Week 9: Gone Too Soon

 

"Gone Too Soon" was a common occurrence in the short life of my great-grandaunt Julia Ann Scott Foulke.  Julia was the daughter of my 2nd great-grandfather Samuel Scott and his first wife, Ann Clinger.  Twenty-two year old Samuel and eighteen year old Ann were married on 18 Jun 1854 in Kosciusko County, Indiana.  Their daughter Julia was welcomed a little over a year later on 2 Sep 1855 but the family of three didn't have long together.  Ann died four months later on 18 Jan 1856, leaving Samuel alone with their infant daughter and Julia without a mother.  What would a young widower do to take care of a daughter and make a living?  I think Samuel's parents Caleb and Mary Scott took over her care while Samuel lived with his uncle Thomas Ivins working as a laborer and continued when Samuel served in the Civil War from 1962-1865.  

In a letter written from the army camp in Murfreesboro, TN, in 1863 Samuel wrote:

"I should like to have you take Julia Ann and get her likeness taken on a plate and send it to me." 

and later in the letter: 

"Well, Julia Ann, I have a nice little watch, that if I get home with it, and you have been a good girl, and learned to spell and read and write good, I will give it to you for a present.  I want you to hurry and learn so's you can write to me."

After Samuel's return from the war he married Nancy Elizabeth Cretcher in 1867 and Julia came to live with them.  By the time of the 1870 census Julia was 15 years old and had a one year old half-brother named William.  Two years later she had a half-brother named Charles.  I like to hope that her years living with her father and step-mother were happy ones for her and that she felt welcomed into the new family.

On 29 May 1877 twenty-one year old Julia married Hugh Aaron Foulke.  In August of the following year Julia gave birth to a baby girl who was either still-born or died the same day. Three years later Julia and Hugh had another baby girl named Bessie.  In another heart-breaking loss, Bessie died after only seven weeks of life.  Less than a year later Julia and Hugh welcomed a son they named Edmond Forrest Foulke.  Julia and Hugh must have been so happy to have this healthy son. 

But the Foulke family didn't have long together to be a family.  Just four years later on 5 Jun 1882 Julia died, leaving her husband and the baby she had waited so long for.  She was gone too soon just like her own mother and both of her infant daughters. 

 

 

Week 8: I Can Identify...

The 1910 U.S. Census entry for my great-grandparents has always been a mystery to me.  Walter and Martha Cartwright had recently moved from their homestead in Mylo, North Dakota, back to northern Indiana.  Their census information contains a puzzle.  Four children are listed; the oldest having been born before the move to North Dakota and three having been born during the homestead years.  The puzzle is that this is the only time the daughter Marie ever shows up on any document or record.  No living family member has any memory of there having been a daughter named Marie.  For a while I wondered if the family's information had been provided by a neighbor and the neighbor was fuzzy on family details but it seems unlikely that someone would imagine a baby. 

 I think the children's recorded ages hold the answer.  Irene (recorded as Irena) was born on 26 Oct 1909.  The census is dated 22 Apr 1910.  The time lapse between those two dates is only 177 days, or 5 months and 27 days.  Irene's age should have been recorded as 6/12 and not 16/12 years.  Could Marie have been adopted?  No, the census says that Martha gave birth to 4 children and 4 are alive.  If Marie was 6/12 years old she would have been a twin to Irene but again, there's no evidence or family lore that Martha ever gave birth to twins.  

My theory is enumerator error.

Week 7: Outcast

Russell Monroe Williams, my grand-uncle, was the first of eleven children born to my great grandparents Owen and Minnie Williams.  I've never been able to find a photograph of Russell either as a boy or a man but I remember the stories that were told about him.  In the 1910 Census Russell was a 9-year-old boy attending school but by the 1920 Census (dated 29 Jan 1920) he was an 18-year-old who wasn't in school and had no listed occupation.  In September of 1920 Russell joined the Army in Company F of the 49th Infantry and served for eleven months before being honorably discharged on 2 Aug 1921.  

It may have been during this period of service that Russell contracted syphilis.   It was most certainly an unfortunate time to contract the disease.   

Although the cause of syphilis was discovered in 1905--the culprit is a spiral-shaped bacterium called Treponema palladium--there were no effective treatments for it and by the 1930s, approximately 1 out of every 10 Americans suffered from syphilis.  In 1928 Alexander Fleming, a London scientist, discovered penicillin but it wasn't until fifteen years later in 1943 that doctors working at a U.S. Marine Hospital in New York first treated and cured four patients with syphilis by giving them penicillin.

