Tag: Death and Burial

Margaret Anne Jordan LaBelle (1925–2021): A Life Story

Margaret Anne Jordan LaBelle (1925–2021): A Life Story

Posted on by genealogic

My grandmother Margaret died last month. Obituaries are expensive, so hers was kept fairly brief. I completely understand that decision, but I also think people deserve to be remembered in more complexity than two paragraphs can offer. So I decided to write Margaret’s Life Story. Aided by the collection of documents, photographs, and memories people shared at the funeral, I’ve been able to put together an extended narrative and photo essay that will, I hope, honor her legacy and help her descendants learn about her life and times long into the future. 

I am posting this today because it would have been Margaret’s 96th birthday. 

An Active Childhood

Margaret Anne Jordan was born April 17, 1925, in St. Paul, Minnesota. She was the eldest child of Basil and Isabelle (Daly) Jordan, who had married in St. Paul the previous July. Margaret grew up on the east side of St. Paul with her younger brother Patrick. She attended St. Patrick Catholic School through eighth grade and then Johnson High School.

Portrait of Margaret and Patrick Jordan, ca. 1929.
Margaret and Patrick Jordan, 1929.
The Jordan family ca. 1932.
Margaret and Patrick picture in a photo booth.
Margaret and Patrick photobooth shot, ca. 1936.
The 8th grade graduating class of St. Patrick Catholic School. Margaret is farthest right in the front row.
The 1939 8th grade graduating class of St. Patrick Catholic School. Margaret is farthest right in the front row.

As a child, Margaret spent a lot of time with her maternal grandparents, Ed and Jane (Reynolds) Daly. In 1924, while Margaret was in utero, her grandparents had moved from a farm near Beardsley, Minnesota, into a house on Edgerton Street, just two blocks away from their soon-to-be granddaughter. 

Some of Margaret’s most lasting childhood memories were of her grandfather. Ed had a job as nightwatchman for the Twin City Rapid Transit Company, which operated the streetcar system in Minneapolis and St. Paul. As an employee, he could ride for free. On his days off, he would ride around town visiting friends and chatting up the waitresses at his favorite restaurant on the corner of University and Snelling. When Margaret was nine or ten, she regularly accompanied him on his social rounds. She got to explore the city and meet all sorts of people. Her grandfather would jokingly introduce her as his “chaperone.” 

Grandpa Ed Daly with Margaret and Patrick, summer 1928.
Grandpa Ed Daly with Margaret and Patrick, summer 1928.
Passengers board a streetcar in St. Paul with the Cathedral of St. Paul in the background.
Passengers getting onto streetcar at west entrance to Selby Tunnel, St. Paul, ca. 1929.
Minnesota Historical Society, http://collections.mnhs.org/cms/display?irn=10732818.

Another distinctive memory Margaret had from around the same age was of clandestine meetings at her house. For sixteen years, from 1928 to 1943, her father Basil worked at the enormous St. Paul Union Stockyards in South St. Paul. During most of his tenure he was a teamster. Early in the Great Depression, he struggled to get enough hours, often working only half days, and Margaret’s mother Isabelle got a job at a local restaurant to help make ends meet. By 1937, Basil had the opposite problem, routinely putting in 60 to 70 hours a week—without overtime pay. (Basil’s compensation record and the rest of his personnel file are archived at the Minnesota Historical Society.) 

The secret gatherings Margaret remembered her father hosting were organizing meetings for the union. Basil’s union activities were part of the broader Twin Cities labor movement of the ’30s. Based on the Minnesota Historical Society’s photograph collection, strikes at the stockyards took place in 1932, 1933, and 1938. Basil may also have taken part in the Teamsters strike of 1934, which was centered in Minneapolis. Margaret and Patrick knew about their father’s meetings but were sworn to secrecy. 

Teamsters lined up at the St. Paul Union Stockyards, 1929.
Minnesota Historical Society, http://collections.mnhs.org/cms/display?irn=10669809.
Member of the workers’ organizing committee speaks during a 1938 strike at the stockyards in South St. Paul.
Minnesota Historical Society, http://collections.mnhs.org/cms/display?irn=10729180.

On November 11, 1940, Margaret was 15 and a freshman at Johnson High. It was a warm morning, so she wore only a skirt and blouse when she left her family’s house on Payne Avenue for her one-mile walk to school. But by the time she had to make the long walk home, a blizzard was raging. She recalled wrapping newspapers around her legs in a futile effort to keep warm. Like many other Minnesotans that day, Margaret survived the Armistice Day Blizzard—but barely. This experience too stuck with her for the rest of her life.

Two women in skirts caught on the streets of Minneapolis during the Armistice Day Blizzard of 1940.
Minnesota Historical Society, http://collections.mnhs.org/cms/display?irn=10750540.

At school, Margaret was a very active student. She took part in Spanish club, bowling club, archery, and was on the Board of the Girls Athletic Association. She was part of a traveling folk dancing group and was also a talented speed skater. Margaret was especially proud of the school letter she earned for athletics at a time when most girls were discouraged from participating in sports. 

A class photo from high school.
Margaret's high school diploma.
A snapshot of her high school diploma.

Margaret graduated from Johnson High in 1943. This was in the middle of World War II. Many of her male classmates went off to basic training and then to Europe or the Pacific. Margaret started working as a Rosie the Riveter. Every day she travelled to Holman Field, an airfield across the Mississippi River from downtown St. Paul. She and several thousand other workers—mostly women—retrofitted B-24 Liberator and B-17 Flying Fortress bombers with high-altitude oxygen and ventilation systems and new, top-secret H2X radar systems.

Margaret (back, facing left) and four other women in a training fuselage, perhaps photographed by staff from the Office of War Information (OWI), at the Northwest Airlines modification center at Holman Field. According to the names written on the back of Margaret’s small photo print, the women in the picture were Carol(?) Boger, Margaret Jordan, Alice Anderson, Dorothy Reiter, and Audrey Hane.
Retrofitted B-24 taking off from Holman Field.
A modified B-24 takes off from Holman Field.
Northwest Airlines via NWA History Center

In the fall of 1943, Margaret’s father Basil quit his job at the stockyards. He, Isabelle, and Patrick moved to Durand, Wisconsin. Since Margaret had a high-paying job at Holman Field, she stayed in St. Paul. She moved in with the family of her aunt Bessie at 331 Geranium Ave. Bessie’s husband Martin Aasen was a butcher at a Swift & Co. packing plant in the same South St. Paul stockyards complex. 

Margaret’s grandfather Edward Daly had died in 1937, but her grandmother Jane Daly now lived with Bessie, Martin, and their 11-year-old son—Margaret’s cousin—Dick. Jane had early-onset dementia, and Margaret helped Bessie care for her until her death in 1945.

Margaret and Patrick with their mother Isabelle (Daly) Jordan and grandmother Jane (Reynolds) Daly, ca. 1932.
Margaret with her mother Isabelle when she was a single, young working woman living with her aunt Bessie.

When the war ended in 1945, all the men came back from overseas. For the rest of her life, Margaret bitterly resented being forced out of a good-paying job and into the role of homemaker. But that’s what she did, and she did it well. 

A Wife and a Mother

Two of Margaret’s good friends from school were Dorothy LaBelle and Dorothy’s first cousin Marge LaBelle. Margaret had met Dorothy’s older brother Gerald back in her school days. She started seeing him after he returned the Pacific. Margaret and Gerald wed on June 20, 1946, at St. Patrick’s Catholic Church in St. Paul—their home church.

Gerald LaBelle in Navy uniform, probably during the winter of 1943—after he enlisted in November ’42, but before he left for basic training? He enlisted with his friend Don Wagner, who married Gerald’s sister (and Margaret’s friend) Dorothy LaBelle in June 1943.
Gerald worked as a machinist aboard the USS Matanikau, a training and transport aircraft carrier in the Pacific, from September 1944 to October 1945. Note his insignia, which shows his rank as Aviation Machinist Mate 3rd Class.
Love birds ’46.
Happy newlyweds.

Five children followed between 1947 and 1958: Gerald, Jr.; Greg; Maureen; Mark; and Ross. Their early years of parenthood were a challenge. Little Jerry, Jr., was born with cerebral palsy after a difficult childbirth. Then, as a small boy, he contracted polio. In 1951, Margaret and Gerald made the difficult decision to appoint a state guardian for Jerry. He lived the rest of his life in state hospitals or group homes before his death in 2005. (This was many years before in-home care for someone with significant disabilities was an option like it is today.) 

Margaret and Gerald with baby Jerry, Jr., 1947.
Margaret with children Greg and Maureen, 1952.

In 1953—after a very brief residence in Belvidere, Illinois—Margaret and Gerald bought a house at 388 Geranium Avenue East in St. Paul, less than a block from the home of Margaret’s aunt Bessie. Margaret would reside in that house for the next 62 years. 

Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, Margaret was a busy mother and an active member of St. Patrick’s Church. As a mother, she did all kinds of creative arts with her kids. She made doll cakes, fancy sugar eggs for Easter, and marzipan candies in the shapes of fruits and vegetables. She was a cub scout den mother. At church, she helped organize and run the fall festival and spaghetti dinners, and she served as one of the “church basement ladies,” cooking countless meals for church functions. If that wasn’t enough to keep her busy, she also occasionally worked as a department store clerk. And she was a regular hostess. Her extended family—especially her many paternal cousins—were regular guests in her home.

LaBelle family portrait, 1954.
Margaret and kids in front of the Tetons during a trip to California to visit Gerald’s parents and sister, August 1961.

On Her Own

Then, in 1969, Gerald abruptly left the family. The ensuing divorce and annulment left lasting scars on everyone in the family, but especially on Margaret. In fact, the divorce went all the way to the Minnesota Supreme Court, where it helped establish case law that is still studied by prospective lawyers today.

In a few short years, Margaret effectively lost her whole family. Her mother Isabelle had died of ovarian cancer in 1967. Her husband abandoned her in 1969. One by one, her children left for the Air Force or college or to live on their own. And now she had to support herself.

Margaret's diploma from the University of Minnesota.
Snapshot of Margaret’s diploma from the University of Minnesota.

In June 1973, Margaret earned a two-year Certificate of Liberal Arts from the University of Minnesota. At age 48, this was one of her proudest accomplishments. She had also recently begun a new job at West Publishing Company. Margaret supported the company’s traveling salesmen, making sure they had everything they needed while on the road and arranging supply shipments as needed. It wasn’t the professional career she had envisioned for herself in 1945, but it paid the bills. And she made several good friends there. Margaret stayed at West Publishing until she retired in June 1990. 

