The Evidence of the City Directories

I was trying to figure out the course of my great-aunt Ruth’s nursing career. It’s hard to do without much documentation. She didn’t keep a diary that I know of, and when my father moved her from her apartment in Portland, Oregon, after she fell and broke her hip, a lot of her papers must have been thrown out to condense her things to be moved into our house with eight people already living in it. Then her papers were probably further condensed when my parents moved from their big house to a double-wide trailer house. (Later they built a large house again.) A final condensation of papers happened when my parents decided to reduce their household down to a single travel trailer during the years they followed the sunshine and had no fixed address.

Aunt Ruth wasn’t much for talking about her own life. When I got to know her well the year that she and I were left alone in California together, we talked mainly about her sister, the grandmother I never knew.

But now I’m digging into her past and have discovered a source of information about her professional life: city directories on Amazon.com.

Ruth Boedefeld was born late in 1892. That means that it was about 1910 when she graduated from high school. Maybe even 1911. What did she do next?

1912 Elkhart, Indiana City Directory

The 1912 city directory for Elkhart, Indiana, shows that she was an assistant secretary to the YWCA (Young Women’s Christian Association). The directory says she boarded at 528 Vistula in Elkhart, which was her parents’ home. (I think it’s fun to see that her sister, Beatrice, rated a large bold-face entry for her position as the society editor on the Elkhart Truth. But their father, the cabinet-making foreman at the Lake Shore and Michigan Southern railroad shop, might have felt slighted—or not—he seems to have encouraged his daughters in their careers.)

Bee on that large front porch

In 1914 the city directory has Ruth as a student, still boarding with her parents, but their residence changed to 714 W Marion. It was a large house (the 2011 Google screen shot shows that the house had been divided), and there were a few pictures of their front porch showing they had a lot of room. Back to Ruth the student—I have no idea what she was studying at that point.


Ruth didn’t study nursing until a few years later. In the summer of 1916 her sister, Bee, went to Yellowstone for a few months, and Ruth was her substitute at the Elkhart Truth in the interim. Perhaps she was taking a typing class. Typewriters had by that time assumed the form that they would keep for decades. The Truth office reporters used under-mount typewriters until at least 1917, when Bee bought her own tiny portable Corona typewriter.

The 1917 typewriter

In the 1917 city directory Ruth is listed as a clerk for the New York Central Railroad (the successor to the LS and MS). Then of course the United States joined the World War in Europe.

Ruth went to nursing school and joined the United States Army Nursing Corps. The 1920 Census shows her in Washington D.C. at Walter Reed Hospital. Down on line 95 she appears, an Army nurse still, a little over a year since the Armistice on November 11, 1918.

The entry in the 1922 Elkhart, Indiana city directory is a little sad. Ruth was back at home and working as a nurse at the local hospital in Elkhart. Her father died that October, and during the next year she and her mother settled up his estate, sold their home, and headed to Portland, Oregon.

The next city directory to show Ruth is Portland, Oregon in 1924. She and her mother took a house in the Ladd Addition, a planned community in a wagon-wheel configuration with a rose garden in the center. Ruth worked for the Visiting Nurse Association, probably as soon as she arrived in Portland. The Visiting Nurse Association was a loosely-allied series of organizations around the country of home-health care services. In Portland they ran clinics for giving inoculations and basic child and maternal health care.

The 1924 Portland, Oregon City Directory

The 1926 Portland, Oregon, city directory shows that Laura and Ruth moved four or five blocks east to a place on the corner of SE 9th and Market Streets. Ruth was working for the Visiting Nurse Association.

The 1927 directory shows no change in their location or Ruth’s professional position.

But in 1929 they had moved about a mile north to 789 NE Pacific Street. There was no change yet in Ruth’s profession.

The Great Depression had no effect on Ruth’s job. Nursing was always necessary. But perhaps she and her mother could not afford the place on Pacific, for they moved several blocks north to 753 Weidler where they paid $35 a month for the rent, according to the U.S. Federal Census for 1930, taken in April of that year.

They stayed there, as recorded in the 1931 city directory, which shows Ruth as expected, but her mother is listed several lines above with her last name quite mangled as Boebeseld. Ruth is listed also right below her mother as a “registered nurse.”