Uncle Russell's syphilis went untreated long enough to cause Meningoencephalitis, a central nervous system infection common in the early stages of untreated syphilis.  Uncle Russell began to show neuropsychiatric signs of mental illness and violent behavior toward his family and in 1941 was admitted to the Logansport State Mental Hospital.  This hospital was his home until 1960 when he died with the official cause of death being Tuberculous Pneumonia. The death certificate listed Central Nervous System Syphilis: Meningoencephalis as a contributing factor.  For the last nineteen years of his life Uncle Russell was only able to see his family under controlled visits at the hospital.  He died alone, never having married.  The family only spoke of him in in hushed tones.

Rest in peace, Uncle Russell.  I'm sorry that a disease made you an outcast and that I never got to meet you.

 

Week 6: Social Media

I found interesting clues about the day-to-day life of my grandpa Angus Cleon Scott with a subscription to Newspapers.com.  People today on Social Media like to post highlights of their lives with shots of their vacations, achievments, restaurant meals, and picture-perfect families.  But I found a different story in the small town newspaper social and local news columns in northern Indiana.  

                                            

A.C. married my dad's mother Eva Bird in 1920.  Twelve years later they separated.  I've never been able to find the divorce papers for A.C. and Eva but this detailed article appeared in The Bremen Enquirer newspaper on 4 Oct 1934.  It seems like a lot of personal information to be published but it provided vital information to me.  The older child who went with A.C. was only 14 at the time but he wasn't mentioned as being a minor child here.

Does this article give a hint of my 25-year-old grandpa's temperament?  I always saw Grandpa as a dog lover when I was growing up but this gives a different picture.  From The Bremen Enquirer on 28 Aug 1924:

Tracking a family between the Census periods can sometimes be hard, but thanks to the local newspapers I was able to make a time line of moves that Grandpa and his three wives made. This appeared in the South Bend Tribune on 23 Jul 1926:

Five months later on 23 Dec 1926 the Bremen Enquirer stated that:

In 1935 after Grandpa and his first wife Eva divorced he hired a housekeeper to take care of his sons while he worked in nearby Michigan.  After a couple of years of commuting Grandpa moved the family to Dowagiac, MI.  In 1937 former housekeeper Miss Hazel DeVoigne became the second Mrs. A.C. Scott for a short time before her death in 1940.  This from the Bremen Enquirer on 7 May 1936:

                                         

Next it was a move to southern Indiana as seen here in the South Bend Tribune dated 29 May 1943.  A year earlier Grandpa had married the grandma that I would know--Irene Shumaker.  

This article from The Bremen Inquirer on 2 Aug 1945 showed a sweet side of Grandma Irene Shumaker and a clue that the family was no longer living in Tell City:

The last clue I found was four years later on 16 Jun 1954 from an Angola, IN newspaper:

This move took Grandma and Grandpa to the farm that I knew as their home in Steuben County, IN.

Finding the small clues and mentions in these small town newspapers helped me to follow Grandpa and the moves that he and his wives and sons made.  With all of them gone now it was so interesting to me to be able to piece together the changes in their lives by reading these news snippets, the social media of A.C.'s time.

 

Week 5: Oops

   Week 5:  Oops  

  

Elsie May Williams

11 Mar 1908 - 7 Nov 1926 

My grand-aunt Elsie May Williams was the sixth child born to Minnie Casto and Owen Williams, just two years younger than her brother Lester who was my grandpa.  I never met Elsie because she died under tragic circumstances long before I was born but I was curious to find out more about her short life. 

                     

The Williams family lived in the town of Wolcott in Princeton Township, White County, Indiana, when Elsie was born.  Minnie was 26 years old and Owen was 29 at the time.  In the 1910 U.S. Census the family lived in a rented farm home on Black Oak Road where Owen worked as a ditcher installing farm tiles and Minnie worked at home raising the children.   By the 1920 Census the family had moved to another rented farm in nearby Jasper County.  Elsie was no longer the lone little girl in the family.  Four sisters had been born to keep her company, spaced every two years:  Leola, Eliza, Katy, and Della.  Elsie, age 11, was attending school and could both read and write.  Her two oldest brothers—Russell (18) and Louis (16)—were no longer attending school but siblings Renolt, Lester, Leola, and Lena were.

                                                                                                 

Somewhere between 1920 and 1923 the Williams family moved from Jasper County to St. Joseph County and Elsie left school.  On 3 August 1923 she married a man named Ray Bowman.  In August of that year Elsie would have been only 15 ½ years old so instead of her correct birth year (1908) on the marriage certificate, she wrote 1907, making her appear to be over 16 at the time.