Margaret with her daughter Maureen and father Basil, Christmas 1976 at her house on Geranium Avenue.

Besides working, Margaret rededicated herself in her Catholic faith. She continued to volunteer at church, and she became a member of the Legion of Mary, an association of Catholics dedicated to spiritual and social welfare through prayer and apostolic works. 

After she retired, Margaret went on numerous pilgrimages to important Catholic sites in North and South America, often with her friend Ceile Swenson. They visited sites up and down the U.S. East Coast and in South Bend, Indiana. In 1994, they visited Our Lady of Guadalupe in Mexico City and a year later traveled to the Shrine of Betania in Cúa, Venezuela, the location of thousands of apparitions of the Virgin Mary and a Miracle of the Eucharist Host. Then in 2000, they traveled to Birmingham, Alabama, to join the studio audience as Mother Angelica filmed an episode of her famous TV show, which was broadcast on the Eternal Word Television Network (EWTN). While in Alabama, Margaret and Ceile also stopped at Our Lady of the Angels Monastery and the newly built Shrine of the Most Blessed Sacrament, both of which—like the EWTN network—had been established by Mother Angelica.

A few years later, Margaret took a different kind of trip. In 2004, when Margaret was 79, she had the pleasure to visit Ireland with her cousins Colleen and Cindy. Margaret was enormously proud of her Irish heritage—every branch of her family tree traced back to the Emerald Isle—so this was the trip of a lifetime for her.

A very cold and wet Margaret visiting the Giant’s Causeway in Northern Ireland, 2004.
Margaret’s Irish heritage touched every corner of the Emerald Isle. This map shows the (known) locations Margaret’s immigrant ancestors left behind in Ireland.

Inevitably, age eventually caught up to Margaret. In 2015, after 62 years in her house on Geranium Avenue and 90 years(!) as a member of St. Patrick’s church, Margaret moved into Cherrywood Pointe of Forest Lake. She lived independently until age 92, and then in assisted living until her death.

When she was in her 90s, her children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren enjoyed celebrating each birthday with her (except for her 95th, which was cancelled due to the COVID-19 pandemic). Her family brought brunch, played games, and kept counting higher every year! 

Margaret with seven of her eight great-grandchildren celebrating her 91st birthday in April 2016. (An eighth and final great-grandchild would be born in 2018.)

She was a tough woman to the end. She survived a heart attack at age 85—followed by a triple bypass and surgery to clear her carotid arteries—a stroke at 86, and numerous serious illnesses in her 90s, including influenza. Even in her last week of life, she told visitors she planned to get better. The hardest part of her final years was the dementia which took hold after her stroke. But while her short-term memory failed, she could still remember details about being a child and young adult. During one visit in October 2019, I recorded her talking about her experiences in the 1930s and 1940s. That discussion informed some of this story. 

Margaret Anne LaBelle died peacefully in her sleep, March 9, 2021, at Cherrywood Pointe of Forest Lake, following two months under the compassionate care of Ecumen Hospice.

A Difficult Life, But a Life Well Lived

A simple narrative like this can never capture the full picture of a person’s life. Margaret had a wide range of hobbies and interests. A true Minnesotan, she liked to fish. She loved reading, especially biographies and histories. From an early age, she had a fondness for painting, sewing, and gardening. She loved clothing and jewelry and collected all sorts of outfits over the years.

Margaret was generous—almost to a fault. She supported dozens if not hundreds of charitable causes in her life (perhaps including a few fraudulent ones). At Thanksgiving, she would gladly invite anyone in the neighborhood who had no place else to go. Even late in life—when she was well into her 80s—Margaret offered a room in her house to someone in need.

She was predeceased by her parents, brother Pat, and son Jerry, Jr. She is survived by her children Greg (Johnny), Maureen (Wes) Vanek, Mark (Jenny), Ross (Joni); grandchildren Erik (Jennifer) LaBelle, Carrie (Tim) Hill, John (Pam) Vanek; and great-grandchildren Ally, Cece, Lucy, and JJ LaBelle, Carson and Caleb Hill, and Eliza and Lena Vanek, as well as other family and friends. 

Margaret was buried Friday, March 12, 2021, in Resurrection Cemetery in Mendota Heights, next to her son Jerry LaBelle, Jr. Paul bearers were Ross LaBelle, Wes Vanek, John Vanek, Carrie Hill, Erik LaBelle, and Ally LaBelle. Due to COVID-19 restrictions, only Margaret’s immediate family attended the funeral. Margaret went out as she came in, a proud Irish Catholic. Father Tom Fitzgerald led her funeral service. And, at Margaret’s request, the service was full of Irish music: “Danny Boy,” Carrickfergus,” “Into the Mystic,” the ancient Irish hymn “Be Thou My Vision,” and the jig “The Irish Washerwoman,” among others.

Another Blue Christmas

Posted on by genealogic

The Christmas holiday is supposed to be a joyous time of year. Families gather to give gifts, share stories, delight in children, and be merry through the darkest days of the year. Unfortunately, the past several years haven’t been so merry for our family.

Nesteby family Christmas card, 1957 or 1958. My wife’s late grandmother Martha Nesteby Van Loy is seated front and center.

Many a Blue Christmas

On Christmas Eve 2010, we were at my in-laws’ house when my parents called to tell me my grandfather had collapsed and might not make it. We changed plans, drove six-and-a-half hours to Grand Island, Nebraska, and were at my grandfather’s bedside when he died at 11:30 Christmas Eve. Not exactly the gift Santa was supposed to bring.

Last year my aunt died suddenly the day after Christmas. She was just 61. Once again, our holiday plans changed. New Years weekend was spent not with friends and champagne but rather attending her funeral in Sioux Falls and helping my cousins clean out her house. The deaths of my grandfather and aunt mean Christmas will always be tinged with sadness, especially for my dad.

We made big plans with both sides of our family this year. Our daughter is two, so this is the first year she’s old enough to get super excited about Christmas. Everyone was looking forward to it. We were going to spend the days before Christmas with my wife’s family in Mankato. On Saturday the 23rd, we would all drive to tiny Lucan, Minnesota, (pop. 180) to celebrate Christmas with my mother-in-law’s family. My wife would get to see her ten aunts and uncles, many of he first cousins, and Grandma Martha, matriarch of the family. Martha just turned 84 on December 20th, so it would be a double celebration. Then we would spend Christmas Eve and Christmas Day with my immediate family. Finally, the 26th would be a day just for us. My wife and I were excited to have a day off without our two year old. We intended to see the new Star Wars movie.

Unfortunately, the holiday curse struck again this year, and with a vengeance. First, on December 21, my grandmother’s brother Pat passed away. My grandmother is 92 and has a failing memory. The death of her only sibling has been quite hard on her. In a terrible cycle, she forgets it happened and then learns about it all over again. It’s really disheartening.

Then the next morning my mother-in-law called to tell us that my wife’s grandma Martha had died suddenly overnight. We were planning to spend time with her in Lucan the very next day. The family still go together in Lucan on the 23rd, but it was a somber Christmas gathering as Martha’s 11 children arranged her funeral instead of working on plans for the family reunion that had been scheduled for next summer in honor of her 85th birthday. Christmas itself was still fun (that’s the purpose of two-year-olds), but the joy was tampered by shock and emotional exhaustion. On the 26th, instead of seeing Star Wars, we drove back to Lucan for Martha’s visitation. The funeral and burial took place on the 27th, a frigid day as we awoke to a temperature of 14 degrees below zero.  And of course, our two year old came down with a fever. (Par for the course at this point.) At least our car started.

Look for the Silver Lining

I have tried to find silver linings in this seemingly endless series of unfortunate events. For one thing, Christmas is a time for family. Deaths too bring families together. It is as if the deceased knew their families would be better able to grieve together and to support one another because they were already planning to be together for the holidays. Indeed, by making us think about losing a family member, all of these Christmas deaths set our holiday priorities in high relief. It’s easy, especially with children, to get caught up in the excitement of giving and receiving gifts. But Christmas is about family first and gifts a distant second (or, for some people, God first, family second, gifts a distant third). Yes, we get nice things for Christmas, but they mean little without the important people in our lives.

That was Martha’s philosophy. Martha’s greatest gifts—and she would have agreed—were her children and grandchildren. She has 54 living descendants and another one on the way (the baby my wife and I are expecting in April). When you add in her five siblings, a dozen nieces and nephews, and all of the spouses and in-laws who spent time with her, you see how many lives she touched. It’s a pretty remarkable family for such an unassuming woman from Lucan, Minnesota.

The final silver lining I draw from deaths around Christmas is this: The holiday is supposed to be one of hope—the birth of a savior, anticipation of the longer and brighter days of spring, hope for the future embodied by giggling children. We find hope when we look not at the life we lost, but at those still living and yet to be born. In Martha’s case, that’s a lot of wonderful people.

“More Sorrow than Happiness:” The Life and Death of Anna Smith

Posted on by genealogic

John Smith and Barbara Papik, possibly a wedding photograph from 1874, or more likely from the 1880s. Photograph by “The Traveling Art Company,” about which I can find absolutely zero information.

Anna Smith’s life began, it seems, before her parents were quite ready for her. She was born January 11, 1873, probably at the home of her maternal grandparents in Big Blue township, Saline County, Nebraska. Exactly a year and a day later, her parents John Smith and Barbara Papik married in the nearby town of Crete. When Anna was born, her father John was still improving the farm he had claimed under the Homestead Act a few years earlier. It was just across the county line in Lancaster County. After the wedding, Barbara and little Anna moved onto the new farm with him.

Anna’s life had gotten off to an inauspicious start—at least if the moral authorities in the community had anything to say about her illegitimacy. I don’t personally believe in divine retribution for sin—especially not on a person who was the consequence not the cause—but as it would turn out, Anna’s adult life “was filled with more sorrow than with happiness” according to her obituary. She suffered from an illness that carried a deep societal stigma, and it ultimately led to a death that was both slow and painful. Anna is the next subject in the blog series You Died How?, which examines all the unusual ways my ancestors died.

A Vulgar Name?

Anna Němeček, 1890s?
Anna Němeček, ca. 1890

Before we get into the details of Anna’s life and death, a quick note about her name. “Anna Smith” probably strikes you as an uber-generic English name. Our Anna Smith, however, was Czech. Her paternal grandfather was born in 1818 with the name Václav Fucík in the small village of Velká near Milevsko in what is now the region of South Bohemia in the Czech Republic. Václav and his wife Anna Němeček had at least five children between 1842 and 1858, including a son named Johan, Anna’s father.

