How My Family Came West

My husband asked me this morning why my family ended up in the Western United States. His ancestors’ motivation was easy to pinpoint: they all joined the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and wanted to get to Utah in those days of the “Mormon” gathering.

My ancestors were not religiously motivated, but they came for reasons tapping into the mainstream of American history: they wanted fresh land, or job opportunities, to escape social or political conditions, or to answer that indefinable call to move westward; thus they each participated in the idea of Manifest Destiny in its several facets.

The Andrews family were in Connecticut from 1630 until the turn of the 19th century. Then my ancestor Anson Seeley Andrews went to New York City and opened a mercantile, the name for a general store in those days. He felt the pull westward, so he packed up and moved himself to southern Indiana, the edge of the frontier in those days. He again established a mercantile, and he cleared a large farm, and he added a brick kiln that made the bricks for all the important buildings thereabouts for decades to come. He became pretty wealthy.

Anson Seeley Andrews, red brick barn at
Farmersville, Indiana, built about 1844
Photo: EJ Andrews, 1927

His two sons split up the estate after Anson died, and the younger, Seth, bought a farm in southern Wisconsin. Their mother lived mostly with Seth after that. The elder son, John, was in partnership with their brother-in-law, James Hinkley, Harriet’s husband. John and James bought a large fruit orchard in southern Illinois, to the west of the old Andrews homestead at the southern tip of Indiana. But when the U.S. Civil War broke out, they found themselves in uncomfortable situations time again with their Southern-sympathizing neighbors and business associates. Their wives, Mirinda and Harriet, were feeling the pressure of social disapproval of their Northern sympathies. The Andrews and Hinkley partnership sold out and bought new orchards near Rockford, Illinois, west and a little north of Chicago.

Meanwhile, the Pipers had come from Massachusetts to Kentucky in the late 18th century. Mirinda grew up there, and, her father being a Baptist preacher, they visited a lot at the homes of the wealthy plantation owners. Mirinda found that the white children were snooty and snobby toward the preacher’s poor and shabbily-dressed daughter, so she much preferred escaping to the back of the plantations where the slave cabins were, where she could play with the black children who were far nicer to her than their owners. She grew up hating slavery.

The Barnes family had started out in Connecticut, neighbors to the Andrewses. In the late 18th century they migrated across New York and down the southern shore of Lake Erie to Ohio. Some of them from there went up into Michigan, and then across Lake Michigan north of Chicago, into southern Wisconsin. They sought good farmland all along the way.

Professor Ernest J Andrews supervising physics pupil,
Robert A Waller High School, Chicago, Illinois, 1904.

John and Mirinda Andrews’s sons, Charles, Harry, and Ernest, all stayed in the region around Rockford. I don’t know what Charles did for a living; as a young man of 20, he was listed in the 1880 Census as a farmer. He lived only until he was 40. Harry became an attorney and stayed in the mid-West. Ernest became a high school physics teacher, but as he was always inventing things, he eventually became a patent attorney with a large practice and an office in one of the foremost and fashionable new skyscrapers in Chicago. Ernest met his wife, Vinnie Barnes, on a bicycling trip in Wisconsin.

On the other side of my father’s family were the German branch and the English branch. The Selgraths and Boedefelds had come from the German states in the 1830s and settled in or near Pottsville, Pennsylvania, looking for better opportunities. Ferdinand Boedefeld, a shoemaker, married Catharina Selgrath in the late 1830s and they had ten or more children. Ten grew up. One of the middle children, Ferdinand Joseph, became a cabinet maker and got work finishing the interiors of railroad passenger cars. He and his youngest brother, Frank, made their way across the continent as they worked on the railroad in the early 1880s, and then they took a steamer from San Francisco up the Pacific Coast to Astoria, Oregon. There Ferdinand met Laura Worsley.

Mount Hood from The Dalles, by John Stanley, 1871

Laura was the daughter of English immigrants. John Worsley and his wife, Barbara Oliphant Worsley, had met in the Manchester area of England where their families worked in the cloth-making trades. After they were married, they booked passage to America in 1848 in search of better opportunities and began working in various cloth mills around the east coast—Maryland, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, and New Jersey. When the U.S. Civil War started, John was drafted into the Army. He had to serve six months, and then when he was discharged, he and Barbara packed up everything to move as far away as they could get. They ended up in Brownsville, Oregon, but Barbara had contracted malaria on the way and died almost as soon as she arrived. They had planned to start a woolen mill with some friends, and though John went through with the plans, he had lost heart with Barbara’s death and soon sold out. He took his children and moved north to The Dalles, a town on the Columbia River where the Cascade mountains divide the desert from the coastal region, and Mount Hood towers over the town. He became a photographer, but he lived only ten more years. His sons and elder daughter reared the youngest son and daughter. One son became a steamboat engineer on the Columbia River. One bought a fruit farm just outside of Astoria. Laura, the youngest, divided her time among her brothers’ and sister’s homes. She was living in Astoria when she met Ferdinand J Boedefeld, and they were married there.

Old Faithful Geyser, Yellowstone National Park, 2007

Ferdinand and Laura Boedefeld’s two daughters were born in Tacoma, Washington Territory (it was not yet a state). But Ferdinand’s work took them east clear back to Indiana, Elkhart to be exact, and there the two girls grew up. Beatrice, the elder, became a newspaper reporter. Ruth, the younger, became a nurse. Bee, needing a break after six years of steady work, asked her paper for a leave of absence one summer in return for an extended series of society columns on the adventures of a cabin-maid at Yellowstone National Park. She fell completely in love with the West, she and her girl-friends reading nothing but novels of western adventures like Harold Bell Wright’s The Winning of Barbara Worth and the works of Zane Grey. Bee pursued every opportunity to return to the west and was successful at winning a contract to work for the Tribune in Casper, Wyoming at the end of the First World War.

