Throwback Thursday: Hotel Bryant in Elgin, Iowa

After serving lunch to her patrons on October 12, 1909, Mary Bryant hung up her apron for the last time – at least, for now. The 67-year-old widow was taking a much-needed vacation from running her hotel by Elgin railroad depot. She and daughter, Myrtle, planned to spend a year traveling and visiting family.

That evening Mrs. Bryant handed the keys to Sam and Ella (Shaffer) Greenley. Sam was a long-time drayman, hauling goods to and from the railroad, so living next to the depot was advantageous. Sam could continue his dray service while Ella handled the day-to-day business of Hotel Bryant, including running the restaurant.

They had their share of trials, especially with accident-prone Sam. On February 15, 1910, Sam ignited gas can fumes while tending to the hotel fireplaces. The explosion rocked the house and left Sam with a badly blistered left arm, not to mention burning off his eyebrows and part of his mustache. That summer he broke his foot, dropping a massive block of ice off his dray cart in the July heat. 

Despite these setbacks, the hotel was successful. Business was lively, with railroad employees becoming regular lunch customers. When October 1910 rolled around, Mrs. Bryant took over again and the Greenleys moved out – and into the Center Street home where the Bryants spent their year of leisure. 

They took with them a rocking chair, left on the porch of Hotel Bryant by the “railroad boys” in appreciation for all the meals they’d eaten at Ella's table.

Another cousin, and some inspiration

One of the side benefits of researching your family history is meeting people you never would have encountered in everyday life. Even better, most of them are your (distant) relatives.

I was very pleased to meet my distant cousin, Barb, and her husband a few weeks ago. We share common Shaffer ancestors, and both have roots in small town Elgin, Iowa, though neither of us grew up there. She lives outside of Chicago, but is a University of Iowa graduate whose mother grew up in Cedar Rapids. We corresponded for more than a year about finding a time to meet so that I could scan family photos (my long-time passionate obsession) and we could compare notes on the family.

I was fully prepared to drive to Illinois to meet them. I find the more obliging I can be the more willing people I've never met are to let me rummage through old boxes of familial detritus searching for gems. We finally had a weekend planned, when at the last minute it fell through. Barb said, "You don't by chance have this weekend free?" Lucky enough, I was. Suddenly, a trip years in the making was tomorrow. Fortunately, Barb planned to come to Iowa. She wanted to see where her mom grew up again after several years. Considering it cut my trip from five hours to 50 minutes, I was happy to agree.

We met at their hotel lobby, where I had access to an outlet to plug in my scanner. Barb brought bags of photos, many from the 1920s and earlier, all of the Capper branch of the Shaffer family (My great-great-great-grandfather, John D. Shaffer, had a sister, Emeline, who married Thomas J. Capper).

After scanning was done, we decided to head to the Czech Village for dinner. While the main purpose of this trip was family history, the highlight might have been enjoying dinner and drinks with them. We talked about travel, writing (Barb and I both have journalism backgrounds), and all sorts of associated things. It was lively and relaxing and truly fun. I left feeling inspired to commit to actually writing a family history of some kind. Thanks for that, Barb!

Now we're connected on Facebook and I hope to keep in touch, like I do with so many distant relatives I've met in the 15+ years I've been researching my heritage. I'm now starting an outline for a biography of John D. Shaffer that I hope to begin writing this fall. There are so many stories to tell in my family tree, and I was struggling to figure out how to tell them all. The reality is that I don't have to tell them all. Not at once, anyway. One story at a time, step by step.

I'm looking forward to the process (I say now, having written exactly zero words). I hope that doesn't change.

Fingers crossed.

Racine Reactions

Lately I've made it a goal to plan at least one family history road trip every summer. Sometimes it doesn't happen in the summer exactly, but it happens at least once in a calendar year.

In 2017, I drove to Denver, Colorado, to see my dad's cousin. The trip was double duty, as the primary intent was to attend my cousin's wedding. The secondary reason was to visit cousin Cindy, talk family stories, and scan family photos. The trip was a success in all ways.