In 1867, the Fucík family migrated to the United States. The manifest of the Bark Industrie, the ship that carried them across the Atlantic, recorded the German versions of their first names. Václav was written as Wenzel, for example, and František as Franz. Upon entering the United States, they changed names again. Václav became James. Johan became John. The surname Fucík became some version of Smith.Copy of ship manifest from Bark Industrie, which arrived in Baltimore from Bremen Jun 17, 1867, showing the Fucik family. From National Archives microfilm.

John Fucik/Smith's name written as "Schidt" on his Certificate of Naturalization.
John Fucik/Smith’s name written as “John Schidt” on his Certificate of Naturalization, May 14, 1874, in Saline County, Nebraska. In his Homestead paperwork, John had to write an addendum stating that he was the same man who had been recorded under several different names on various attached documents—John and Johan; Smith, Schmidt, and Schidt.

My family, like many, inherited the folktale about the family’s name being changed by officials at the port of entry. Whether it was officials in Baltimore or earlier Czech immigrants who had a grasp of English, someone suggested the Fucíks find a new surname. My hunch is that somebody pointed out how similar Fucík looks in writing to a particularly vulgar English word. (One irony of the name change, if indeed it was due to its similarity with “f***”, is that Johan Fucík/Smith’s official Certificate of Naturalization twice recorded the misspelled surname “Schidt”.)

According to a note written by John Fucík Smith’s granddaughter Emma Vanek Clark, the name Smith was assigned because John was a blacksmith. In fact, there is no evidence any of the men in the family were blacksmiths. The ship manifest records Václav as a farmer and eldest son Josef as, perhaps, a saddler. All four of the Fucík sons became farmers in America.

Whatever the reason, Václav Fucík became James Smith and the rest of the family followed suit. Ever since, all of Václav’s male-line descendants have carried the non-Slavic name Smith, including his granddaughter Anna.

A Life of Sorrow

Anna Smith grew up on her father’s homesteaded farm in Olive Branch Township, Lancaster County, Nebraska. We know very little about her early years, except that she must at a young age have been required to help her mother care for her many siblings. Eight more children blessed the Smith home, with Barbara giving birth every second or third year until 1892. Thankfully, all of them survived to adulthood. Anna’s parents did reasonably well on their farm, but they were never among the most prosperous families in the area.

Anna’s formal education was minimal. She attended some school alongside her younger siblings, but it appears her responsibilities at home limited her achievement. According to the 1900 census, Anna had not yet learned to speak English. Both of her parents and all of her siblings could. As long as she lived in the predominantly Czech area around the town of Crete, language would not be much of an issue. But that would not always be the case.

On June 4, 1892, Anna married Joseph Vanek. Joseph and his family were more recent arrivals than the Smiths. Joseph had been born in Bohemia in 1869 and had come to America with his parents and two brothers in 1883. Joseph’s teen years were spent on a farm several townships west of the Smiths. I presume the couple met either through mutual acquaintances or at Czech social gatherings in the primary market towns of Crete and Wilber. The wedding took place in Wilber with Anna’s uncles Joseph and Frank Smith serving as witnesses. After the celebration, the newlyweds moved onto 80 acres of farmland in western Saline County. Anna’s new home was more than 25 miles from the farm of her parents and siblings. At least most of their neighbors were still Czech.

The most life-changing event in Anna’s life probably occurred a year or two before the wedding when she suffered her first seizure. It probably struck her while she was a teenager still living at home with her parents. Even today, epilepsy is a mysterious illness and seizures a startling thing to witness. In the 1890s, people knew far less about the disease and the social stigma was significantly greater. Anna’s illness, bouts of which apparently recurred quite frequently, affected her for the remainder of her life. It significantly limited the relationships she had with other people.

Epilepsy did not, however, limit Anna’s fertility. She was almost always pregnant, giving birth to 15 children in just over 20 years. Unfortunately, even her children were a source of sorrow. Anna and Joseph’s very first child, whose name is unknown, died in infancy. Their sixth child, too, spent a heartbreakingly short time on Earth. Seven more healthy children followed before their last two children also died in infancy. Without a strong social network, Anna’s children were her dearest companions. The deaths of so many of her children as infants put even more burden on Anna’s already distressed psyche.

Vanek family photograph, 1908.
This picture was probably taken in early 1908, not 1909. Their next child James was born in about April 1908, and it appears Anna was quite pregnant when this photograph was taken. This dating would match the ages of the other little kids too, including my great-grandfather Lloyd who would have been about three and a half.

Joseph and Anna had limited options, but they were always looking for ways to improve Anna’s outlook. In 1906, they decided to move. “Thinking that a change of surroundings might be of benefit to his wife’s health,” states Anna’s obituary, Joseph sold the farm in Saline County and bought another one about 70 miles southwest in Nuckolls County, Nebraska, near the Kansas border. The tradeoff for new scenery was that their new farm was well beyond the area of Czech settlement. With no one else around who spoke her language, Anna became extremely lonely. “She missed her parents, brothers, sisters, and people who spoke her language,” continues her obituary. “She was not able to go out much, but was always glad to have people see her.”

And then little James died. James Vanek, called Václav at home after his grandfather, was the couple’s eleventh child. He was born in about April 1908 at the new farm in Nuckolls County. Despite his stern look in the photograph below, he was apparently a sweet boy. His mother had grown quite fond of him before a neočekávaným neštěstím—an “unexpected calamity”—struck him dead in October 1912 at age four-and-a-half. Family lore says he died in a farming accident. Anna’s obituary made special note of James and the affect his death had on a woman who already had more than her share of sorrow. After mentioning the four children Anna lost in infancy, it reads, “and one boy, little James, was accidentally killed at the age of five. Mrs. Vanek seemed to grieve a great deal over the loss of this boy.”

Younger Vanek children, 1911.
Younger Vanek children, 1911. Standing: Lloyd, Emma, and Albena. Seated: James and Mary Jane.

Václav (James) Vanek obituary from Wilberske Lisky, 30 Oct 1912, pg. 4.
Václav (James) Vanek obituary from Wilberské listy, 30 Oct 1912, pg. 4. Nebraska Newspapers: http://nebnewspapers.unl.edu. Note that nearly all of the children had both Czech names and English ones. Until I found this obituary, no one in my family knew that my great-grandfather Lloyd was called Ladislav in Czech.

A Long, Painful Death

After moving to Nuckolls County, Anna “continued in poor health until her death,” a span of more than a decade. For a woman who had already suffered so much, one would have hoped that her death, when it came, would be quick. Alas, Anna faced more than three months of misery before the end finally came.

In mid September 1920, Anna suffered another seizure. It was probably no different than the ones she had regularly experienced over the previous thirty years. This time, however, she was not able to get to a safe place. Her death certificate explains what happened, though it is difficult to read on account of the doctor’s handwriting and the number of lines he squeezed into a small space. What I can make out is that a week previous to the doctor’s first visit on September 18, Anna had a seizure that resulted in a “severe scald (burn of right side back and neck . . . .” One can imagine Anna cooking at her potbelly stove when she suddenly collapsed on top of it, severely burning one side of her body.

The doctor treated her burns but they eventually became infected. Day after day she suffered as her wounds tried to heal. The doctor’s notes read, “at least 10 days [illegible] infection until last 10 days [illegible] many burns [illegible] . . .” as the infection slowly spread. Finally, on November 19, 1920, her body gave up.

Cause of death section from Anna Vanek's obituary.
Cause of death section from Anna Vanek’s obituary. It is quite difficult to read.

Needless to say, Joseph and Anna Vanek were not wealthy. All Joseph could afford was this cement slab.

Anna was just 47 years old. She was survived by both of her parents and all eight of her siblings.

The obituary, which I have quoted several times above, was obviously written by her grieving husband Joseph. The writing expresses far more pathos than was typical for an obituary from this era. Reading it, one senses how much Joseph recognized Anna’s fortitude and how much he loved spending time with her despite the limitations of her illness. One also senses that Anna’s death was in many ways a relief, not least for Anna herself. No more violent seizures. No more shame or social anxiety. No more loneliness. Just peace.

It Could Have Been Worse

When I think about Anna’s life, I am reminded how lucky I am to be healthy, educated, and surrounded by loyal friends. Anna had none of these things. She didn’t so much live as persevere. I admire her for the care and devotion she put into the few relationships she did have. I have a lot of admiration for Joseph Vanek, too, for his strength in dealing with his wife’s illness. He was involved more than most fathers of his day in rearing his children. When Anna died, six children still lived at home with him. He never remarried. Anna was fortunate to have such a devoted husband and father.

Joseph Vanek with his and Anna's youngest children, Mary and Herman, ca. 1915.
Joseph Vanek with his and Anna’s youngest children, Mary and Herman, ca. 1915. I adore this photograph. It looks like Joseph loved being a dad.

Anna was fortunate from another perspective, too. Had she been born a generation or two later, in the 1890s, 1900s or 1910s, the state or federal government might have sterilized her against her will. Epileptics were commonly included in eugenics legislation that became widespread during the 1910s and 1920s. (Nebraska passed a number of eugenic sterilization laws, but none of them applied to epileptics.) Some states did not go quite as far as forced sterilization, but they nonetheless prevented epileptics from marrying and having children. If Anna had been sterilized or prevented from marrying, her ten surviving children never would have been born and her many hundreds of descendants would not be here today.

Proponents of eugenics for epileptics presumed that the cause of the disease was genetic. They believed they were “purifying” the gene pool and “improving” humanity by removing disease-causing genes. We now know that only in rare cases is epilepsy caused by a single underlying genetic mutation. Most of the time, its cause is more complicated. Sometimes, epilepsy is the result of an undiagnosed brain infection, stroke, or past head trauma. Usually, the cause is a complex of genetic factors and environmental stimuli. More than different 200 genes have been identified that are sometimes associated with epileptic seizures. How these genes interact with each other and with sensory inputs remains the cutting edge of research.

In short, the state-sponsored eugenics of the past was based in ignorance and its measures were extreme, like using a sledgehammer when a scalpel was called for. The collateral damage was immense. It remains perhaps the most striking American example of unnecessary government involvement in citizens’ private lives. The government forcibly prevented thousands of people from having children by destroying their God-given reproductive biology.

At the same time, the impulse behind eugenics doesn’t seem so bad; the goal to eliminate disease and improve human lives is nearly universal. And there have been some noted successes. For example, voluntary genetic testing has been used to discourage marriages between carriers of the recessive gene for Tay-Sachs disease, leading to a significant reduction in the occurrence of the child-killing disease among Ashkenazi Jews in North America.