Meanwhile, back in Chicago, Ernest and Vinnie Andrews had four sons and a daughter. Their eldest son, Frederick, ran away from home when he was 17 and went to Texas where he punched cattle until the day he saw a man gored to death by a longhorn steer. Somewhat sobered, he took a job at a railway machine shop. Transferring to New Mexico, he landed in the machine shop whose foreman happened to be his own uncle, his mother’s brother. This uncle took him home with him and made him write to his parents, and took him in hand to teach him to be a good mechanic.

Fred came down sick with something that required an extended rest. He was sent to Los Angeles where he entered a convalescent hospital, and there he married a nurse. He and his new wife kicked around southern California and Nevada for a couple of years, as Fred’s new passion was mining ventures. He and his pals struck a rich vein of silver ore in Nevada and came out with enough money to start their own company back in Chicago, building dirigibles, or airships. Somewhere along in there his wife had left him, and he obtained a divorce for desertion. The U.S. Government came calling and bought the company as the U.S. was entering the First World War, and Fred got himself a position as a lieutenant in the infant Army Air Corps. He went to France in 1918 and mostly worked on airplane engines during the war.

Driving from Casper, Wyoming, to Yellowstone National Park

As part of his mustering-out pay at the end, Fred Andrews was given 320 acres of land in Wyoming. He went out there to look at it, sold it the next day, and bought an insurance franchise. Bee Boedefeld came calling from the Casper Tribune to interview the reputed airplane expert about his experiences during the war and about his vision of the future of air travel. He embellished his war career somewhat, but his predictions about airplanes proved remarkably prescient. He, however, never entered another aircraft for the rest of his life. He always said he had had enough and to spare during the war. He and Bee were married the next year and went up into the mountains to pursue Fred’s passion for mining. He was sure he would strike it rich again and kept trying these ventures the rest of his life. When the one upon the Continental Divide didn’t work, he and Bee moved to Portland, Oregon.

Bee’s father had died in Elkhart the year before, and her mother and sister had moved west to Portland. Portland had been Laura Worsley Boedefeld’s home when she had been a teenager, and she loved the city. Her brothers and sister lived near. Ruth, Bee’s sister, started a chapter of the Visiting Nurses’ Association in Portland. Every year they rented a cabin at Cannon Beach on the coast and stayed a week.

Bee’s son grew up in Portland. When World War II was over, he came home there and met the woman he would marry, a daughter of Lloyd and Lillie Read.

American families moving west, public domain photo.

Lloyd came from long-time Oregon residents. His great-grandfather had been born in New York and had steadily worked his way, with his family, westward, first to Ohio, then to Illinois, and in 1852, he decided to go to California. The family started with a wagon pulled by oxen, a cow and a couple of horses tied behind. Their sixteen-year-old son proudly rode one of the horses when he was appointed a scout by the leader of the wagon train. Somewhere along the trail, Mr. Read decided too many people were heading to California, and he decided they would go to Oregon instead. They landed in the Willamette Valley and staked a claim.

Nearby lived the Porter family, who had come from Missouri with a wagon train in 1847, having migrated from North Carolina. The Reads’ teenage son and the Porters’ teenage daughter fell in love, and in a few years they married. Their descendants are many, and many of them still live in Oregon.

Lloyd met his wife, Lillie, while working on a train on which she was a passenger. She was a daughter of a Michigan-born woodworker named Les Munro whose Scottish ancestor arrived in America around 1650 as a former prisoner of the British. The Munros settled in New York, and 200 years later Les’s father moved west to Michigan. Les went to Arkansas looking for work opportunities and there married the daughter of a formerly rich Southern family, Mary Jane Whittington. Mary Jane’s family had settled North Carolina and had moved west to renew their farmlands, first to Tennessee, then to Arkansas, Oklahoma, or Texas. Les was something of a ne’er-do-well, and when his wife died, the death certificate said the cause was “want of care.” Apparently disliked by his in-laws, Les decided within a few years to leave the South and get as far away as he could go. He saw an ad for workers needed for the Boise Reclamation Project, a BLM project begun in the early 1900s. He took the children on the train to Boise. After working in that area for a year, he decided to go further west. They had a wagon with a horse or two to pull it, and they crossed Oregon to the southern part of the coast, landing at Marshfield, which now is called Coos Bay. After a year there, he decided to go to Portland, where there would surely be better work opportunities.

Portland, Oregon, about 1910. Public domain photo.

And that is how Lloyd and Lillie ended up meeting on a train from Portland, Oregon, to Vancouver, Washington, just across the Columbia River. And from that circumstance, my parents were both in Portland and were fated to meet after the Second World War.

It is a typically American story of people starting somewhere in the east, whether they were the descendants of 17th-century English and Scottish immigrants, or the children of 19th-century German and English immigrants, they moved ever westward until all the branches of my family tree reached Oregon. They were looking mostly for better job and living opportunities. Some moved to escape the conditions of the U.S. Civil War, and some felt drawn to the West by something almost spiritual, their own “manifest destiny” taking hold and pulling them by the hand until they came within the reach of the Pacific shore.

Oregon coast, June 2014.