This year, I decided to plan a trip that had family history as the primary focus. There were so many places I could go, but one has always been on my list: Racine County, Wisconsin. Racine is where the Foxwell and Richards side of my family first settled when they arrived from Cornwall, England, in the 1840s and 1850s. The family lived there for several decades before my lot drove a covered wagon west into Northeast Iowa. Still, some of the family remained in Racine County, populating the small towns of Yorkville, Raymond, and Caledonia.

Before setting off to Wisconsin, I made sure I knew what I was looking for. I knew the family had deep Methodist roots going back to England, so I searched for Methodist churches in the area. The only one to come up in the rural towns was in Yorkville, and their website, which included a rich history curated for their 175th anniversary last year, said they were founded by the Foxwell-Shephard family.

I arranged to meet the church historian on a Friday morning and was there bright and early at 8:00am. I wasn't sure what I was going to find, so I didn't know how long I'd be there. She had been gracious enough to look through books before I arrived and confirm there were, in fact, Foxwell entries in the church registers. Among the most precious to me was the baptism of my great-great-great-grandmother, Catherine (Foxwell) Richards, who was baptized with her younger sister the day after Christmas, 1857.

Original baptism record for my ancestor, Katie Richards,
and her sister, Mary Ann Foxwell.

There were many other entries, including baptisms, marriages, and burials. This included records going back two more generations, with Foxwell matriarch Ann (Harris) Foxwell being buried in the churchyard in 1858.

After the church, I spent some time with the historian at a local coffee shop, where she told me more about the church today, as well as the town. It was nice to get a contemporary perspective on a village where so many ancestors spent their formative years.

Since the cemetery was small, I parked in the front and walked it alone. Familiar names were visible along every step: Foxwell, Moyle, Richards, Shephard, Waldron. I always find it rewarding to be able to pay my own respects to people whose names and stories I've studied for such a long time. Next time, I'll remember to bring flowers.

Family Search Finds

Online databases seem to be growing exponentially, and not just on pay sites like Ancestry.com. One of my biggest discoveries of late came almost by accident on FamilySearch.org, and the lead came from a podcast.

I spend 90 minutes in the car every day commuting to and from work, so podcasts are an essential part of my daily life. Most of my favorites revolve around true crime (My Favorite Murder, Casefile), food (Gastropod, Milk Street Radio, Munchies), or pop culture (Pop Culture Happy Hour). I would love to add a family history podcast to the mix, and I've sampled a lot of them. I just haven't found the right one yet.

Often the first thing I look at when trying to find a podcast is how long it is. That sounds terrible, as length does not equate to quality, but I'm a pragmatist. My one-way commute is 45 minutes. I want an episode that will run at least that long so I'm not left fumbling to switch episodes midway home.

A lot of the genealogy podcasts are much shorter than that, maybe 10-20 minutes. Others that are longer just don't interest me. That's the tricky thing about family history. It's an intensely personal pursuit. If you have a podcast that talks about research in New England, but your roots go back to Germany in the 1870s, then you're left with an "appreciation" for that podcast, but not a desire to listen to it.

One day I was sampling one of the shorter podcasts, one that promised kind of a weekly digest of new things available for researchers. I'd love to give them a proper shout out here, but I'm sorry to say I didn't add them to my regular podcast list and I don't remember the name! Perhaps later I'll look it up again and add an addendum to this post. The one episode I listened too mentioned the addition of new German records on Family Search. I have used FamilySearch.org many times, but not for a while, as I had run out of new things to discover. This podcast, however, piqued my interest. As soon as I could get to a computer I went hunting.

I have a lot of German roots, and my own last name has been one of the hardest to research, primarily because of spelling changes in the mid-19th Century (from Stäcker to Staker) and other geographical conundrums previously explained in this blog. Through church records sent from Germany I was able to locate my great-great grandfather and his two sisters, but what happened to those sisters remained unknown. I had the married name of one, and I knew in 1910 my great-great grandfather, Henry, returned to Germany to visit them both. The church archivists, however, could not come up with death dates.

Then along came FamilySearch.org! One of the new records eluded to in that podcast were civil records for Kreis Steinberg, the region of Germany where a lot of the Stäcker family was located. It took almost no time at all after a a few queries to locate the first, then the second sister in civil death records. This led to the husband of the youngest sister, and the identification of two children.