The debate over the ethics of eugenics continues today. It is philosophical, political, and scientific. It lies at the heart of debates over pre-natal testing, abortion, and genetic engineering of humans and human organs. The lesson to take from last century’s eugenics programs is that we must move forward with caution, taking extra care not to ruin lives in an effort to save them. Anna Smith’s epilepsy was apparently not a case of simple genetic mutation. As far as I am aware, none of her descendants has since suffered from epilepsy. Preventing her from having children would not in any way have “improved” humanity. I, for one, am thankful she had children.

Children of Joseph and Anna Smith Vanek, 1911.
Children of Joseph and Anna Smith Vanek, 1911. Only Herman, born 23 Apr 1911, is missing. Of the ten who reached adulthood, all but Herman had children of their own.

František Filipi and the Perils of Winter

Posted on by genealogic

Here in the Upper Midwest, the weather is about to turn frigid. It’s four degrees Fahrenheit as I write this and forecast to hover around zero all week. It happens every year, but it’s still a notable event when the Arctic air finally arrives. The bitter cold forces everyone to change behavior. More time reading under a blanket or sitting by the fireplace, less time outside. It takes longer to go anywhere for the simple fact that one needs to put on so many layers of clothing before stepping into subzero temperatures. (You know this to be especially true if you have young children.)

With the onset of frigid weather, I thought I would write a short post about my 4x-great-grandfather František “Frank” Filipi, who had a dreadful relationship with winter. Indeed, it killed him. The story of Frank’s suffering and ultimately his death at the hands of Old Man Winter is the fourth installment in the GeneaLOGIC blog series “You Died How?”.

Meet Frank (again)

We’ve already met Frank. He was a minor character—in the role of father-in-law—in the story of my great-great-great-grandfather Jacob Kobes, who died in his own winter accident in 1895. In that story, we learned that Frank Filipi’s family lived in Racine County, Wisconsin in the 1860s and moved with the Kobeses to Saline County, Nebraska, in 1869 to acquire land under the 1862 Homestead Act.

Frank was born in about 1821, possibly in the village of Ceská Trebová in eastern Bohemia. Records about him are scarce. He declared his intention to become a U.S. citizen in 1856 in Racine County, Wisconsin, and then claimed land in Nebraska in 1869. Aside from Homestead records (which include copies of some of his immigration documents), the Filipi family has been almost impossible to track down. The family is missing from both the 1860 and 1870 censuses. I honestly believe Frank may have been trying to conceal his identity whenever he could. Perhaps he was still paranoid about reprisals from his possible involvement in one of the failed revolutions in Europe in 1848. I plan to write a separate blog post about all the missing and misleading records about Frank and his family.

This copy of Frank Filipi’s declaration of intention was included among his Homestead paperwork. Only U.S. citizens could claim land under the Homestead Act. Note that even within this single document, both his first name and surname are spelled several different ways.

Only one census record  definitively shows Frank and his family. In 1880, we find Frank and his wife Josephine in Wilber Precinct (as townships are called in some Nebraska counties), Saline County, Nebraska, one household away from the family of their daughter Marie Filipi Kobes and her husband Jacob. Frank and Josephine Filipi were both approaching sixty years old (though other records suggest Josephine was a bit younger than that). Three children still lived at home with them: 16-year-old Joseph, 12-year-old Ludwig, and 9-year-old Emma.

Frank Filipi family in the 1880 census. Wilber Precinct, Saline County, Nebraska, page 1. (Downloaded from Ancestry.com.)

The agricultural schedule tells us that Frank owned 80 acres of land, with 60 acres under till. The variety of crops the Filipis grew was mostly unexceptional: wheat, corn, oats, rye, and potatoes. The Filipis stood out somewhat from their neighbors in that they had produced in 1879 not just milk, like all the other farmers, but 25 lbs. of cheese. They also harvested a small grove of peach trees.

The most notable thing about Frank, however, comes from the population schedule. Column 15, under the heading Health, asked, “Is the person . . . sick or temporarily disabled, as to be unable to attend to ordinary business or duties? If so, what is the sickness or disability?” Next to Frank Filipi’s name, the census enumerator wrote “Toes & Fingers frozen off.”

Well that’s gruesome. One can imagine a dozen scenarios in which a farmer in Wisconsin or Nebraska might have succumbed to frostbite. Had he been caught in a surprise blizzard and been unable to find his way back to the house? Or had he merely been careless while traveling one winter day, failing to realize the damage the cold was inflicting upon his body until too late? As with many genealogical questions, we may never know. We can speculate that Frank’s lack of toes may have played a role in his even more gruesome death a few years later.

A Gruesome End

March 1886 was cold and snowy throughout Nebraska. The weather summary for March printed in the Annual Report of the State Board of Agriculture, reads, “The most striking feature of the month of March has been the unprecedented snow fall of 25.3 inches, the normal amount for March being 4.6 inches. . . . The precipitation, the number of days of precipitation, and the proportion of cloudy days have been correspondingly large.” Likewise, “The temperature has been about five degrees below normal, being the coldest March, except that of 1881, for the past nine years.”

The total of 25.3 inches was an average of observations made across the state, but mostly in southeastern Nebraska, where Frank lived. In fact, we can make an educated guess at how much snow fell in Wilber. Both Crete, eleven miles north of Wilber, and De Witt, seven miles south, had weather stations. Crete recorded 2.39 inches of precipitation that month, while De Witt reported 1.8 inches. Assuming most of that precipitation fell as snow and using a ratio of about 8:1 (typical of wet spring snow), we can calculate that Wilber saw between 15 and 20 inches of snow in March 1886.

Into this world of snowdrifts, daytime thaws, and nighttime freezes, walked Frank Filipi and his missing toes. It was the middle of the month, still a couple weeks before the weather finally warmed up for good. Perhaps it was Sunday, March 14, and Frank and family were strolling through Wilber with their fellow churchgoers. Maybe it was Tuesday the 16th, as Frank made a quick run into town for supplies of some sort. For whatever reason, Frank was walking the business blocks in the village of Wilber on foot. All it took was on misstep. He slipped on a patch of ice, flew into the air in a classic winter pose, fell into the opening of a basement entry to one of the businesses, and broke his neck.

Omaha Daily Bee, March 17, 1886, pg. 4, column 5, under “Nebraska Jottings.”

 

The only report I’ve found of his death was a succinct summary printed in the Omaha Daily Bee on Wednesday, March 17 (above), which is short on both details and empathy. No doubt Frank’s family missed him and were shocked by his sudden death. If there is a silver lining, it’s that Frank was already 65 years old. He hadn’t been all that much use around the farm since he lost his fingers or toes. Recall that his disability was recorded under the heading “unable to attend to ordinary business or duties.” All his children were grown. By 1886, Frank was far more dependent on other people than anyone was on him.

Let Frank’s tragic death serve as a reminder to all of us in advance of the cold and snow. Be careful out there. And if you see someone having trouble getting around on an icy day this winter, give them a hand. If snow and ice are treacherous for you, they’re even more annoying and dangerous for people in wheelchairs, visually impaired people with white canes, and others, like Frank, whose lack of toes was probably not evident but whose lack of balance might have been.

“Another Serious Accident”—Jacob Kobes Runs Out of Luck

Posted on by genealogic

Czech ancestry according to the 2000 U.S. census. Even today the state of Nebraska has the highest percentage of people claiming Czech ancestry. Image credit: Wikimedia Commons.
Czech ancestry according to the 2000 U.S. census. Even today the state of Nebraska has the highest percentage of people claiming Czech ancestry. Image credit: Wikimedia Commons. A better, zoomable map is here. It’s pretty easy to spot Saline County.

My grandfather Norman Vanek was of 100 percent Czech descent. All of his great-grandparents and some of his great-great grandparents were Czech immigrants. They came to America at different times between 1855 and 1883, the early arrivals settling first along the shore of Lake Michigan between Manitowoc County, Wisconsin, and Chicago, Illinois. In 1869 and 1870, those in Wisconsin and Illinois migrated to Saline County, in southeastern Nebraska, on land that was then just beyond the western terminus of the local railroad line. Later immigrants from Bohemia joined those already in Saline County, creating one of the most densely populated Czech settlements in America.

For all of these former Czech peasants, the fertile farmland of Saline County represented an opportunity to improve their lives. Most of them got by on 80 or 160 acres—small to average-sized farms in late 19th century Nebraska. While this was significantly better than the tiny plots they had owned or rented in Bohemia, most of Norm’s ancestors were far from the wealthiest people even in their own township. They struggled the iconic struggles of pioneers on the prairie: dugouts and sod houses, grasshopper plagues, heat waves and blizzards, and the perpetual risks of epidemic disease and farm accidents.

Jacob Kobes and his wife Marie Filipi stood apart from the rest of Norman’s ancestors. They overcame these challenges and prospered. Of course, even in America, the land of promise, success took good sense, a lot of hard work, and a little bit of luck. Jacob had all three, at least until his luck ran out one tragic day in 1895. Jacob’s is the next story in the series “You Died How?,” which looks at all the strange ways my ancestors died.

A Lucky Start

Let’s start with luck. Jacob was lucky to have survived infancy. His parents, Johann Kobes and Katerina Kwitek, came from peasant families in western Bohemia, not far from the German border. Johann had been born in the village of Havlovice and Katerina in the small town of Mrákov.

When their marriage was recorded August 9, 1826, in the Roman Catholic Church in Mrákov, Johann was listed as a chalupner, a German spelling of the Czech word chalupnik, meaning peasant cottager. Johann may have owned a garden plot or a few acres of his own, as well as a small cottage, but he also had to work as a day laborer, farmhand, or petty craftsman to make ends meet. He was still listed as a chalupner when his son Jacob was born on July 24, 1849, almost 23 years after the wedding. In short, while Johann and Katerina were not the poorest of the poor, they had little hope of upward mobility.

Johann and Katerina Kobes suffered more than their share of loss. According to parish records, the couple lost four of their eight children as infants or toddlers. Jacob was their only son to survive to adulthood. In fact, he was the third child to whom his parents had given the name Jacob. The other two Jacobs, born in 1829 and 1833, each died before reaching age two. Another older brother, Andreas, born in 1836, only reached two-and-a-half before he died. Our Jacob was the only boy in his family to reach age three, much less middle age. He survived the widespread childhood diseases that ravaged peasant families across Europe and probably killed four of his siblings. (Three of Jacob’s four sisters lived long lives; the fourth, Dorothea, born in 1842, died after only three short months of life.) Such a high rate of infant mortality was sadly typical in 19th century Europe, especially in families of peasants and the urban working class.

