A Family Through the Decades

On a Friday morning in late June, I found myself with a stack of piles and boxes at my aunt and uncle’s dining room table. Just to set the scene a bit further, i wasn’t uncovering treasures just anywhere. It was at one of my very favorite historic houses - a  Hoosier homestead built in 1885. I’ve always loved this house and it kind of makes looking at equally old photos (like the wedding shot from 1880 below) even more surreal. 

So I'm at the dining room table, opening boxes that my aunt has carefully labeled and divided into categories when I see the above photo. To me, this is like finding gold! From the clothing I can date it to the Edwardian era, probably around 1910. Then I ask my uncle Walt if he recognizes anyone and he immediately points out the woman second from the left. “That’s grandma Kramer!” He says.  

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Carl Stoppenhagen and Wilhelmina (Minna) Kramer post for their wedding portrait in 1880.

With this clue I’m able to start comparing labeled photos and start connecting the dots. Of course it’s Wilhelmina Kramer Stoppenhagen! She’s my second great grandmother (or Dorothy’s grandma) her face is easy to pick out in the dozen photos I’ve found of her so next I aim to put a name to the rest of the faces in the portrait.  

Because there are three other women and three men, my next assumption is that she’s posing with her children, husband and grandkids. If I look closer at the woman in a dark hat and dress, I can pick out the smile of my great grandma Mary (see her wedding portrait below). When I look at records, I can also see she would have had three daughters when this photograph was made - Minnie born 1903, Hilda born 1907 and Edith both 1908. I also think the blurry little boy behind them is her son Arnold, who was born in 1910 and is being held by her father Carl Stoppenhagen. 

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Mary Katherine Stoppenhagen and Charles Nicholas Werling pose for their wedding portrait in 1902.

So who else had children by 1910? Her sister (first woman on the right) Minnie! Thanks to additional records I found at Barb and Walt’s house, I could date Minnie’s children - Paul born 1908 and Gerhert born 1911. Those kids look roughly like they are three and under a year! 

By taking into consideration the youngest child together with the next to be born (Mary is not visibly pregnant with her next child who would be born in March 1912) I’m ninety nine percent sure this was taken in the summer of 1911! 

The younger woman on the far left would have been the youngest - Lydia. She would have been seventeen. Although she’s wearing a woman’s dress, check out the enormous hair bow she’s wearing in her hair. This indicates so me she might still have been treated as the baby of the family. Or maybe it was popular with the other girls in her class?! Who knows! 

Lastly are the two men on the left and right of the photo. Those would have been the brothers Fred and Charles, but they were only born two years apart - one man would be 24 and the other 26. I’m really guessing on this but the man on the left in the bowler hat looks a little older so I think that’s Fred which makes the man on the right brother Charles. 

So that’s the family! Next I’m going to try to compare this to Minna and Charles Sr’s 50th wedding anniversary photo taken in 1930 (below) to try to match younger and older faces of the same people. My grandmother Dorothy is the second child from the left in the front row! Mary and Charles Werling are standing on the right side just behind the seated elderly couple and I'm pretty sure Charles' twin August is standing just a few people to the left of them! 

Have you ever aimed to date photos? I love using my costume history background to give it my best shot! I’d love to see links to your posts or photos of your family too!  

The Mystery of Sarah Jane and her Father David King

Front Row: David King Jr, Almena Caldwell King, Samuel Nobel King, Robert Quigley King Top Row: Mary Elizabeth King Gotwald, Sarah Jane King, Almena King

Take look at this beautiful family, especially the young woman standing center in the back row. Her name is Sarah Jane King and she was born in 1839. Sarah is part of a mystery I’ve been working on for weeks, which all started with a leafless branch extending from her father, David King.  

So far in my genealogy research I’ve had remarkably good luck. Maybe because I wasn’t expecting to find much more than what my parents had already shown me. Any branch that’s opened up to a previously unknown set of parents or a new piece of vital information im able to fill is a whopping victory. The farther youre able to go, the taller and wider your tree. 

David King Sr.

But with David King and his parents, I kept getting dead ends.  That is to say - I couldn’t find any parents at all. 

So I turned to his children - specifically the names they were given - in hopes that might provide a clue to David’s own parents’ identities. His wife’s side of the family (Almena Caldwell) was incredibly well documented, so it was easy to identify which of their children’s first and middle names came from her ancestry. 