 

Elsie may have needed parental consent to be married at 16.  Currently, 16 year-olds in Indiana can marry someone no more than four years older with the consent of a juvenile court judge.  Ray Bowman stated his birth year as 1902, which would have made him a little more than 4 years, 7 months older than Elsie.  Despite Elsie's young age, she must have been in love and hoped to have a long and happy marriage, but that wasn't to be.                                                                                      

 

Within three years of their marriage Elsie and Ray had separated and Elsie's life seemed to spiral out of control. 

 

On 11 Nov 1926 Elsie rode to church with her family at Bethel Tabernacle, 129 N. O’Brien Street, in South Bend.  She stayed in the car while everyone else entered the church and wrote a note to her family explaining why she didn’t want to live any longer.  From some hiding place in the car she took out a bottle of carbolic acid, an easily obtainable disinfectant, and drank the sweet-smelling clear liquid.  The immediate severe burns in her mouth and throat caused her to cry out, but a rushed trip to hospital wasn’t enough to save her.  Elsie left behind her parents Owen and Minnie and nine siblings:  Russell, Louis, Renolt, Lester, Leola, Eliza, Katy, Della, and new baby brother Robert. 

When I found Elsie's obituary it said that her husband Ray had died a few months before November of 1926 and it suggested that Elsie had begun to date another man but had a disagreement with him, leaving her in “fatal despondency”.

     

 

The cause of death was stated as Phenol poisoning suicide.  Phenol is the poisonous substance in carbolic acid.  There was an inquest into her death.  As seen in the death certificate below, the number 155 written under the cause of death means "death by suicide", as listed in the International List of Causes of Death from that period.  Elsie was listed as Miss Elsie Williams, a single woman, and not as Elsie May Bowman, a widow.  That seemed curious.

It made me want to find out more about this ill-fated marriage and more about the man she had married.  When I looked further I noticed that Ray and Elsie’s marriage certificate stated that Ray had one previous marriage.  A little research told me that on 21 Jul 1920 Ray had been married to 18 year-old Jessie Thorp by a Justice of the Peace in Cassopolis, MI.  

 

But then Ray married Elsie on 3 Aug 1923.

 

Jessie filed for divorce from Ray on 29 Sep 1924, more than a year after he had married Elsie.  The divorce was granted two months later on 29 Nov 1924.  Ray was a bigamist!  Jessie was the libellant in the divorce, citing non-support for the cause.  Apparently it wasn't noticed that, besides not providing support, Ray had married Elsie while he was still married to Jessie.

 

Elsie and Ray separated at some point between their marriage in 1923 and her death in 1926.  Had she found out about his bigamy and betrayal?  Was the story about Elsie being despondent over a new man in her life a fabrication?  Had she realized what an "oops" she had made by making a terrible choice for a husband and decided that she couldn't go on living?

 

I decided to find out all I could about this scoundrel Ray Bowman that young Else had married.  On 12 Feb 1927, only three months after Elsie’s death, Ray married was married to his third wife, 18 year-old Fredia Ward.  Ray and Fredia were divorced on 12 Jan 1935 after she filed for divorce on the grounds of desertion.  Ray and Fredia had two small children when the divorce was granted.

 

After that divorce it became harder to document Ray Bowman.  In the 1940 U.S. Census I found a Ray Bowman who was born 1905 in Michigan.  The enumerator recorded that Ray was a resident of Danville, IL, was married to a Martha Bowman, and had a 3-year old daughter named Charlotte.  Ray’s birth year was fluid throughout his life; each marriage he gave a different year so this may have been him.  

 

In February of 1942 Ray registered for the draft.  He was living in Whiting Lake, IN.  His birthplace was given as Decatur, MI, with a birthdate of 28 Jul 1904.  Living at the same address was a Phyllis Bowman, presumably his wife.  In the 1950 U.S. Census Ray Bowman lived in Bangor, MI, with wife Phyllis and two sons, Charles (2) and Ray Allen (1).  After the Census, no records were found until his death.

 

Ray’s Michigan death certificate information:

Ray Bowman

Arlington, Van Buren Michigan     

Born  28 July 1904   Died  14 Jan 1981

 

Ray’s Social Security Death Index information:

            Born  28 July 1903    Died Jan 1981

 

Ray's birth year varied until the very end.  One thing is certain, though:  Ray did not die before Elsie did like her obituary had stated.  He married young Elsie under false pretenses.  Elsie's death certificate gave no mention of Elsie's "oops" marriage to Ray but I feel certain that it must have been a major contributing factor to her decision to end her life.