Jacob was also lucky to survive considering his mother’s age. It may have been something of a surprise when Katerina found out she was pregnant in late 1848. She was 40 years old and—at least as far as parish records tell us of her pregnancies—had not given birth in more than seven years.

On the Move

Jacob grew up in the village of Havlovice. He was almost an only child, since his three surviving sisters were so much older than him. As a little boy, he probably played with nieces and nephews as much as cousins. His older sisters Maria (b: 1827) and Anna (b: 1831) had married and begun having children Havlovice before Jacob was even born. Before he was too old, however, his family made the life-changing decision to leave their homeland for new and better opportunities in America.

In the mid 1850s, Maria (now Schleiss) and Anna (now Kovarik) and their families were the first to emigrate. They joined dozens of other Czech emigrant families that chose to settle in Manitowoc County, Wisconsin. Johann and Katerina soon brought Jacob and his sister Katherine (b: 1839) to join them. In 1860, we find Johann and Katerina on a farm in Kossuth Township, with just Jacob still at home. His sister Katherine had married Bohemian immigrant Jacob Hulec (pronounced Huletz) the preceding November.

At some point in the mid 1860s, the Kobes family followed the Lake Michigan shoreline south to Racine County, Wisconsin, south of Milwaukee. I haven’t found any primary-source records of them there, but the obituary of Jacob’s sister Katherine says she lived there for a time, and there is also evidence Jacob’s future wife Marie Filipi was there. Jacob married Marie, probably in Racine County, in about 1868. She was just 13 or 14 years old.

In 1867, Jacob’s sister Anna and brother-in-law Joseph Kovarik packed up and moved their family to Saline County, Nebraska. They were the family’s explorers, checking out the frontier of white settlement and giving prairie life a try. Joseph Kovarik claimed 80 acres under the 1862 Homestead Act and built a sod-roofed dugout for his family to live in.

The 1929 book A History of Czechs (Bohemians) in Nebraska, compiled by Rose Rosicky, includes this photograph of the Kovarik brothers' dugout. There were two sets of Kovarik brothers in Saline County. All four men came from Havlovice. However, Rosicky's narrative states that "Joseph and Thomas Kovarik . . . built the first saloon and dance hall on their farm, which burned down in 1879. Their dug-out for many years remained as a memento of pioneer days." This is presumably a photograph of that dugout, perhaps taken in the 1880s or 1890s when it had become something of a historical artifact. Joseph Kovarik's wife was Anna Kobes, Jacob's sister. In fact, Homestead claims tell us that everyone in the Kobes and Filipi families initially lived in dugouts like this one for a couple years before they were able to buy enough lumber to build log cabins. Rosicky, Rose. A History of Czechs (Bohemians) in Nebraska. Omaha: Czech Historical Society of Nebraska and the National Printing Company, 1929, pp 70-97. Published online here.
The 1929 book A History of Czechs (Bohemians) in Nebraska, compiled by Rose Rosicky, includes this photograph of the “Kovarik brothers’ dugout.” There were two sets of Kovarik brothers in the same township near Crete and all four men had come from Havlovice, but I think we can be confident the above dugout belonged to Joseph and Thomas Kovarik. Joseph Kovarik’s wife was of course Jacob Kobes’s sister Anna. Rosicky’s narrative states that “Joseph and Thomas Kovarik[‘s] . . . dug-out for many years remained as a memento of pioneer days.” Moreover, the photo appears to match the description Joseph made of the dugout in his Homestead papers: “16 x 24 feet with sod roof with one door and window.” Rosicky also notes that Joseph and Thomas Kovarik “built the first saloon and dance hall on their farm,” though it “burned down in 1879.”

In fact, Homestead claims tell us that everyone in the Kobes and Filipi families initially lived in dugouts like this one for a couple years before they were able to buy enough lumber to build log cabins. The Filipis lived in their dugout for exactly two years. The Kovariks lived in theirs for at least five years and perhaps longer.

Rosicky, Rose. A History of Czechs (Bohemians) in Nebraska. Omaha: Czech Historical Society of Nebraska and the National Printing Company, 1929, pp 70-97. Published online here.


In 1869, the rest of the Kobes family followed Anna to Nebraska, with one exception. Jacob’s father Johann died around this time, probably in Wisconsin. There is a small chance he made it to Nebraska—a list of early Czech settlers published in the 1920s includes “John Kobes, Havlovice” as a pre-1870 settler and no other John Kobeses lived in the county as far as I can tell. However, Katerina called herself a widow on the Homestead claim she made in 1869 and John is absent from the 1870 census.

Without Johann, the 1869 migrant group included Jacob and his new wife Marie, Jacob’s mother Katerina, his other married sisters, and his new in-laws Frantisek and Josefina Filipi and the rest of their children. That summer, Jacob and Marie settled on 80 acres of land three miles southwest of the village of Wilber. Just like the Kovariks, they first constructed an iconic pioneer dugout. Jacob filed a Homestead claim for the land on September 25. Both Jacob’s mother Katerina (acting as an independent widow) and his father-in-law Frantisek Filipi claimed 80 adjacent acres the same September day. His brothers-in-law Fredrich Schleiss and Jacob Hulec and nephew Wenzel Schleiss each also made a nearby claim within the next six months. Collectively, Jacob’s extended family claimed 480 acres of excellent farmland and they paid a total of just $84 in filing fees to get it. Even though they all lived in sod-covered dugouts and would not hold the title to any of this land for another five years, the future looked far brighter than it ever would have in Bohemia.

"Jacob

 

Prospering

Jacob was twenty when he put in his Homestead claim. He was old enough to fend for himself. He had learned enough skills not just to survive but to thrive, including many that had probably been imparted by his late father. We know, for example, that Jacob had a knack for managing money. When men in the community gathered to create the new Czechoslovak cemetery in 1874, Jacob Kobes was chosen as one of two trustees. (Joseph Kobes, who sold the land for the cemetery and became president of the cemetery organization, was Jacob’s double 1st cousin. Their fathers were brothers and their mothers were sisters.)

Jacob was obviously ambitious and hard working. Consider what he accomplished in his first first five years on the land. According to his Homestead paperwork, he built two houses, first a 14 x 16 foot dugout and then a “good, comfortable” 16 x 18 foot log house, brought 55 acres of prairie land under cultivation, constructed “a stable, granary, and corn cribs, bored and tubed a well, and set out 2 acres of forest trees.” In spite of grasshopper plagues in 1874 and 1876 that destroyed the region’s entire corn crop and a serious flood of Turkey Creek in 1875 that may have inundated the Kobes land, the family prospered and Jacob was able to buy more land.

By 1880, Jacob had purchased an additional 160 acres of adjacent land for a total of 240 acres. (80 of those acres were the ones his mother had Homesteaded in 1869.) He had 120 acres under till and grew a surprisingly diverse range of crops (in order of acreage): wheat, corn, oats, barley, rye, and potatoes. He owned more poultry than any of my other Czech ancestors and had a decent number of cattle, pigs, and horses. To help him manage so many different things, Jacob had employed a total of 56 weeks worth of hired labor in 1879. The total value of his farm was more in line with the established farms owned by my old-stock American ancestors in Illinois than with any of my other Czech pioneer ancestors in Nebraska.

For Jacob, more land meant more profits with which to buy more land. By the early 1890s, he owned 400 acres (see pg. 31 of hyperlink). I believe he had inherited or purchased 160 acres after the death of his father-in-law Frantisek Filipi in a freak winter accident in 1886. At the time of Jacob’s own death in 1895, his estate totaled 480 acres.

Throughout these years, his family was growing. Marie gave birth to her first child, my great-great-grandfather Joseph, in November 1870, probably in the dugout they had built the year before. Daughter Anna followed in 1872. Unfortunately, Jacob and Marie then had to deal with the same sad loss Jacob’s parents had faced. In 1874 they buried their daughter Ema, who had lived only eight months. She was one of the first people buried in the new cemetery. Then son Adolf, born in 1876, died in early January 1878 aged 17 months. Thankfully, three more healthy children arrived after that: Adolph (1878), Albena (1880), and Emma (1882). Just like Jacob’s parents had done, he and Marie chose to name later children in honor of deceased older siblings.

“Another Serious Accident”

All thing considered, Jacob had been incredibly lucky. He survived infancy when half of his siblings did not. He survived a transatlantic voyage and repeated moves within the United States. He survived inhospitable prairie weather and the social stigma of living in a dugout. He overcame grasshopper plagues and floods and carried on despite losing two of his children. By the mid 1890s, he was a well known and “influential farmer” in Wilber. From the perspective of a Bohemian peasant boy, his landholdings and the financial security they represented would have been beyond belief. But his luck ran out in the winter of 1895.

It was the middle of February. It was cold. Nine days that month the temperature dropped below zero in nearby Lincoln. Jacob’s wife Marie was staying at the home of their daughter Anna—now the wife of John Somberg—in Crete, a town eleven miles north of Wilber. Anna had been sick and Marie had gone to care for her. On Tuesday, February 19, Jacob hitched two horses up to his “single seat, top buggy” and started out for Crete to fetch Marie. He made his way into Wilber and then turned north on the main road to Crete.  About two-and-a-half miles north of Wilber, the road crossed the tracks of the Lincoln–Wymore line of the Burlington and Missouri Railroad. (You can trace Jacob’s course on this roughly contemporaneous plat map. Look for his property in section 20 and the railroad crossing in section 3.)

As one local newspaper reported, Jacob “had his head tied up well because of the cold, consequently he probably could not hear the approaching train. As he was crossing the tracks . . . the passenger train coming to Crete overtook him, struck the rear of the buggy, knocking it into splinters and pitching Mr. Kobes to the ground, killing him instantly. His horses were not injured and he himself received no wounds save where the side of his head struck the ground.”

I believe this reprint was published in the Wilber Republican in February 1985, whence my grandfather clipped it. However, the description--"two and a half miles this side of Wilber"--makes me believe the original story was probably published in the long-defunct Crete Democrat.
I believe this reprint was published in the Wilber Republican in February 1985, whence my grandfather clipped it. However, the description—”two and a half miles this side of Wilber”—makes me believe the original story was perhaps published in the long-defunct Crete Democrat.

The sudden and tragic death of Jacob Kobes at the age of 45 was undoubtedly hard on his family. And yet, compared to the consequences of some of the other unfortunate deaths we’ve examined in this series—take Dolphis Dupre, for example—Jacob’s family was going to be OK. His youngest child was 11. Even if the worst imaginable circumstances arose, he left enough property that its sale could keep the family secure for a while.