Now, I make it a habit of checking every week to see what new records have been added to FamilySearch.org. There are still a lot of questions on that side of the family, and I'm hoping one week the new records added will be the puzzle pieces I've been looking for.

P.S. I'm open to good genealogy podcast recommendations if anyone has one.

What do you do when you find out no one liked your ancestor?

One of the great things about family history is getting to know the people who came before you. Even if you can't meet them in person, you can learn so much about their lives and personalities through stories, photos, documents, and other material.

Sometimes what you learn isn't what you expect. What do you do when you find out your ancestor was kind of a shitty person?

Of course, I've known for a long time at least one of my ancestors was kind of a dick. I've written numerous times about my hunt for Loren Finch and the eventual discovery that he changed his name and started a new life (and family) just one state over. That's old news, but his character was never really the question. Loren left in 1909, so there was a solid century of people knowing and understanding that he was a deadbeat dad - even if his second family has a different opinion.

In recent years, I've come to learn that a more recent ancestor, one whose time on this Earth overlapped with mine by more than a decade, was probably not the best mother or grandmother, and certainly not the best wife.

My great-grandmother had six children and lived to be 96. I was very close to her daughter (my grandmother), and was always fascinated by the fact her mother lived such a long life. She was actually the last of my great-grandparents to pass away when I was 10 1/2, and though I was old enough to remember it clearly, we never met. She lived in Arizona and being in Iowa I never traveled her way - not until she had long since passed.

I think this missed connection is what made me want to know so much about her. I kept thinking about what we could have talked about and how much I could have learned from someone born in 1898. Of course, I thought of these things in my 30s, not thinking about the fact a 10-year-old wouldn't know what to even ask.

Because of this mild obsession (a sub-obsession of my greater genealogy mania), I have pushed hard to find photos, to meet cousins, the uncover documents that tell me more about her life. Through that process I've learned a lot about her and the relationships she had with people around her. The general consensus has been this: She wasn't a great lady.

That's over-simplifying it. She was complicated. She was a product of circumstance. She probably wasn't someone who should have been a mother, though I'm glad she was for obvious reasons. Her own children and grandchildren have told me stories and called her names that would make most people blush - especially talking about your grandmother. How often do you hear that your great aunt called her mother a slut?

Anyone who is interested in family history has to understand that this is part of the deal. You can't go digging around in ancient history without expecting some dirt. You can't expect your ancestors to be Mary Poppins and Santa Claus every time.

This is why I always say I'm a family historian and not a genealogist. I am working to find the whole picture of the person. The stories alone about my great-grandmother tell me she was a bristly woman who shipped her kids off the relatives while she went bed hopping, then pitted them against each other in later years. The facts tell me she was the daughter of German immigrants who got pregnant at 17, married the baby's father when 8 months pregnant, and worked many jobs while her husband was in and out of work as a blacksmith.

Usually the stories are what bring context to the facts, but in this case I feel it's the opposite. The facts of her life help explain some of the stories. She was a young girl thrown into marriage and motherhood too soon. This complicated her relationship with her husband and children. Who knows what might have happened if she had married for love? Maybe she would have been the same person whose grandchildren describe her as "gruff" and someone they didn't really like. Or maybe not.

I could ponder the question forever, but there's no way to find an answer. The best I can do is keep learning, keep asking, and keep striving to understand the woman who was, not the woman who could have been.

Catching up

I have been woefully remiss in keeping up with this blog. I really set out to make it my journal of research and discovery, but it's so easy to just... not do it.

Sadly, it's been four months since I posted, and even longer since I wrote a legitimate blog post and not just a re-post of some Facebook Throwback Thursday photos. So, I'll try here to do a recap of research and discovery for 2016. I know there's a month to go, but I can almost guarantee I won't get much posting done between now and the holidays.

This was actually a pretty significant year in family history research for me. I made connections with cousins in Germany, I solved a century-old mystery, and I uncovered remarkable photos of people near and dear to me. I'll try to keep the summaries brief, though that's always hard for me once I get writing...

