Clermont Chronicles

The Shaffer women, including matriarch Susan Shaffer (gray hair). Most of the
remaining women are unidentified right now, but I'm working on remedying that. 

I completed my much-anticipated road trip to Clermont on Saturday. It was nearly five hours and 250 miles of driving roundtrip, but definitely worth it for so many reasons.

As I've chronicled in this blog before, the passion for family history is always present, but the drive waxes and wanes frequently. I get busy with work. I get frustrated with a roadblock. I say "I'll do this tomorrow" and six months go by. Lately I've been feeling the drive more and more, getting more focused, doing more work, and looking for new information. My trip to Clermont put me in hyperdrive.

That's good and that's bad. The good, of course, is making me laser-focused on results. The bad: the results desired are so often not the results gained. There are so many photos that I know in my bones must exist. Don't tell me Israel and Bessie Shaffer didn't get a wedding portrait taken in 1904. I've seen the local history story about the wedding - as described by a 96-year-old Bessie in 1979. It was a big, expensive affair. They wouldn't spend $4 on wedding shoes and not have it documented on camera.

But that's a search that has gone on for some time and I fear will continue to go on for some time more. For now, let's look into the successes, the discoveries, and the revelations that emerged from my visit to Clermont.

Victor, my second cousin twice removed, lives in a single wide just north of Clermont off a gravel road.  He and his wife, Laura, had a box of photos sitting on their sun porch waiting when I arrived. They were quite friendly, and Victor quite chatty. Later his cousins, Curtis and Durwin, and Curt's wife, Dorothy, arrived. Durwin and Victor really knew how to goad each other. Victor, and fervent Democrat, and Durwin, an ardent Republican, went back and forth exchanging political barbs and engaging in fierce debates that had clearly happened many times before. In between those moments, we talked about our shared family history.

Like so many boxes of photos I've come across in my search, the photos at Victor's house were unmarked. The knew their own parents and grandparents, of course, but many others were hard to identify. I was able to help some, especially when I spotted my own great-grandfather and great-great grandfather in candid snapshots from the 1920s. Still, there are probably more questions than answers.

John D. Shaffer

Susan (Robbins) Shaffer

While looking through the box Victor suddenly said "Oh, come in here!" and led me into the living room. There, high on a wall in the corner, was a framed photo of an older couple. I had never seen the woman before, but I knew the face of the gentleman. It was the stern, authoritative stare of my third great grandfather, John D. Shaffer. Next to him, his wife, Susan.

As much as I know about Susan (and I know quite a bit, really!) I have never seen her photo. To me, photos are one of the most important parts of family history - especially for someone you never met in person. I could imagine how I thought Susan looked, but she was still a caricature in my head; a fictional projection based on an archetypal "1920s grandma" look. Seeing her face allows me to really bring the person on paper to life. It's as close to meeting the person as you can get.

After asking permission, I eagerly grabbed the frame off the wall and carefully extracted the photos from their frame for scanning. After scouring the box of photos I came across one another photo of John with some of his children, including Israel (my great-great grandfather). I also found another photo of Susan with who I believe are the "Shaffer women" - her daughters and daughters-in-law. Unfortunately, no one gathered that day knew the women in the photos other than their own grandmother, Mabel, and Susan, but I am confident one of the women is Bessie, my great-great grandmother. Today I mailed a copy of the photo with a letter to Darlene Shaffer, the widow of my great-grandfather's first cousin, in the hopes her eyes are still keen and her memory still sharp enough at 95 years old to remember some faces.

Mary Shaffer

Curt's wife, Dorothy, also brought an album, which contained some fantastic photos. Particularly interesting were two postcards: one showing John Shaffer and his siblings, the other Susan and her sisters. One of the few labeled photos was of a young, smiling girl. Scribbled across the bottom was "Aunt Mary Shaffer". Mary was the youngest of John and Susan's children and died during the Spanish Flu outbreak in 1918 at just 19 years old. Seeing her bright, cheery smile made her untimely death seem even more tragic.

After several hours of scanning and talking about family, I followed Curt's car back to Elgin, the town that's been home to my family for generations. As luck would have it, the town museum was open. I strolled inside and found several family photos and relics, including a dray cart from 1873 once used by another third great grandfather, William J. Gruver, when he worked for the railroad.

My final stop on the road trip was Illyria Community Church in rural Fayette County. The church has witnessed many moments in my family's history, including the wedding of my grandparents and great-great grandparents (my great grandparents eloped in Illinois). The cemetery holds many generations, going as far back as my fifth great grandparents. Down a farm lane across the street from the cemetery was once my great grandparents' farm. It was the house where my great-great grandmother grew up. It was the house where she prepared for her wedding in 1904: where the seamstress came to sew her dress, where she and the wedding party rode by sleigh across the snowy field to the church, standing all the way so as not to wrinkle their dresses. It was the farm where my mom visited as a kid, seeing rattlesnake hides tanning on the fence along the drive.

The Richards Farm, Illyria Township

In 2010 my mother and I visited the house, then long abandoned and near collapse. No one had lived in the home since my great-grandparents moved to Elgin in the early 1980s. The aging brick home was sinking, it's windows broken, it's walls decaying, it's floors warped and stained. We took pictures that day of as much as we could. Now looking back I wish we'd pried loose a few bricks, as shortly after that the house was razed. When I visited Saturday no trace of the home was there, all bulldozed away or buried beneath the dirt. If I had a shovel and better footwear I might have trudged into the waist-high grass and started digging, hoping to hit a buried piece of home I could cart away as a memento. For now, the pictures will have to be enough.

Visiting the "old home place" truly ignited the passion in me again. Finding Susan's photo made me realize how much of a thrill it is to learn new things about your family history, and in turn learn new things about yourself. Walking the grounds around the place where my great-grandparents farmhouse once stood made me realize how quickly life can change. Even something as solid as a century-old brick house can't be taken for granted. It's here one day, gone the next. The same goes for every part of history. Unfortunately, that's a realization that usual comes with hindsight.

I'm determined now to keep searching, keep asking, keep uncovering the clues about the past that form so much of who I am - who we all are - today. I don't want to be the forlorn person waxing nostalgic while I stare at an unidentified photo saying "I wish I had asked..." I want to be the one making sure the photo has a name, a date, and a digital copy. I won't be the one wishing I'd done something. I want to be the one saying "I'm sure glad I asked..."

One of many photos scanned during my trip to Clermont, Iowa. This one,
which includes members of the Shaffer and Gilson clans, includes my
great grandfather, Ralph (back row, third from left), and his parents, Israel
(front, second from left) and Bessie (front row, right).