This small portrait that was displayed at Jacob's funeral is the only photograph of Jacob that I've seen. Some distant cousin may still have the original among their family photographs, but it might also be gone forever.

Jacob’s estate was apparently not legally dispersed until after 1900. Until then, it was de facto in possession of the widow Marie. Eventually, eldest son Joseph took ownership of the eastern 280 acres, including the land originally homesteaded by his grandmother Katerina Kwitek Kobes and grandfather Frank Filipi and half the land homesteaded by his father Jacob. Younger son Adolph got the western 200 acres, including the other half of Jacob’s original claim.

This small portrait at right was displayed at Jacob’s funeral (below). It is the only photograph of Jacob I’ve ever come across. Some distant cousin may still have the original among their family photographs, but it might be gone forever. That would be another unfortunate and unnecessary loss.

Lumir Kobes, Jacob's grandson, wrote that this was his grandfather's funeral. Lumir's daughter Vicky and I agree that this is Jacob's funeral, not the funeral of his maternal grandfather. (Vicky has a similar photograph of the commemorative display from Marie Filipi Kobes's funeral, and the two photographs passed down the generations together.)
Lumir Kobes, Jacob’s grandson, wrote that this photograph was from his grandfather’s funeral. Lumir’s daughter Vicky and I believe he meant the funeral of Jacob Kobes, not that of his maternal grandfather Lorenz Bernklau (who died at age 75). (Vicky also has a similar photograph of the commemorative display believed to be from Marie Filipi Kobes’s funeral. The two photographs passed down the generations together.)

Trains have always been dangerous. It’s difficult for them to stop and they can’t deviate from the course of the tracks. Jacob’s story reminds us that railroad workers were not the only ones who suffered injuries and deaths around railroads. Surprisingly, Jacob isn’t the only relative of mine to die being hit by a train. My 5x-great-grandfather James Daly lost a brother-in-law in very similar fashion. The administrator of Morgan Hussey’s Findagrave page quotes a story published in the McKean County Miner [Penn.], November 2, 1883:

“Mr. Morgan Hussey, of Keating township, met with a sudden death while walking on the track of the Philadelphia & Erie railroad, near Sterling Run, on Wednesday. He was visiting his daughter at that place, and for some purpose started out to walk down the track. He was a very old man, and quite deaf, and not hearing the express train which came upon him was killed instantly. Mr. Hussey had been a resident of this county nearly half a century and by hard work and economy had assumed a comfortable property. His funeral will take place here today from St. Elizabeth’s church.”

My takeaway is, never go near railroad tracks when you’re visiting your daughter!

Do any of you have crazy stories of railroad accidents from your families?

Faith, Slavery, and Murder: The Life and Death of Burgess Nelson

Posted on by genealogic

Our next victim in the “You Died How?” series is Burgess Nelson. He was my 6x-great-grandfather. The story of his life can be seen as a parable of religious life in the early years of the American Republic. The story of his death has a lot to teach us about the importance of a family’s legacy and about the reliability of certain kinds of genealogical records.

Let’s start with a quick summary of Burgess Nelson’s life, as many of his descendants first encounter it. The following excerpt comes from the 1882 History of Mercer and Henderson Counties [Illinois], one of those massive county histories written in seemingly every county in the country during the late 19th century. The book includes a short sketch of George Cronkite Nelson, Burgess Nelson’s grandson through his son Elisha. It reads, in part:

Burgess R. Nelson, father of Elisha Nelson, lived in Maryland all his life. He was a minister of the Methodist Episcopal faith. He was a successful financier; a proprietor and director in a bank corporation. He lived to the extreme age of ninety-eight years, and then was murdered for his money [emphasis added]. He was a man that was highly respected for his good qualities and high integrity. He frequently visited his son, Elisha, in Ohio, making the entire distance to and from on horseback. He served in the Revolutionary War.

Some of these details turn out to be true. As we shall see, Burgess was a minister and he was involved at least peripherally in banking.  Some of the other “facts” were a complete fabrication. There is no evidence, for example, that Burgess Nelson served during the Revolution. Most importantly for us, he was not murdered. In the rest of this post, we’ll take a closer look at Burgess’s life as well as his death. As it turns out, the truth of his death might be stranger than the fiction.

“The Reverend gentleman”

From the moment of Burgess Nelson’s birth, his life embodied the national religious rejuvenation that scholars call the Second Great Awakening.  According to his gravestone, he was born January 1, 1764, probably in modern Carroll County, Maryland (which was then part of Frederick County). As it happened, Frederick County was also the birthplace of American Methodism. A few years before Burgess was born there, an itinerant preacher named Robert Strawbridge had come to the county from Northern Ireland and begun to attract converts. The first sermons took place in his little log cabin home in Sam’s Creek, Maryland, but he was soon a well-known preacher throughout the mid-Atlantic. Strawbridge set up the first Methodist societies in Delaware, Virginia, Pennsylvania, and on Maryland’s Eastern Shore.

Perhaps Burgess’s parents were among Strawbridge’s early converts (though who exactly his parents were is uncertain). Perhaps Burgess himself became a convert after hearing a sermon by Francis Asbury, who arrived in the Mid-Atlantic from England in 1771 as an official delegate of John Wesley. Whatever the case, Burgess grew up near the heart of the growing Methodist movement. He came of age alongside the religion. He was 20 years old when the Methodist Episcopal Church was formally founded at a conference in Baltimore in December 1784, with Asbury at its head.

However he was introduced to Methodism, Burgess was obviously quite taken by the promises of the faith. He was ordained a Methodist minister—definitely by 1801 but probably long before that—and he remained active in the church for the rest of his life.

Methodism appealed to many Americans because of its focus on the faith experience of each individual. Whatever one’s station in life, God offered hope of salvation. As American political democracy gradually expanded during the early 19th century, so too did faiths like Methodism, which were underpinned by similar democratic ideals. Burgess Nelson believed in these things, and he spread the Word to anyone who would listen. He preached to rich and poor, white and black, free and enslaved, even to members of secret societies. In April 1824, for example, a Frederick County Freemason Lodge “voted the ‘Rev. Burgess Nelson a set of silver tea spoons with the letters B. N. engraved on the upper side in the usual place for initials, with the square and compasses under said initials and the name of the Lodge on the under side.’ . . . (The Rev. gentleman had officiated for the Lodge at the funeral of a visiting Brother; John Holmes, of Lodge No. 1*, Ohio.)” (source)

Photograph of Rev. John Baptist Snowden included in his autobiography, published in 1900 by his son.
Photograph of Rev. John Baptist Snowden included in his autobiography, published in 1900 by his son.

A few years before that incident, Nelson had preached a sermon at a church in Elk Ridge, Maryland, southwest of Baltimore. Listening intently in the audience that day was a 19-year-old slave named John Baptist Snowden, who remembered the sermon as a turning point in his religious development.

The Rev. Mr. Griffith made another appointment to preach in the same church in a few weeks, but failed to get there to fill the appointment, and the Rev. Burgess Nelson preached in his place. He took his text from the prophecy of Daniel 12:2: “And many of them that sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life and some to shame and everlasting contempt.”

The sermon was preached in the month of April, 1820. The earnest words of the preacher as they came, prompted by a loving heart, moulded (sic) by a keen intellect, warmed by the fire of Jesus’ love, and a consciousness of their great importance flowing in a continuous stream of sacred eloquence, sent conviction of sin and guilt to my heart. At the close of the service I returned home with a heavy heart and a troubled mind. But I managed to conceal my convictions and moved around as if nothing was wrong. In the evening I fed the cattle and did my other work as if all was well with my soul. I appeared calm without, but there was a mighty raging of the troubled waters in my poor sin-smitten soul.

After dark I went some distance from the house, knelt down and prayed as best I could. This done, I felt somewhat relieved and returned to the house still troubled. Monday morning I arose and went about my work as usual, but with very different feelings. I was sent to the woods to cut wood. After cutting down one tree, the burden of sin was so heavy that I put down my axe and said, “If my owner come or not, I was going to seek the Lord.” I went some two or three hundred yards from my work and fell on my knees and prayed earnestly to the Lord to pardon my sins and convert my soul. I had not prayed very long before God, for Christ’s sake, pardoned my sins and set my soul at liberty and put a new song in my mouth.

I cried, “Glory to God! Praise the Lord for what He has done for me.”

Snowden’s description of his conversion—an inspirational sermon followed by an ecstatic personal experience of God’s grace—was typical of the Second Great Awakening. (The famous camp meetings from this era were gatherings of individuals experiencing ecstatic moments in the presence of others.)

In April 1823, exactly three years after hearing Nelson’s sermon, Snowden, “the uneducated slave boy,” gave a trial sermon at the Methodist’s Quarterly Conference and earned a license to preach on behalf of the church. A few years after that, he bought his own freedom and became a Methodist circuit rider. Once free, he moved to Westminster in modern Carroll County. He met his wife there and called the city home for the rest of his life. We can only speculate that he chose to go to Westminster to be near Burgess Nelson, who lived nearby.

Snowden’s experience demonstrates the power preachers like Burgess Nelson had to change the shape of American religion in the early 19th century. Nelson and hundreds of other preachers, ministers, circuit riders, and laypeople of faith helped grow Methodism into the largest religious denomination in the United States by 1820.

"Methodist Churches: 1850" compiled data from the 1850 U.S. Federal Census. (Source of this digital map)
“Methodist Churches: 1850.” (Source of this digital map. Original map from Gaustad and Barlow.) Several regions dense with Methodists were evident in 1850. The map suggests that Methodist adherents sometimes migrated with like-minded people. Burgess Nelson’s son Elisha, for example, moved to eastern Ohio in the 1810s and then to western Illinois in the 1840s. As we see from the map, he was among coreligionists.

A crisis of conscience

The first serious crisis for the Methodist Episcopal Church was the same crisis that later tore apart the whole nation: the question of slavery. Indeed, the division of the church into Northern and Southern branches, which took place in 1844, was viewed as a bad omen for the nation as a whole. The same crisis of conscience affected Burgess Nelson personally. He was a slave owner. In 1820, the same year he preached to Snowden, Nelson owned three slaves according to the U.S. census. Two free blacks also lived with the family.