• I finally know the fate of Loren Alfred Finch, my great-great grandfather who abandoned his family in 1909! This really deserves its own lengthy blog post, but for the sake of brevity I'll say he moved to Illinois, changed his name, remarried, and and a bunch more kids - one of them still living today. This revelation came about thanks to Ancestry DNA, which helped me find Marilyn, my grandfather's half first cousin. We were matched through DNA, and by looking at her tree and discovering a Lawrence Alfred O'Neil, who shared the same middle name and same birth date as Loren Finch, that we were able to piece things together. There was also a second DNA test (my grandfather), photo comparisons, and some archival investigation. Like I said, I'll save it for a separate post (someday).
• I began a lengthy letter correspondence with my fourth cousin in Germany. Birgit is a descendant of Margaretha (Krambeck) Ehlers, older sister of my great-great grandmother, Freida (Krambeck) Sienknecht. It has been wonderful exchanging letters with Birgit and learning more about not-so-distant cousins still living in Germany. 
• I made so many contacts with cousins across the state! I visited cousins in Cedar Rapids, who had photos of the Ackerman and Adler family, including two with my grandmother at three years old. I visited my grandmother's cousin in Elgin and took home boxes of photo albums to scan and record - hundreds of photos of aunts and uncles, great-great grandparents and cousins. 
• I made another stop at the Elgin Museum, where once again I unearthed a box of seemingly random photos that proved to be filled with Shaffer family images dating back to the early 1880s. They appeared to be part of the collection that once belonged to Leota (Phillips) Welch, my great-great grandfather's first cousin, who died without heirs in the 1970s. I so appreciate the generosity of the museum volunteers, who let me bring a scanner inside (always travel with a scanner!) to make copies of the images. Another reason I ALWAYS send a pledge check when they are fundraising. 
• I wrote so many letters. Seriously, it's safe to say I wrote more than 15 letters - old school envelope-and-stamp letters. I find that's easiest for contacting distant relatives for several reasons. First, I hate cold calls. People don't often answer calls from strangers, and if I don't know the person, it's too hard to explain that I'm their third cousin twice moved in the course of making initial introductions. Second, I like to provide evidence. Every time I write to someone I send them some of my research and some photos if I can. I like to show that I'm "legit" and can help them learn something while I'm also learning from them. I have a pretty good success rate. My unofficial tally right now tells me that I had at least five people write, call, or email me based on letters I wrote them. A lot of the letters in the 15 I mentioned above just went out in the last week, so it's too early to say if they'll bring results.
• I had an unexpected package arrive from Montana. It contained photos of the Reinig family dating back to the 1860s. It was addressed to my late great aunt, Pauline, whose house I purchased after her death in 2011. It came from Pauline's second cousin, now 96, who hoped to find a home for the images in the Reinig Civic Center built in Toledo. I have talked to the city about having some of the photos on display there, but haven't really pursued it much further. We had a nice conversation on the phone and I plan to write to her again to thank her and follow up on some of the photos and information she sent me. In fact, I think I'll do that tonight. 

That's my update for now. I'm sure I'm missing something - which is why I should be blogging in more regular intervals. As always, happy hunting! 

Throwback Thursday: Lydia Clapper Moats

Lydia Ann Clapper was born in Ohio on July 21, 1825. When she was 18 she married David Moats and by 24 she was already the mother of four children.

In 1851 the family headed west and on March 10, 1852, David received a federal land grant for 40 acres in Highland Township, Clayton County, Iowa. David and Lydia made a life for themselves in Clayton County, where David farmed and Lydia raised their four children – and give birth to 10 more.

They retired in 1899 and moved to Elgin, where David and Lydia remained active. When they celebrated their 66th wedding anniversary in 1909 a reporter from the Elgin Echo stopped by there home. He found David, 89, hauling a wheelbarrow of potatoes to the cellar and Lydia, 84, cleaning the house.

In total they would celebrate 68 years of marriage and earn the title of the longest married couple living in Fayette County. When she died in 1912 at age 86, they had had 48 grandchildren and 43 great-grandchildren.