Nora Quackenbush Could’ve Been My Grandma

But she wasn’t.

Technically speaking, she was married to my great-grandfather for maybe a year, more or less. All I know for certain is that she married him in the spring of 1918, and by December 1919 things were as if the marriage never happened. It might be as well to trace the meanderings of Nora Quackenbush to make an effort to pin this thing down.

Nora was born to Reuben and Mary Quackenbush in Wisconsin in June 1865. The family later moved to South Dakota, and then to Nebraska, to Thayer County. Nora married a man named Boston Armstrong when she was 19 years old and bore him three children: Lillian, Lester, and William.

Sometime after William’s birth the marriage broke up, and she apparently next had a relationship with someone surnamed Hunt, because in the next census she reports a son named Johnnie Hunt, born in June 1897. Four months later, in October 1897 she married Samuel Levy Werring (or Waring), so the Hunt connection was over with. Johnnie took Samuel’s surname as his own, combined with Hunt, so his records show his full name as John David Hunt Werring.

Nora and Samuel had a son named Reuben, born in the spring of 1900, the same month as the census was taken. They didn’t have any more children together, and I wonder if Samuel died while they were married, because when any subsequent marriages ended, she went back to using the surname Werring and listed herself as “widowed.” Samuel was an elusive subject to research; he appears in exactly one record: his marriage to Nora. That marriage record says he was born about 1862 in Wisconsin. Nothing tells us where he lived, what he did for a living, or where he died and was buried.

Nora appeared on some census records as a child in Wisconsin. Samuel appears nowhere as a child or adult except at his wedding.

Samuel wasn’t even living with Nora and the children when that census was taken in 1900, although his own son had just been born that month. Instead, Nora and Lillie, Willie, Johnnie, and baby Reuben (Lester was with his Quackenbush grandmother in South Dakota) live with a Mr. Willis Marshall, for whom she works as a “servant.” It’s odd.

(Nora’s Samuel might be the Samuel Waring living in Kansas in 1895, a bachelor with a family boarding with him. Other than that possibility, it looks as if he was successful in avoiding a single record being created about him—except his marriage to Nora. Did he even exist? Hm.)

Next thing that shows up is in 1910, Nora is in her third marriage to a man named William Purdy, living in the central part of Washington state near the Canadian border. This is quite a drastic move from Nebraska. There is nothing to suggest why Nora moved there. William Purdy is a baker from Canada, five years older than Nora. Nora’s children Lillian, Lester, William, and John live with them, but not young Reuben Werring. Where did he go?

The very next year the family was counted in the 1911 Canada census. They had moved several hundred miles north of Vancouver, British Columbia. But now Nora is the head of the household, and where the baker went is anybody’s guess. Nora has her two youngest sons listed with her, but Reuben’s name is listed as “Willis,” which, coincidentally, is the first name of the man for whom Nora was working when that son was born. The boys’ surnames are “Werring.”

(Could “Willis Marshall” have been a pseudonym for Samuel Levy Werring? Or vice versa?)

In addition to her two younger sons, Nora had a 29-year-old lodger named Benjamin Peon living in the house. The Purdy marriage was apparently over, and Nora moved back to the United States, staying in the Pacific Northwest.

In the late 19-teens she met my grandfather, William Lester Munroe. The marriage record gives his home as Camas, Washington, on the southern border of the state near Vancouver. It gives her address as Molson, Washington, almost on the Canadian border (Molson is now a ghost town and was never very well populated). They lived over 400 miles apart. Where and how they met are a mystery, as I do not know what either was doing in those years. I suspect he was going from job to job, doing whatever he could find. He never was very stable in his employment.

They married in Vancouver, Washington, in May 1918. Lester had just turned 60, and Nora was going to be 53 the next month. Lester brought witnesses to the wedding: his daughter Medora and his brother James. If Nora had anyone there, we don’t know about it. The marriage certificate says this was Lester’s third marriage and Nora’s fourth.

Wait. Lester had a second marriage that we don’t know about yet? The family knows about only his marriage to Mary Jane Whittington in 1884. She died in 1899, and we thought he was living as a widower all that time. Well, well, well. Now we know about this marriage to Nora Quackenbush Werring (or to put it more accurately, Nora Quackenbush Armstrong Werring Purdy). I guess I need to do some more digging for another marriage for Lester Munroe!

To continue with Nora’s story, as I said, the marriage was soon over. She married again in Spokane, Washington, on 22 December 1919 to a man named E. Varney. She used her childhood name, Elnora, but she signed “Lenora” and the clerk wrote “L. Nora.” She used the surname Werring. She said this was her second marriage, that she was a widow. It was really her fifth, at least so far as I know—at the rate she was going, she could have been married several more times before Lester met her!

This marriage didn’t last either. She listed herself in the 1930 census as Nora Werring, widow.

I’m sorry to be so judgmental, but I suspect my grandfather was well rid of her. No wonder nobody ever mentioned this in telling us stories about his life. But now that I’m being judgmental, I have to wonder what happened to this woman to produce such a level of instability in her personal relationships. From my studies of genealogy, I have found that usually some sort of trauma precedes this kind of a life, whether the death of a parent, loss of another kind, or related trauma. Whatever it was, poor Nora.

Her son Reuben, whose name had been permanently changed to Willis E., died in September 1924, a private in the U.S. Army. Her son John David, who went by the name Jack, served in the U.S. Navy during World War I, came home and settled in Montana, where he married. He later moved back to Washington. Her son William died in 1928. Her son Lester took the name John, changed the details of his birth, and got himself a ranch in Nevada. He never married. Her daughter Lillie married a number of times, apparently following her mother’s pattern. Nora died in Washington in 1946 and was buried in Walla Walla near Willis. Jack is buried there too.