Returning again to the family of Nicholas Selgrath and his wife, Margaretha Hartung (I have written about them in this blog before), we might think a couple who married in the 1840s and had six children would have a very numerous progeny by now.
Yet within two generations their family had died out except for one possible line.
Of their six children, only one son had any children, and he had just two. One of those children had children. What causes such a thing? Was it simply bad luck?
The eldest son seems to have moved around a lot and apparently never settled down or got married. The 1870 census, when he was around 22 – 23 years old, found him working as a brakeman on the railroad and living at home. His name was Francis, or Frans, as one census calls him, and Frank, as he is called in the 1900 Census, when he was living in the town of Mammoth in the mining district of the Tintic Mountains of Utah and working as a locomotive engineer. (Mammoth is a favorite now with people who like ghost towns, but back when Frank lived there it was booming.)
His next sister, Mary, was working as a “tailoress” when she was 18. Somewhere she met Christian Kramer, who ran a carpentry business with his younger brother Henry. Mary and Christian married in Manhattan, New York, on 25 August 1874. Henry Kramer married a couple of years later and had seven children. Maria and Christian never had any. They moved to California about 1876 and in 1886 were living in downtown San Francisco. By 1900 they had moved to Fruitvale, a suburb of Alameda, and then by 1910 they had settled in Oakland, where they remained. Mary continued her dressmaking business throughout her life. Christian died there in 1923, and Mary nine years later in 1932, having become an inmate in an “old people’s home.”
The third sibling, Jacob F Selgrath, was still going to school when he was 16, and by the time he was 26 his occupation was a nonspecific “laborer.” That was in 1880. He died on 25 November 1900 of heart disease at his home in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The record states that he was working as a driver and was married. I even looked up the address where he died and found it on the 1900 census, but another family was living there in June when the census was taken. The Selgraths must have moved there between June and November that year. There has been no record found of his wife’s name nor whether there were any children. I’m assuming there were not, because I have not found any Selgrath children of the right age living in that area during the next few decades who aren’t already identified as belonging to some other branch of the family. But I could be wrong—I frequently am!
The next child in the family is Margaret, and we know about her. She’s the one who went with her other siblings to Utah and ended up marrying a railroad man there—a widower with two little children. She was the one who was active in Catholic Church work and I speculated that she worked in the parish that included the Cathedral of the Madeleine in Salt Lake City. She had no children of her own.
After Margaret came Charles. We’ve already discussed him too. He’s the one who became a railroad man, married Emma Leonard, and they had a son in Salt Lake City and a daughter in Pennsylvania after they moved back home. They ended up twenty years later in Ogden, Utah, where Emma died, and then Charles moved to San Francisco to live with his daughter and her husband, which is where Charles died. Charles’s son died unmarried and childless, and Charles’s daughter had four children. Whether any of them had children is unknown at present.
Last in the family comes John F Selgrath, born in 1867. He grew up and became a locomotive engineer like his brothers. Like them too, he moved to Salt Lake City. He married Maggie Ammerman in 1899, a woman ten years younger than himself, either from West Jordan, Utah, or from Iowa, depending on which record you look at. You may remember in the story about John’s sister Margaret, she and her husband lived in West Jordan in 1900. Probably that’s where John met Maggie Ammerman. She could have been from both places: she was probably born in Iowa and the family had moved to West Jordan when she met John.
They don’t appear to have had children when John died suddenly in the summer of 1906. The record doesn’t say what the cause of death was, but it occurred in Farmington, Davis County, Utah, another very rural place in those days. I wondered if John had the family heart disease, and then I saw on the Findagrave memorial page this sentence: “He drowned in Lagoon Pond.” Really! Was he swimming?
Lagoon Resort opened in the summer of 1886 on the shores of the Great Salt Lake, called Lake Park in those days. Then the proprietors moved it east to Farmington where there was a big pond, hence the name change. You should see the history here. I hope John got a chance to ride on the new Carousel, which had just been installed that year. But what a horror for Maggie, for what must have been supposed to be a fun outing to turn into tragedy like that.
Or did she push him in? Maggie remarried in less than a year. (I do tend to read too many murder mysteries.) If she did the dastardly deed, she got her comeuppance fairly soon—she died during an operation for an ovarian cyst in 1912.
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| Lagoon Resort, from the their website history page |
Hi Marci,
ReplyDeleteBecause of the fuel for locomotives, coal and the method of delivery to the firebox in the mid to late 1800's, a shovel, most locomotive crew members spent the day, (or night) with coal dust all over their skin. Before 1890, when most new locomotives began to be delivered with mechanical stokers, skin cancer and testicular cancer were very common among them. They worked up to 16 or more hours per day getting the trains to their destinations and were away from home for several days at a time. A lot of them had few or no children. John Luther Jones, (Casey Jones) and his wife Mary had no children or only one or two. She died around 1970, alone.
Thank you! I was hoping you would add something about the profession they all were in. I never would have guessed. It's kind of sad--and the other line of this family being anthracite miners--same thing?
DeleteQuite likely, in addition to lung problems associated with breathing coal dust and for the railroaders, breathing the fumes from the burning coal.
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