American Methodists had struggled with the existence of slavery since the very beginning. During a 1780 conference in Baltimore, Francis Asbury demanded that Maryland preachers promise to free their slaves. He later sent anti-slavery petitions with circuit riders in Virginia. Ultimately, however, anti-slavery agitation by Asbury and other religious figures failed to change the minds of enough Southern legislators (many of whom were slave owners). Ratification in 1789 of the new U.S. Constitution, with its provisions for the continuation of the slave trade and extra voting power for slave owners, ended all practical debate on the matter. Slaves were property even if their souls could be saved.

By the 1830s, religious revivalism had stoked the spirits of Americans from upstate New York to backwoods Tennessee. In the North, widespread religious fervor was one of the driving forces behind the growing Abolitionist movement. More and more people were coming to believe that slavery went against the teachings of the Bible. It was morally wrong to hold another human soul in bondage, they believed, especially in the violent manner of the American South, where whippings, rape, and other forms of abuse were common. To degrade and dehumanize another person in this way was the exact opposite of raising him or her up to the grace of the Lord. To support their argument, abolitionists publicized stories told by slaves themselves.

Every slave had stories like John Baptist Snowden (though his were not published until decades after the Civil War). He could speak of his grandmother, “brought to this country by the men-stealers who tore her away from her native land.” He knew his father “was a good husband and kind father” even though he was enslaved on a plantation seven miles away from John and his mother. He “came to see her and the children several times each week, walking the seven miles after working hard all day.” But that meant that “We children did not see much of father during the week, as it was late before he got home at night, and had to leave long before it was time for us to get up in the morning.” Snowden passed into the possession of five different owners by the time he was 13 years old. He had to beg his third owner not to sell him to slave trader who would tear him away from his family and take him south.

In the South, the Bible played a central role in the public defense of slavery, which also emerged more vocally during the 1830s. Slavery was a positive good, argued people like South Carolinian John C. Calhoun, and the Bible said as much.

Maryland was, quite literally, in the middle of the conflict. It was a slave state, but one made up mostly of exhausted tobacco plantations. The real money was to be made on the cotton frontier south and west. The most direct consequence was that tens of thousands of Maryland slaves were sold south, their owners pocketing the cash. A more subtle consequence was that, since slavery’s economic value was diminishing in the East, it was easier for some slave owners in states like Maryland and Virginia to consider a time when the institution might end altogether. Some Maryland slave owners voluntarily emancipated their slaves.

In May 1836, the slavery issue which had lain dormant beneath Methodism for decades erupted at the General Conference in Cincinnati. When two abolitionist members lectured in the city during the Conference, a number of Conference officials formally censured them. Leading the anti-abolition charge was Marylander Stephen G. Roszel from the Baltimore Conference. Following his direction, the General Conference condemned the abolitionist speakers and supported an official decree (proposed by Roszel) to suppress “modern abolitionism” wherever such “agitation” occurred. The 1836 conflict set the stage for the denomination’s North-South division in 1844.

Once again, it’s uncanny how closely Burgess Nelson’s religious journey mirrored the national one. For Burgess, the issue was personal. It was a crisis of his own conscience. He encountered enslaved people on a regular basis as both an owner and a preacher. He understood them as spiritual beings, just as capable of salvation as their white masters. As the issue came to the fore nationally, the lines of argument sharpened on both sides—helping to frame the debate in his own mind. The obvious brutality of slavery was set against the psychological defenses of the institution that had been ingrained in white slave owners like him since birth. Moreover, Burgess knew as well as anyone that religious leaders like him were supposed to embody moral authority. But which side was in the right?

We’ll never know completely what went on inside his head. But we do know the outcome. On March 10, 1836 (just two months before the contentious General Conference in Cincinnati), now the owner of two slaves, Burgess Nelson signed a deed that legally established his plan to free them. His slave Elizabeth Ann, then about 15 years of age, he would free on April 1, 1840. His slave John, about nine years old, was “to be free on the 1st day of April, 1852.”

Burgess Nelson deed to free his two slaves. Report of Manumissions, Frederick County, March 10, 1836, Henry Schley: Burgess Nelson will free Negro Elizabeth Ann in 1840 and John in 1852 [Frederick County]. Maryland Manuscripts collection, item 3124. http://digital.lib.umd.edu/image?pid=umd:89361
Burgess Nelson deed to free slaves Elizabeth Ann and John. Report of Manumissions, Frederick County, March 10, 1836, Henry Schley: Burgess Nelson will free Negro Elizabeth Ann in 1840 and John in 1852 [Frederick County]. Maryland Manuscripts collection, item 3124. http://digital.lib.umd.edu/image?pid=umd:89361
I’m not really here to lay judgement on Burgess, either praise or condemnation. On the one hand, Burgess was a Southern slave owner who voluntarily emancipated his slaves 25 years before the Civil War. He didn’t offer immediate manumission, but the deed was a promise to his slaves that they would be free for most of their adult lives. From another perspective, Burgess had known the arguments against slavery since his earliest days as a Methodist minister; this was too little too late. And since he was about 72 years old when he drew up the contract, it was likely that John’s emancipation would come after his owner’s death.

A legacy to protect

This brings us at last to Burgess Nelson’s death. Revisiting the 1882 description submitted by his grandson George C. Nelson for the local county history, we recall that Burgess was supposedly involved in banking and “was murdered for his money” at the “extreme age of ninety-eight years.”

Burgess was involved in banking, at least as an investor. In 1829, he was listed as a capital subscriber to the Farmers’ and Mechanics’ Bank of Frederick County. It’s possible he was a co-director to that bank’s predecessor. (More research is needed here…)

But Burgess was not murdered for his money. When George Nelson submitted his account to the editors of the county history, he  covered up the truth of his grandfather’s death. Just like the fabrication of Burgess’s Revolutionary War service, George was embellishing his own pedigree and protecting his family’s legacy. The murder George invented allowed him to put the blame on someone else, when in truth Burgess Nelson killed himself.

Burgess Nelson suicide reported in The Baltimore Sun, April 3, 1852, pg. 4.
Burgess Nelson suicide reported in The Sun, Baltimore, Maryland, April 3, 1852, pg. 4.

 

New York Daily Times, April 5, 1852, pg. 2.
New York Daily Times, April 5, 1852, pg. 2.

burgess-nelson-suicide-Gettysburg Republican-Compiler, April 5, 1852, pg. 3.
The Republican-Compiler, Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, April 5, 1852, pg. 3.

The Religious Recorder, Syracuse, New York, April 15, 1852.
The Religious Recorder, Syracuse, New York, April 15, 1852.

The report of his suicide was first published in the Catoctin Whig and/or the Frederick Citizen. The Baltimore Sun ran it a few days later and papers all over the country picked it up from there. The death of the “aged divine” was reported everywhere from New York City to New Orleans. Each report was slightly different (and sometimes contradictory in detail). None of the accounts says why he killed himself.

But look at the date. Burgess Nelson hanged himself on Thursday, April 1, 1852, the very same day he was supposed to emancipate his slave John. The timing is strongly suggestive of a connection.

One might propose, for example, that Burgess Nelson was a sad, lonely old man, who chose to live only long enough to see his last slave freed. (This won’t be the last time we encounter lonely old men committing suicide in the “You Died How?” series.)

Alternatively, freeing John may have caused the 88-year-old minister to confront once and for all the greatest moral dilemma of his life. In this final judgment, as it were, perhaps he fell into a bout of severe self-loathing and depression and killed himself out of guilt, shame, or fear of eternal damnation for having owned other human beings. Maybe he was ruminating on the prophesy in Daniel 12:2 that had caused John Baptist Snowden so much anxiety: “And many of them that sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life and some to shame and everlasting contempt.”

For now, all we have to go on are the 1836 manumission deed and these newspaper reports that give the same date for both events. The rest is pure speculation. We don’t even know if John was actually freed that day. For all we know he had died prematurely or been freed ahead of schedule.

The moral dilemma of slavery weighed heavily upon the consciences of our 19th-century forefathers, people like Burgess Nelson. It ought to weigh on our shoulders too. I hope to find out what became of Elizabeth Ann and John, the two slaves whose names we know. We have a duty, I believe, to help recover the family histories of slaves who once belonged to our ancestors. It was our ancestors, after all, who obliterated that history in the first place by stealing husbands from wives and children from parents for their own economic gain.

Burgess Nelson headstone in Deer Park Cemetery in Smallwood, Carroll County, Maryland. He and his wife Sarah were originally buried in the Nelson family burial ground in Warfieldsburg, Carroll County, Maryland. The stones were moved to Deer Park Cemetery in 1949 after the original graveyard had been destroyed. Photo uploaded to Findagrave.com by user Tommy "Roger" Sparks Jr., April 10, 2009.
Burgess Nelson headstone in Deer Park Cemetery in Smallwood, Carroll County, Maryland. He and his wife Sarah were originally buried in the Nelson family burial ground in Warfieldsburg, Carroll County, Maryland. The stones were moved to Deer Park Cemetery in 1949 after the original graveyard was destroyed. Photo uploaded to Findagrave.com by user Tommy “Roger” Sparks Jr., April 10, 2009.

Dolphis Dupre, You Died How?

Posted on by genealogic

This post is the first in a brand new series called “You Died How?” in which I investigate bizarre and unusual deaths in my family tree. For more about the series, read this.

A poor French-Canadian

Dolphis Dupre photoThe first unfortunate soul in our exploration of unfortunate deaths is my great-great-grandfather Oliver Delphis Dupre.

Oliver usually went by some version of his middle name: “Dolphis” or “Adolphus.” He was baptized May 6, 1881, at St. Genevieve Catholic Church in Centerville, Minnesota. Located about 18 miles north of St. Paul on a chain of small lakes, Centerville is both the name of a township and the small village within it. In 1847, Dolphis’s grandfather Olivier Dupre (1830-1914) had migrated from Sorel, Quebec, to St. Paul—then part of Wisconsin Territory—with his maternal grandparents and aunts and uncles. A few years later Olivier became a pioneer settler in Centerville. By the time Dolphis was born, Centerville had grown into a small but vibrant French-Canadian community. Even though all of his family had been in the U.S. for more than 30 years before his birth—indeed, both of his parents had been born in Minnesota—Dolphis grew up speaking mostly French.

Fast forward. In October 1917, Dolphis was 36 years old and had a wife and eight children to look after. They still spoke French at home. His eldest child, my great-grandmother Alice, was 14. The youngest, a baby girl named Rosella, had just been born in July. The family lived precariously on a small rented farm near Forest Lake, Minnesota.