One name unaccounted for was Quigley - two of David and Almena’s sons had it as a middle name and that struck me as worth noting. If I searched David’s mom’s maiden name using Quigley, would something pop up? 

I tried so many combinations and still, nothing in the Family Search database. So over to google I go, searching each of his kids’ names, hoping there will be a headstone somewhere or maybe even a photo. 

And that’s where I struck gold. David’s grandson David Ward King (he went by his middle name, Ward) was quite the 19th century inventor and developed machinery which made paving roads easier. For this he gets his own Wikipedia page complete with stories and photos of his ancestry. In the telling of Wards’ family history, I learned his grandfather was found wandering the streets of Baltimore as a toddler. The child only knew his own name, so his birth year is estimated and we don’t know anything about his parents, although it’s presumed they died during the yellow fever that swept through the city around that time. That child was David King! 

Enter Robert Quigley, a Pennsylvania farmer. He took young David in and raised him as his own, but never legally adopted him. So what do you name your own children to honor the man who became a father figure to you? Bingo. The missing Quigley link. David and his wife Almena named their fourth son after David’s guardian Robert Quigley. Even though I wasn’t able to find David King’s parents I was happy to complete this portion of the puzzle of how he named his children and to realize I shouldnt use more energy on trying to find David’s parents for that branch of the tree.

When I found the post on Ward King I also found a lot of photos - of Almena and David and Ward at various ages. I used google image search to see what else might turn up.

And that’s where I found the photo of Sarah Jane. Dig deep enough, and with specific enough names, and you might find someone’s old photobucket account.  Bonus points when someone else has written on the back of the photo with everyone’s names. I couldn’t believe it!! I had found a photo from approximately 1860 of my third (Sarah Jane) and fourth (Almena) great grandmothers along with great aunts and uncles (Robert Quigley King is seated at the bottom right).  

Then I got greedy and that’s how the story shifts. In addition to a the photo of young Sarah Jane alongside her mother and five of her six living siblings, there was a photo of a much older Sarah taken forty years later. Her brothers David Jr and Robert and sister Mary Elizabeth are pictured. Below someone has labeled the photo with names. Her sister’s surname reflects her married name - Mary Elizabeth Gotwald but Sarah is still Sarah Jane King. That’s when a red flag went to to me. Why would one sister have been labeled with a maiden name and the other her married name?

Col. David King Jr., Sarah Jane King, Mary Elizabeth Gotwald, Robert Quigley King

There was another hole in the story I also needed to fix. On my Family Search page for David and Almena’s children, all but one were accounted for - either through stories, vital records or through photos. All children but one - Jennie. According to the information I had, she was second youngest - born in 1841 but with no date of death.  After a little googling this and that I finally found a headstone for S Jennie King, which I updated in her file along with her life 20 December 1841 to 2 March 1927.

Then I went back to the siblings, which I often do when a direct line isn’t giving me answers. This time I looked around for Mary Elizabeth Gotwald and found a Wikipedia page on her husband Luther, who was a well known minister of the time. And a side note here, I do not take everything I read on Wikipedia to be the end all be all truth. Nor do I trust everything I find on family search, but they can and do help corroborate information.  

That said, after reading about Luther I see that Mary Elizabeth’s Sister, Sarah Jane “Jennie” King lived with Luther and Mary at the King Homestead for the rest of her adult life. Then I keep reading to see a quote from Luther describing Jennie as  “one of the sweetest and best “Old Maids” the world has ever had.” 

Uht oh. 

It all comes together. The woman in the photo isn’t my third great grandmother Sarah Jane Fisher (neé King). She’s Jennie King, who never married or had children.  

This one error canceled out a long and well documented ancestry on my tree. If Jennie King wasn’t my great grandmother, neither was Almena Caldwell King. And that knocks out a captain in the Revolutionary War, who legend has it was given 200 acres of land by the great George Washington himself. No great grandpa Europe Hamlin. Or connection to Abraham Lincoln through his Vice President Hannibal Hamlin. 

And that’s the thing with genealogy. It’s what happens when you crowd source your lineage. My Sarah Jane King was born in the Midwest in the late 1830s. Another Sarah Jane King, also born in the Midwest (Ohio) just a year or two later. Both had fathers from Maryland. No wonder someone saw that and thought it a match.  It’s the first big disappointment of what I know will be many as I carefully review documents for each and every generation, every grandmother and grandfather.  