In 1933 the city directory shows a change in Ruth’s status. She is the Welfare Supervisor for the Visiting Nurse Association. She and her mother had moved again, 15 blocks east, to a little house.

When the 1940 Census was taken, Ruth and her mother had moved to 1202 Tillamook, at the corner of NE 12th Street. They had Bee’s son living with them at that time. Ruth was doing well in her profession.

Showing seven places Ruth lived in Portland, Oregon

The war years were hard on everyone. Ruth’s nephew went off into the Army, and her mother, Laura, died in 1945 a few months before the war ended. Ruth rose to the position of general supervisor of the Visiting Nurse Association in Portland.

In the years afterward, Ruth rented apartment No. 2 in a double building at the corner of NE 16th and Hancock streets. She lived there for the next two decades.

I am not sure whether she retired when she was 65 years old, in late 1957, or later. She appeared in the 1956 Portland City Directory still listed as a supervisor for the Visiting Nurse Association. When the 1959 edition came out, she was listed at her residence, but no profession.

And that is where the city directories leave me hanging. I don’t know where else to look for later city directories. But they might turn up, and they might give me some more information.

Still looking . . .

Aunt Ruth in her apartment on NE 16th St

Aunt Ruth’s Jewels

Why the Amethyst Jewelry?

Opal ring

My great-aunt Ruth had some wonderful jewelry. In looking it over, I have been wondering why in her collection of birthstone jewelry, she had amethysts. Her own birthstone was the opal, and she had some opal rings, or her sister did. Her sister was also born in October.

Opal and seed pearl ring

Garnet brooch and ring

Her mother, Laura, was born in January, so her birthstone was the garnet. She had some beautiful garnets, including a brooch and ring that we were always told had been bought off a Russian aristocrat after the 1918 Revolution.

Jade necklace

Aunt Ruth favored green jewelry, especially jade. She had some beautiful jade pieces. One of her jade necklaces was set in old silver, with each lozenge intricately carved. She had a lot of great costume jewelry in a number of shades of green as well.

Shades of green!

Aunt Ruth also had a several topaz pieces in a distinctive golden color. Topaz is the November birthstone. Both the Boedefeld grandparents, Katherina and Ferdinand, were born in November. Perhaps the topaz pieces were theirs. I have no idea what the actual age of the jewelry is, but the watch chain at least seems to be from the nineteenth century and could have belonged to Ferdinand. What era the pendant is from I cannot tell. I have not been able to find anything like it online and jewelers specializing in antiques are not thick on the ground around here. Same goes for the topaz brooch. But the ring is still in its original box, labeled Elkhart, Indiana, which dates it to between 1896 and 1921, when Ferdinand Joseph Boedefeld and his wife Laura Worsley lived there. It is a very large size, just right for a man. Perhaps Ferdinand bought it and wore it in memory of his parents.

Various costume jewelry brooches, some glass, some jewels, some enamel

19th century rosary

Besides the topaz jewelry, Aunt Ruth had an old rosary in her possession. Since she was not a Catholic, but her Boedefeld grandparents were, this probably belonged to them. The story is that it belonged to old Ferdinand Boedefeld. We also have an old German Catholic prayer book with his name written in it, and his birth date in 1809. It was supposed to have been given to his son Ferdinand Joseph, his namesake. I have to be glad that primogeniture was not the belief of that branch of my family, or I would never have these treasures—there were three brothers older than Ferdinand Joseph.

Amethyst jewelry

The amethyst jewelry is a little harder to figure out. Ferdinand Joseph Boedefeld was born in February, so this was his birthstone, and perhaps the watch chain was his as well. But the pendant and earrings are for a lady to wear. I can make a guess that Laura wore them in his honor, but that is only a guess. I read somewhere that in the nineteenth century amethysts became the rage everywhere, and then again in the art deco period of jewelry making, amethysts again were extremely popular. Maybe the birthstone connection is there, but it does not have to be the reason for wearing such a lovely stone. I would wear it a lot if it were mine.

