The Estherville Connection

Lawrence Reinig (right) and Unknown.
Taken in Estherville, Iowa.

For years this photo of my great grandfather, Lawrence Reinig, has been a puzzle to me and my family. We know well enough that Lawrence is on the right, but the man on the left has remained unidentified. Lawrence was an only child, as was his mother, and all of his cousins on his father's side are well documented in photos. Lawrence was never a high school graduate, so this wasn't a classmate. My late great aunt, Lawrence's eldest daughter, once went through the old photos and tried identifying people. On the bottom of this one she wrote "?"

A few years ago I noticed the very faint, nearly undetectable photo studio imprint at the bottom of the photo. The photographer was located in Estherville, a town in northwest Iowa that was nowhere in the family history. The Reinigs, the Sabins, none of them had any connection to Emmet County or anything in that region. The photo hasn't garnered much attention or investigation because there were just so few clues.

But yesterday, while combing the microfilm pages of the Toledo Chronicle from 1919 and 1920, I came upon this short item on page six of the Oct. 9, 1919, edition:

The Toledo Chronicle Oct. 9, 1919, p. 6

BUSHY RIDGE - Mr. and Mrs. Jimmie Maloney of Estherville came last Wednesday for a visit with his cousin Laurence Reinig.
---

As I transcribed this at the historical society the Estherville connection didn't dawn on me at first. I was more interested in the reference to Mr. Maloney as Lawrence's cousin. There was no Maloney on Lawrence's father's side and as I said his mother was an only child, leaving no branch of the Sabin tree from which a cousin could sprout. I knew right away this wasn't a first cousin because of this, how he was a cousin would be harder to decipher. When people wrote little society items for the paper, they didn't normally say "Lawrence Reinig's third cousin once removed came for dinner last night." A cousin is a cousin is a cousin, no matter how indirectly connected.

I came home trying to remember anything I knew about people named Maloney or a connection to Estherville. It was then I remembered the photo of Lawrence taken in Estherville. Could this be Jimmie Maloney? How are they related?

The next step was ancestry.com where I quickly searched for a James Maloney living in Estherville, Emmet County, Iowa. The search brought up numerous people, and without more to go on it was hard to say who it could be. One James was born in 1898, so I back-traced him from the 1920 Census to 1900, where he was living with his father, James A. Maloney.

None of this showed a definitive connection to Lawrence Reinig's tree, so I decided to try the Estherville newspapers on newspaperarchive.com. Luckily there were some issues available. I did a search of James Maloney in Estherville and found several references, including an obituary for James A. Maloney from 1922. Among the out of town guests for that service was Anson Jackson of Toledo (Lawrence's great uncle)!

Now we were getting somewhere. I continued looking through the search results for Maloney and found another reference to the Jackson family, this time to my great-great-great grandmother, Angie Sabin in March 1916: 

The Estherville Enterprise March 22, 1916, p. 2

CENTER-ELLSWORTH. (Intended for last week.) – Mrs. Sabin, of Toledo, Iowa, is visiting at the James Maloney home. Mrs. Sabin is a cousin of Mrs. Maloney.
---

So the connection isn't with the Maloney name! Next was to determine the identity of Mrs. Maloney. A quick look at US Census records indicated her name was Lillia and further Ancestry matches elaborated on that to fill out her maiden name, Bishop. So Lillia (Bishop) Maloney was a cousin of Angie Sabin. That would mean Lillia's mother had to have the maiden name of Jackson or Jester to make her a first cousin. Another quick look at Ancestry showed Lillia's mother's maiden name was...

Snyder. Crap.

I sat at my desk staring at my family tree and the name Snyder. Where did this fit? I didn't see a Snyder anywhere, especially not that would make a connection to Angie Sabin. Finally, I decided to do what everyone does when they're in a bind: I Googled it.

A Google search of Lillia Bishop Maloney brought me to her Find-A-Grave posting, which included Catherine Snyder Bishop, Lillia's mother. Catherine had no parents listed, but she was born in Ohio around 1839. Using that as a guide, I began looking through all the Jester family lines to see if anything popped up.

Soon enough, it did.

Angie Sabin had an aunt, Mary (Jester) Snyder, who lived in Ohio. Mary, in turn, had a daughter, Catherine, born around 1838. This was it. It had to be it. It wasn't necessarily definitive, but it was as close as we were going to get. 