Dolphis had never been rich. He began his working career as a day laborer in Centerville. He married Mary Emalina “Lena” Marier there on April 15, 1902. Around 1906, he and his young family moved a few miles north from Centerville to Forest Lake, where they lived in an unfinished house by the railroad tracks. My great-grandmother Alice, born in 1903, remembered the house this way in an autobiography she wrote in old age:

This house by the track had one big room downstairs where the cooking and eating were done. One part where we ate was the living room. The bedrooms were upstairs and the only petitions [partitions] were curtains on a wire. The house wasn’t finished—only two-by-fours. I can remember seeing my Dad’s violin hanging on the wall. He played it quite often and we liked that.

The Dupres were poor. Trying to survive Minnesota winters in a house without insulation must have been miserable. But Dolphis apparently kept his family in good spirits with music on his old violin. He probably played old French folk songs; two of his great-grandfathers had been voyageurs, and they would have sung some of the traditional rowing songs to their children and grandchildren.

In Forest Lake, Dolphis worked as a teamster for the American Grass Twine Company, which owned thousands of acres of swampy grassland west of town. Each day, he drove a team of horses and a reaper through mucky fields of razor-sharp wire grass. The cut grass was dried and sent to St. Paul where it was turned into wicker furniture and rugs. Some of Dolphis’s brothers-in-law worked in the fields with him and his father-in-law worked at a nearby stable. For all of them, pay was at most a few dollars a day. (Here’s a great post on another genealogy blog about the wire grass industry near Forest Lake.)

Some time in the early 1910s, Dolphis quit the Twine Company. He and Lena rented a farm near Forest Lake. “It wasn’t modern of course,” recalled Alice, “no electric lights, only lamps, had to bring in water from the pump and for cooling and heating we had wood stoves, so there had to be plenty of wood cut, ahead [of time].”

Farming was hard work.

We led a happy life there on the farm but it was a lot of work for my mother [Lena]. In order to cook she had to get the kitchen range quite hot before she could cook and most of the time it was three meals a day. She had big washings and a lot of ironing. When I was old enough I would help. My father [Dolphis] had help too[.] [H]is Dad stayed with us[,] and now and then his brother (my Uncle Evod & his wife Stella) would come for awhile especially in the summer.

When Alice wrote about her childhood, she was never very clear on the dates. But her uncle Evod, Dolphis’s youngest brother, married Stella Bernard in June 1915, so we have a good idea when these particular memories were from. Evod and Stella probably lived at the farm with Dolphis and Lena for most of the summers of 1916 and 1917.

Was it an accident?

We know Evod was also visiting in October 1917, when the fateful event occurred. I’ll let Alice explain what happened.

In the fall it was potato picking time. After dinner my Dad and his brother Evod went hunting in the woods near by, they would hunt just about every day while my Uncle was with us visiting[.] [W]ell on October 16, 1917, they hunted again at the same place and were gone only a short time when we all heard a loud yell and my mother ran across the plowed field, she felt there was something wrong. She didn’t come back right away, and sure enough my Dad had been shot and she had stayed with him until he died. His brother said his glove hooked the trigger and that’s how my Dad was shot. It was a shock to all of us. My Grandpa hitched up the mules and went for a coroner in Forest Lake. The mules must have sensed what had happened, they surely took off fast, very unusual for mules to go so fast. My Dad was taken away and we were all pretty upset, that night and after that. We didn’t know what we were going to do.

Alice’s narrative continues, “My Uncle was questioned for a few days, trying to figure out if it was an accident. He was questioned right at the house. They must of found out it was an accident because the questioning was over.” Indeed, Dolphis’s death certificate confirms that officials had deemed the shooting an accident. The family story passed down the generations that Evod was leaning his gun against a fence as Dolphis climbed over, and that’s when his glove caught and pulled the trigger.

Dolphis Dupre death certificate
Dolphis Dupre’s death certificate. I had a devil of a time finding it because it was not properly transcribed in the Minnesota death index. I blame Dr. E. E. Wells, the coroner, and his unorthodox handwriting.

Alice’s memories of the visitation are even more vivid. The forensic evidence she describes supports Evod’s story of accidentally firing his gun while leaning it against a fence.

Then my Dad was returned to the house, in those days they viewed the body at the house. I was always afraid of the dead. Just before my Dad was to be buried my Mom had me come to the coffin even though I didn’t want to but she begged me and I finally looked at him, he looked so nice but he had a bebe mark on the side of his chin and Mom said he (my Dad) was shot in the stomach but the bebe[—]or I should say a bebe[—]came out there. I was 14 so I remember quite a few things especially when Mom wanted me to touch him she had to take my hand, he felt cold.

Dolphis Dupre gravestone
Dolphis was buried in Calvary Cemetery in Forest Lake three days after his death. I took this photo of the gravestone in 2014. (Note: This is the only record of any kind that has “J” as an initial. I think bad, loopy cursive “O” was probably misinterpreted by the stone’s designer.)

Consequences

Most of the deaths I will write about in this series had serious consequences for the surviving family members. The Dupres were hanging on by a thread as it was. Without Dolphis, they were in trouble.

Though Lena was only 33 when she was widowed, she never remarried. She carried her family through the most difficult times on the strength of her own hard work and the help of her older children. Lena and her eight children moved first into a house they rented on the cheap from her sister and brother-in-law Angeline and Jim Patrin. Then they moved in with Lena’s parents. Finally, they settled into another rental not far from “Uncle Jim’s place.” Alice was 14 and therefore old enough to be responsible for the younger kids. Lena started working for money. As Alice recalls,

My Mom got a job for a while at the hotel in Forest Lake[.] [S]he could walk there. I took care of the kids and when there was extra soup left over the hotel keeper would give it to my mother and she’d take it home and of course with 8 mouths to feed the soup disappeared fast, it was so good. Then she bought a sewing machine on time (sic) and sewed for ourselves also for others.

The 1920 census shows that 16-year-old Alice was earning money as a servant for a family in town while 15-year-old Roy worked odd jobs for petty cash. They had become the family’s breadwinners.

1920 census
Occupations of Lena Dupre and her children according to the 1920 U.S. census of Forest Lake, Minnesota. Screen shot from Ancestry.com.

Al LaBelle poses with his Harley-Davidson
Alfred “Al” LaBelle poses on his Harley-Davidson, ca. 1920. What a stud. (Sorry for the bad photocopy. It’s all I have!)

Being the oldest child was hard on Alice. She never said so in her writing, but it is clear she subconsciously sought a way to ease the burden on herself and her family. A nice young man would do the trick. Her uncle Jim was into motorcycles, and “one day he brought a friend along.” The friend was Al LaBelle, 20 years old and proud owner of a Harley-Davidson motorcycle. “We went together three months,” she remembers. “Al kept coming to see me and we got married June 14, 1920.” Alice now had her own breadwinner, and her departure meant one less mouth to feed at home.

Alice had found her escape. She had also demonstrated the path each of her younger siblings would follow. As they reached their teens, they went to work for money to support their mother (and eventually their widowed grandfather, too). In 1930, for example, Lena’s 19-year-old son Walter worked as a truck driver in the construction industry, but he still lived at home. 18-year-old son Clarence worked odd jobs like Roy had once done. Everyone in the family sacrificed to get by,  but thankfully no one starved or otherwise died as a direct result of Dolphis and Evod’s hunting accident. (The only other noteworthy death was Dolphis and Lena’s daughter Pearl, who died of diphtheria in 1925, age 16 .)

What were they hunting?

I find the whole story fascinating. It’s not just knowing how Dolphis died, but understanding through Alice’s narrative what his life and death meant for the family. The only detail I thought was missing was what animals the two brothers were trying to kill when the stray bullet found Dolphis instead.

I went searching through newspapers in hopes of finding the answer.  A death notice or obituary might say more about the circumstances of his death. I came up empty with the first couple papers I searched. I feared his death might not have been printed anywhere since working class foreigners (as French-speaking Dolphis and his family were often considered by the dominant class of Yankees and high-achieving German-Americans) didn’t receive much notice in those days. I did, however, note the high volume of fatal duck hunting accidents recorded in the newspapers that October.

One of the duck hunting accidents stood out to me for several reasons. First, it was national news covered in every paper I checked. Second, it involved someone I knew from my family tree. And third, it was eerily similar to the Dupre death story. On October 21, five days after Evod accidentally shot Dolphis, U.S. Senator Paul O. Husting (D-WI) was killed. He was out duck hunting with his brother on a lake in east central Wisconsin. With ducks in sight he called fire, sat up slightly in the boat, and took the full charge from his brother’s shotgun square in the back. This death was also deemed an accident. I recognized Husting from my genealogy research as the Senator who in December 1915 had nominated my 3x-great-grandfather Henry Pattison to be Postmaster of Durand, Wisconsin.

Dolphis Dupre death notice
Stillwater Daily Gazette, Wednesday, October 17, 1917, pg. 3.

In any case, I was prepared to accept that Dolphis’s death had not been recorded and move forward with the presumption that he also died hunting ducks. Then I checked the Stillwater Daily Gazette out of Stillwater, Minnesota. There it was. “Dolpha O. Dupre Accidentally Shot by Brother While Hunting Rabbits.” The short news story doesn’t add anything to Alice’s account, except that they were hunting rabbits. It ends with a somber reminder of the accident’s consequences: “the deceased leaves a widow and eight children, the oldest 14 years of age, to mourn the loss of husband and father.”

I shared this latest discovery on Facebook with a bit of humor—I mean, who dies hunting bunny rabbits?—and my friend Courtney chimed in to remind me. “How very Elmer Fudd,” she wrote. Touche. Considering how my research transpired, this clip seems appropriate.

You Died How? Series Index

Posted on by genealogic

Tombstone clipartWelcome to a brand new series called “You Died How?”

In preparation for and celebration of Halloween, what better subject can a genealogist write about than death? Somewhere in our family trees, we all have an ancestor who died in an unusual way, or maybe under questionable circumstances. In my family tree, bizarre deaths are everywhere. Up almost every branch people met strange and unfortunate ends—accidents, suicides, surgeries gone wrong . . . even brutal murders. In this series, I examine these deaths case by case.

Yes, it’s a little macabre. But it’s also a little bit funny. How some of these deaths occurred is frankly absurd, and the fact that they all come from one family is almost unbelievable. So let us confront the hard lives and shocking deaths of our ancestors with candor, sympathy, and a dash of humor. I also look forward to hearing what stories you have to share. Feel free to comment.

As new stories are added in the series, I will update this post to serve as an index with links.

  1. Dolphis Dupre (1881-1917)
  2. Burgess Nelson (1764-1852)
  3. Jacob Kobes (1849-1895)
  4. Frantisek Filipi (1821-1886)
  5. Anna Smith (1873-1920)