The earrings used to be the screw type, but my mother found them very uncomfortable and changed them to these clips. I think maybe the two amethyst drops originally hung at the top of the large pendant, but that is because of the style of the topaz pendant. I love the look of the setting. When I was in high school I used to raid my mother’s jewelry box after she had gone to work in the morning. I wore the earrings to school more than once, back when they were still the screw type. I wished I could have pierced ears in those days, but my parents would not give permission. As soon as I went off to college I had my ears pierced. The screw type earrings were the closest thing in those days to pierced earrings.

Finally, in my catalog of Aunt Ruth’s jewels are a couple of delicate necklaces. I don’t wear a lot of silver, but the silver and crystal necklace is an exceptional piece. It is one of the most beautiful in its simplicity and elegance, so I do wear it often. The other, a piece crafted for one of the organizations that Aunt Ruth belonged to, I used to wear when I was younger but not much anymore. Still, it is a pretty thing.

Having made a habit out of watching Antiques Roadshow, I have to look over my pieces and think whether any of them is a hidden treasure, but no. These are all valuable for their family connection, and that is all. Every time I look at them or wear any of them, I think of Aunt Ruth, and that is a great reason to keep them for themselves.

Poor Isabella

I was looking again at the family of the Shoemaker of Pottsville that I wrote about a couple of weeks ago. One of the daughters was Isabella Josephine, born 18 March 1856 in Pottsville, Pennsylvania. We don’t know much about her early life, only that she was married before the spring when she was 30. That was when her father made his will in June 1886, and he named her “my dear daughter Isabella Hamilton, wife of William Hamilton.” Isabella would have been 30 and about 4 months old.

William Hamilton is a complete cypher. All we know is his name, that he married Isabella Josephine Boedefeld, and that he died before 1900.

In the late spring of 1900, we find Josephine Hamilton, a widow born in February 1856 in Pennsylvania, living with three other single people in a house in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Josephine is described as a “housewife,” and she is a “boarder.” Of the other two women, both in their 20s and each a “saleslady,” the elder is the head of the house and the younger is a boarder like Josephine. The man, who is from Spain, is in the insurance business, is a naturalized citizen of 20 years or so and is called a “lodger.” He is also married, for 15 years, it is reported. Despite Josephine being reported to be a widow, under the number of years married column, somebody reported 9 years. The discrepancies in this record can be ascribed to the probable unfamiliarity of the young woman reporting on her household with the detailed facts about all the members of that household.

Perhaps Isabella Josephine’s marriage occurred just before her father made that will, and perhaps William Hamilton died just nine years later, in 1895. With such a common name as his, I haven’t been able to find a single record about him so far.

Josephine disappeared from most of the records after 1900, but she moved to the state of Washington and became a practical nurse, or so her death certificate reported. She died in the Harborview Hospital in Seattle on 21 March 1932. What is on the certificate is from the head nurse of the hospital, and we can probably assume that Josephine had worked there. She shaved ten years off her age, but nobody did the math and correctly reported that her birth was in 1856 even though they said she was 66 years old at death.

The sad thing is that she was being treated for third-stage syphilis since ten months earlier. Presumably the disease had been dormant for a number of years—it can remain dormant between the second and third stages up to 30 years in some cases. It is a very terrible disease, especially before the discovery of penicillin in 1943, which cures it. The treatments were various concoctions of mercury, which often led to mercury poisoning including hair loss, mouth ulcers, teeth falling out, neuropathy, kidney failure, etc. In the late 19th century other things were tried to treat the disease, such as potassium iodide with small doses of mercury, and other metals were tried, including gold, with little to no good effect. In 1909 a so-called “magic bullet” was invented by a couple of chemists who ended up winning the Nobel prize for a compound with arsenic in it called arsphenamine that seemed to be somewhat more effective than anything else up to that time.

Syphilis was sort of “discovered” in the late 15th century by French troops invading Hungary, Italy, and Turkey. It is theorized that maybe it was an older disease that morphed around that time and was brought to Europe by the retreating French army. It was named the French pox in dubious honor of those troops, and it apparently was a much more virulent form of the disease than known today, or even in Isabella Josephine’s time. The three stages known today were present then, but they progressed much, much faster, with death occurring within weeks or sometimes months.

