it might not matter at all. The thing is, families are eternal and so it doesn’t matter whether a tree branch here or there stops growing: you have a responsibility to do everything you can to keep your section healthy while it’s here and then pray that it will reach its full potential in the hereafter.

I’m pretty sure that John and Barbara are proud of the lot of us.

Debunking Family History

One day in Oregon, we drove to a small town on the Columbia River. We rolled in, checked in at our motel, and my sister-in-law and I went out to a cemetery where I had information that my grandma’s three beloved uncles were buried.

I had heard stories of these uncles. They helped raise their baby sister, my great-grandmother. One uncle was supposed to be an operator of a riverboat on the Columbia River. The navigation at the mouth of the Columbia where it flows into the Pacific Ocean is supposed to be very tricky, very dangerous. I had formed romantic ideas of his very dangerous occupation. I don’t remember hearing much about the occupations of the other uncles, but they were all supposed to be extraordinary people.

However, in the spirit of the appraisers on Antiques Roadshow who delight in telling people how wrong their ideas are about their inherited wealth, I found the truth about these uncles and their occupations, and a little bit more.

The uncle who was supposed to have been the lifelong bachelor steamboat operator turns out to have started his working life as a carder in a woolen mill when he was a very young man, and from then on he is described as nothing more romantic than a laborer, or a farm laborer. Uh oh, this is sounding downright dull.

The second of the uncles started out promising: as an 18-year-old he was a fireman on a steamboat on the Columbia River. This sounds like our man. Ten years later he is described as an engineer, but what kind is left to the imagination. Maybe a train engineer? A steamboat engineer? Thereafter he was a fruit tree farmer on the old Columbia River highway near Astoria. He married and had two children, one of whom died young.

Then, twenty to thirty years later, something weird happened, and I wonder if anyone will ever know what it was. In 1900, a census taker came around the farm on June 8th, and he wrote down Benjamin as the head of the household, Felicia as his wife, and their son Ralph, age 19, a teacher. It all looked perfectly normal. But the next week, on June 16th, a census taker inside the city limits enumerated the same family at a different location, with some strange differences. Ben was just “B” and the boxes for his parentage and place of origin are filled with one large word across the page: “unknown.” His occupation is listed as “auctioneer” and it says he’s unemployed for five months. It says he owns the home, but it’s mortgaged. The information for Felicia is more complete, but neither of their birth year boxes contains accurate information. Their son Ralph is listed here as being “at school” and unemployed for four months. I wonder if this all means that the parents had bought Ralph a house in town. If there were no more strange census returns, that’s what I would conclude.

However, ten years later things get a lot stranger. On April 26th, the census taker came around to the farm and wrote down Benjamin and Felicia and all the correct information about them. They had been married 31 years. The third person living with them is Ben’s older brother, William, working as a farm laborer. Now Ben owns the farm outright, with no mortgage on it. Things look pretty prosperous.

The next week, on May 2nd, in Santa Clara County, California, another census taker found Felicia as the head of a household consisting of herself and her son, Ralph, who is a professor at the high school. Felicia is employed as the house mother of the “clubhouse.” What does this mean? Has she figured out how to clone herself? Did she move to California and get a job within six days? What happened to her and Ben?

The next year, she is found on a passenger list for the ship Asia disembarking at San Francisco, having come from Hong Kong, China, and planning to return to Portland, Oregon. Did she and Ben decide she should have lots more freedom of movement? Or was the truth that their marriage broke up after Ralph was grown and established?

The final blow comes on 15 January 1919, when she is reported to have married in Clatsop County, Oregon, groom unknown. I haven’t found a record of hers and Ben’s divorce. He didn’t die until 1927. Did she commit bigamy? Hm. It is quite interesting to come across the skeletons in the closet that the older members of our family never told us.

In January 1920, the census taker finds Ben living in a large rented house in Astoria, where he is the head of the household and says he is single, with 17 people renting rooms from him in a sort of boarding house called “Astoria Land Home.” His older brother William had died three years before.

Their younger brother, Joseph, remains something of an enigma. He escapes being enumerated on the census until he has retired, so nothing is known of his occupation. He did not marry until he was 56 years old, and his wife had been married before and was around 50 years old when they married. They owned a home in Portland in 1920 and were still there in1930. Joseph died in the Santa Clara Valley of California before 1940. His wife died in Portland two years later.

The graves I found were in Joseph’s name. He must have bought the lots when the eldest brother, William, died in 1916. William had no other family. Then Ben died in 1927, apparently still estranged from his son and ex-wife, because he is buried next to his older brother. When Joe died twelve years later, his wife buried him there beside his two brothers, and whoever was left after that buried her there too, in that little town on the Columbia River, several hours’ drive from where they lived most of their lives.

It is not the story I thought I was going to find. It’s a lot more human, and it has a lot of sadness in it.

No Stone

We’ve been cemetery hunting. I decided one rainy afternoon when we held a mini family reunion at a restaurant in Portland that afterwards we would program “Jane” our GPS to take us to the cemetery where my Grammy’s baby boy was buried, the uncle who lived only a couple of weeks. I was curious to see his grave, since when I was a child hanging around my older relatives, they never spoke of Earl and nobody I knew ever had visited his grave.

We found the cemetery easily. It is one of those that some kind genealogically-minded soul has catalogued and put online, so I had a map of all the graves and the correct coordinates for the one I sought.

It should have been easy: count four rows from Holgate and then five plots in from the edge. But old graves tend to shift or something, and there were several spaces with no stones or signs that they had been used, and they weren’t reflected on the map. It was raining (of course, this is Oregon after all), and I was wearing sandals, and my feet were getting muddy. I couldn’t find any trace of the grave for the baby.

Perhaps my grandparents, just 21 and 23 years old and with a toddler daughter, were too poor to afford a gravestone at the time their baby died. Perhaps as the years passed, and the jobs were scarce, and they moved a lot, and there were more and more children to provide for, it was less and less a priority to mark the place.

A few years ago when I was working and we could spend money on pretty much anything we wanted to, I would have immediately ordered a modest little stone to mark this place. But the economy has tanked, and although they say it’s recovering, I haven’t. I am not working and we are on a very tight budget, and the place will have to remain unmarked. I can’t see my aunts and uncles wanting to buy a marker for the brother they never knew when their parents didn’t mark the place or even visit it.

At least it is recorded on the Internet for those who seek him:
R.I.P. Earl Lester Read, born and died in January 1914.