So Angie Sabin and Catherine Bishop were first cousins, making Lawrence Reinig and Jimmie Maloney third cousins. I decided next to search through the boxes of photos in my house to see if there were any photos that were identified of the Maloneys. The more I searched for the connection, the more I could recall seeing that name before and not knowing why. It didn't take me long to dig up a photo of a young man and a woman. On the back was written "Jim Maloney and sister".

Bingo.

Unfortunately, the Jim Maloney in that photo does not match the gentleman who is standing next to Lawrence in this photo. Still, it makes sense that his is probably on of Jim's siblings. A little more research and some more digging and perhaps he'll get a name after all.

I also found a photo of Catherine (Snyder) Bishop on Ancestry. She's an older lady in that photo, but I'm hoping I can use it to compare against the unidentified photos in Grandma Sabin's album. If a family with such distant biological ties remained so close as a family, it stands to reason photos were exchanged over the years.

I hope next to find the descendants of Jim Maloney, or better yet the descendants of the man in the photo.

Stalled

It's happened again.

Like so many times before, I was determined. I was optimistic. I was focused. I thought "now I'm really going to get something done."

And now here we are.

Family history is fun. Family history is engaging. Family history is fascinating. Family history is...

• Time-consuming
• Sometimes tedious
• Often frustrating

Back in January I was sure I was going to get somewhere. I started this blog, I started transcribing my great-great-great grandfather's journal, I was making connections with distant cousins around the nation. Then, life hit. Work got busier, other commitments took hold, and the time for investigations, transcriptions, and new discoveries quickly slipped away.

I haven't worked on Warren Sabin's journal in months. While the potential insights into the life of an ancestor in 1870 is huge, the work is tedious and beyond frustrating. Old timey handwriting is tough to decipher, especially when the writer has a loose grasp on spelling and grammar. In the few weeks of entries I did get through, I learned some interesting things. Warren was a carpenter and built sleigh blades. He went to meeting, went to weddings, and walked to town with friends. He helped neighbors with threshing, commented on business in town he visited and general goings on in the neighborhood. He wrote to his relations in Marengo and they wrote to him. I'm sure once I have time to sit down and go through the remaining pages I'll learn even more.

There's that word again: time.

I'm learning more and more why so many people I encounter who are also researchers are older. You really have to be retired to do this work. And believe me, it sometimes feels like work. I have a Word document on my computer at home with 40+ pages of newspaper transcriptions that have yet to be entered into Family Tree Maker. I wish FTM had a way to tag people in an article the way you tag faces in a Facebook photo. That would eliminate a lot of copying and pasting.

[Family Tree Maker: Feel free to read this and develop that capability, then direct all royalties to me. Thanks!]

With a tree that is so wide it's hard to focus on one branch or one name. I was working on the Sabins for a while because I happened to be going through Warren's journal and Angelina's photo album. Then I remember a Shaffer item I meant to look up, or a Staker relation passed away, or a relative from the Sienknecht family emails me. There is always something else to do. This is one of those times where I wish I had tunnel vision. That kind of narrow focus would come in handy.

Last weekend I tried to kickstart my research again by visiting the Tama County Historical Society. Their hours are pretty restricted, so I was glad to have a Friday off work so I could spend an afternoon there. I spent several hours combing through the 1919 issues of the Toledo Chronicle searching for information about the Reinig and Sabin family, and I found some! Still, it took two hours to go through four months, and as someone prone to motion sickness the constant reeling of microfilm can cause an unpleasant intestinal imbalance.

Regardless of the upset stomach, the bits I did discover were enough to spur my interest again and get me excited to start research. Sadly, when I went to the museum the next day they were closed, even though their posted hours include Saturday afternoons. I think the historical society is becoming the victim of an aging membership. The volunteers who run it are all in their senior years and finding enough people to staff the few hours it is open is tough - especially in crummy weather.

I started volunteering to help the museum create signage to promote their monthly events. The public relations professional in me see the intense need for better marketing of programs and the museum as a whole. There must be young people out there who are interested in research the same as I am. I'd love to lend my insights and time to the effort, but I just do not have the time I feel it needs. The museum needs new blood, not because the current volunteers are bad or ineffective, but because they're aging, they know they're aging, and the future of it depends on this.

So if you're young, if you're interested in history of any kind, go volunteer at your local historical society.

And if you're a resident of Tama County, Iowa, stop down at the historical society in Toledo and find out how you can help.