The third stage can produce blindness, insanity, paralysis, heart trouble, and a host of other terrible things, always ending in death. Poor Isabella.

How did she get it? Obviously from sexual intercourse with an infected person. It might have been William Hamilton, or it could have been someone she had an affair with after William died. I do wonder if her husband infected her and if she became a nurse after his death, and if she was ironically hoping to be on the spot for getting a cure.

Such a betrayal that would have been! Many, many women suffered that betrayal of course, but it doesn’t make it any better. And women of that era would not have spoken of the experience with anyone, not even a doctor, unless they trained in a hospital to be more practical than private about such matters.

But it was too late for her. Perhaps she thought she was cured when the disease went into its years-long dormant period, only to find to her horror when she was in her early 70s that she was in for a very terrible end. The death certificate noted that her face was covered with sores. Poor Isabella!

The Shoemaker of Pottsville

Katherina Selgrath of Pottsville, Pennsylvania, married a shoemaker when she was not quite 18 years old, in about 1839.

Ferdinand Bödefeld had come from the farming and mining regions of Westphalia, and specifically a village located southwest of Arnsberg called Stockum and sometimes known as Stockum-bei-Amecke (Amecke being the town just at the southern tip of the modern reservoir called Sorpesee). At the end of the 18th century the land belonged to the Duchy of Westphalia, under the control of the Archbishops of Köln until the end of the Holy Roman Empire. After the Thirty Years’ War, the French had annexed much of the land west of the Rhine River, and in 1803 the area was secularized and given to Prussia by the Congress of Vienna.

Ferdinand was the son of Maria Theresia Gierse and Frans Bödefeld. Frans was the son of Josef Bödefeld and Anna Clara Sebastian. Theresia was the daughter of Engelbert Gierse and Anna Catharina Scharfenberger, whose parents were Caspar Scharfenberger and Maria Veronica.

Ferdinand and his younger brother Bernard immigrated to the United States, ending up in Pottsville, Pennsylvania, in the 1830s. Ferdinand established his shoemaker shop there, and among his apprentice shoemakers were his young brother-in-law John Selgrath, and his son Jacob. Ferdinand and Katharina had ten children who lived to adulthood: Jacob, John, Joseph, Magdalena Helena, Katherine, Theresa Agnes, Ferdinand Joseph, Isabella Josephine, Mary Ann, and Francis John (known as Frank).

When the U.S. Civil War began, at first it must have seemed a little remote from the Boedefelds. But soon it became their war too. Their sons John and Joseph joined the Union Army and fought for months through the cold and heat and the mud and terrors. John was wounded, and Joseph severely so. They survived, but life was never the same for them. The same thing happened to John Selgrath, who returned unable to continue with shoemaking as a profession. In the summer of 1863 in particular, the battles moved to Pennsylvania itself as General Robert E. Lee tried to consolidate his forces at Gettysburg. On June 30 part of his army was critically delayed at Hanover and prevented from helping at Gettysburg over the next two days. The Battle of Gettysburg is well documented as a major turning point in the war, and although it was fought over 70 miles away from Pottsville, all the citizens of the area were certainly riveted by what happened there. We do not know what Ferdinand Boedefeld did in particular to help the Union in the War, besides sending his sons to fight, but two years after the war ended he was presented with an inscribed gold-headed cane that said,

“To Ferdinand Bodefeld by his Friends, as a mark of esteem for his devotion to his adopted Country, in the hour of her peril. July 1867.”

Shoe making in the early part of the nineteenth century was still an ages-old handcraft, able to be done by a single person. Towards the middle of the century after the invention of the sewing machine by Elias Howe in 1846, somebody else invented a machine for stitching parts of shoes. Thereafter, the mechanization of making shoes progressed through the century until most shoes were being made in factories using machines by 1900. But Ferdinand Boedefeld made shoes and boots by hand until he could no longer work. He handed over his business to his son Jacob, and Jacob became a well-known boot-and-shoe maker in Pottsville, listed in bold letters in all the city directories until 1895, when he died suddenly, only nine years after his father, Ferdinand.

For many years the boot-and-shoe making tools were around our house, but sometime in the last 35 years they disappeared.

Sic transit gloria mundi . . . et calceamenta!