This false connection sends me back to ground zero for my Sarah. Probably a farmer’s daughter who never had a photo taken. But she still existed. She may not be the beauty in the antebellum photo above but she was a real person. I wouldn’t be me without her.

I wouldn’t be me if any of my thirty two third great grandparents didn’t get together to create my sixteen great great grandparents. All of those people meeting, falling in love, making love, having a child who grew up and did the same thing for generation after generation for ME to happen. That’s why genealogy is so fascinating to me.

It’s not just one sliding door that made you who you are today, it’s hundreds and thousands chance encounters, or parallel social classes, shared geographty, the same religious group, mother county, language, birth order and so on. One missing connection and you’d never be you. The odds of getting your special blend of good looks and talents are thousands of years in the making! And the odds that you’ll have the genes you do are microscopical small! But alas! Here you are! 

So if you’re able to name your distant great grandparents- great. If you can put a face to a name - awesome.  But if you can’t, it doesn’t mean that an unknown mother or father in your family tree wasn’t an absolutely necessary link in you being you. 

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Now tell me - who has done a mail order DNA kit? Did it reaffirm what you already knew or surprise the hell out of you? Has anyone done more than one and able to provide a comparison with pros and cons? Tell me all about it!  

You can read more about my family research (and what websites I use!) by clicking here. 

Throwback Thursday | Herman Amos

When it comes to family history research, one of the most thrilling things for me is uncovering never before seen photos or details of someone's life. Case in point - my mom's grandfather Herman Amos Roush. He died before she was born (my grandma was only three) so his legacy doesn't come with many stories. I may have heard his name once or twice growing up, so when I started work on that branch of my family tree, I was really excited with what I uncovered.

A couple of weeks ago I was visiting my parents and went through a big box of old loose photos and albums. There were two prints of the handsome gent you see above, but the photo studio listed was in Mississippi. I had never heard anything about any ancestors from that far south, so I peeled back the plastic cover and gently pulled back the portrait. Bingo! Herman Roush was written on the back. 

I kept digging, going back through the same boxes over and over. Maybe there were more details written on the back of photos? I lucked out again when I found two more photos of Herman - looking like a total stud alongside his dog and another with my great grandma and Harry (who's Harry? I have no idea! I hope that mystery can be solved one day too!) My grandmother had written the names of all those pictured on the back of each snapshot. Thank you grandma! I also found her aunt Ruby (Herman's sister) so I was able to put a face to the name for my chart. 

I also uncovered some military documents which listed Herman as a Corporal in the Indiana Reserve forces during World War I. Online I found his draft card, an application for a military head stone and that all had his regiment information. So then a little Googling and another jackpot - The Story of the 139th Field Artillery which documented the activities of the soldiers, their deployment to France, what camp was like and so on. I'm not really into military history (although now that I've found connections to almost every American war, I'm kind of interested!) but this account really brought life to what it was like for my great grandfather during that time. As for the MS portrait? That's where they were stationed for training and the style of sitting along with the uniform echoes what I found in the recap of the 139th! Luckily the war was over just weeks after they got to France and once home he married Eva (remember her?)I found their original marriage license in those boxes as well!) Sadly, however, he died as a young man and left behind three young children (Including my great Uncle J. Edward Roush who served in Congress and brought forth the legislation for 911!) I'm so grateful to be able to see what he looked like and verify his time as a solider through these various documents. In the coming months I hope I can also confirm our shared Roush ancestors who fought in the Revolutionary War!

Want to read more about my genealogy research or learn how I do it? Read here! 

Throwback Thursday | Dot + Red

Since I'm all in on the family history research these days, I thought I'd do a Throwback Thursday post with some of my grandparent's, Dorothy and Walter (who's nicknames were Dot and Red) wedding photos! If you think I get a kick out of finding old genealogy lines, imagine how much I love seeing these old photos of my grandma and grandpa. I love the amateur snap shots they took with their maid of honor too. So spontaneous and full of love. They really bright the moment back to life! 

Fun Fact: All the girls in my family have had a piece of my grandmother's dress incorporated into their weddings! I wrapped the stems of my bouquet of zinnias my dad, mom and uncle Walt grew for me!