52 Ancestors #3: Ebenezer Griswold (29 Jul 1725 – 30 Sep 1810), Tangled Roots?

The prompt for this week was “Longevity.” If I wrote about my longest living relative, I would start to sound like a broken record. My great aunt, Edna Van Horn lived to be 105, but she was the subject of week 1 and mentioned in week 2. My longest living known ancestor was Martha Elizabeth Smith Foster (28 Jul 1837 – 22 Feb 1938). I haven’t done much research on her yet, but from what I see, she was a remarkable woman and I’d like to visit with her in the future when I know more of her story. I didn’t want to do a statistical study. What was I going to write about?

 A couple weeks ago, DearMYRTLE announced a study group for “Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways to America” by David Hackett Fischer. It seemed like a good idea to review my own early ancestors and figure out what folkway might apply to them before starting to read for the sessions. When I did so, I came across a name I see frequently in my mother’s DNA matches. Griswold. Ebenezer Griswold, born in 1725, was the son Samuel and Elizabeth Abell. He is known to have been a Revolutionary soldier and reported to have had ten children by his first wife, Hannah Merrill. My GGG grandmother, Lydia Griswold Van Horn is said to be the daughter of his son Joshua and Clarissa Wright and here we have a problem. My great aunt had told me that a distant cousin wanted to join the DAR under Ebenezer, but it would never be possible. I didn’t ask why, but a quick check this week revealed that Lydia does not appear in the birth records of Bennington, Vermont where she was supposedly born. She didn’t appear anywhere else either.

I decided to take a look at my mother’s DNA matches to see if there was a clue to be found there. Taking the Ancestry trees at face value, my mother matches numerous descendants of Lydia and also descendants of five of her supposed siblings. She also matches descendants of three of Lydia’s Griswold aunts and uncles, Samuel, Hannah and Alvin. Without a chromosome browser, it’s impossible to tell if all of the matches are on the same segment or if there are others involved, however, what I find intriguing is that my mother shares a 32 cm match with a descendant of Lydia’s sister Hannah and a descendant of her brother Clark. There is also a 33 cm match with a descendant of Lydia’s uncle Samuel and a 46 cm match over 2 segments with another descendant of uncle Samuel. I’d like to think that all of these matches are on the same segment, but for now it can only be a theory. I think it’s safe to say that Lydia is definitely a descendant of Ebenezer. Anything beyond that will have to wait for more research.

There were other Griswold matches, not descendants of Ebenezer, who traced their lines back to my 10G grandfather George Griswold so at some point, after a lot more research, I may have to revise this. For now though, I’m giving Ebenezer the award for longevity based on his DNA, still going strong after 293 years.

52 Ancestors #2: The Mystery Photo

The prompt for this week was “Favorite Photo.” The one I chose isn’t my favorite, but it’s the one that has puzzled me for years. When was the photo taken and where? I had posted it on the internet years ago in hopes that someone would recognize the building and I’d spent hours trying to decipher the lettering on the sign hidden by the tree limb. Eventually I gave up and it has been sitting on a shelf where I could occasionally glance at it and wonder. With interest renewed by this challenge, I determined to finally solve the puzzle, but I’m embarrassed to report that I started out with the same blinders on and no plan for the research. I assumed it was a school photo and that the building must be the school. That I never considered other options still has me shaking my head.

The ancestor shown in the photo is my grandmother, Laura Emma Van Horn Clowes (1906 – 1994). She’s is the young woman kneeling in the second row and wearing the checkered coat.

In the past, I had tried dating the photo by looking at the clothing, but was overwhelmed by the variety. I suspect that many of the youngsters were wearing hand-me-downs, while others were trying to dress in the latest style. In my grandmother’s case, I know her mother made all of her clothes and often deconstructed other garments to do so. I finally chose to concentrate on what the little boys were wearing and decided the date was likely between 1910 and 1920. Laura would have been 14 in 1920 so a range of 1918 to 1920 seemed like a good fit. They were living in Pueblo, Colorado at that time, but the photo didn’t match any of Pueblo’s historic schools. Might it have actually been taken somewhere else? The photographer’s name is on the photo. Maybe that would help.

Searching Google for the photographer was problematic. Was the name Floyd or Lloyd? Was he from Pueblo or Denver. It’s bad enough when you don’t know exactly what you are looking for, even worse when Google starts out by giving you results with half of your search terms removed. At first nothing I tried produce results. Eventually, I got it right and among the results was a pdf version of an article written about a photographer named John Wilbur Clarence Floyd! It had to be my guy, he lived and had a photography studio in Pueblo from 1906 to 1930 when he died. (I’ve chosen not to link to it here as it was not posted by the person who wrote it or the publication he wrote it for.)

Now, I had an approximate date and a probable location, but I still didn’t know what the building actually was. I sent the photo to a cousin and asked her to tell me what she saw. In the meantime, I wrote to the Pueblo City-County Library to see if someone there could help identify the “school.” My cousin wrote back saying that based on what she could make out of the lettering on the sign, maybe it was a church. A church? That had never crossed my mind. A couple of hours later, the library emailed that they had been able to determine that the building was actually a church called El Bethel Presbyterian Church, gave the street address and said it was still standing. They also stated that they were unable to determine what school she would have gone to. I was both excited and embarrassed. And still wearing blinders.

My great aunt Edna, Laura’s older sister from week 1, had written a number of short articles about her mother, her life, and growing up among other things. Maybe I could find the name of the elementary school there as I knew she had mentioned where she went to high school. Yes, there it was. Somerlid.

Now I knew what the building was and wasn’t, but I still had those blinders on. Why was a school photo being taken at a church? I was pretty sure they weren’t Presbyterian and besides there were no other family members in the photo. I decided I better find out how close the photography studio was to this church, maybe that was the clue. No, I found the studio listed in the city directory, but it wasn’t all that close. And then, I thought to look up schools in the city directory. Bingo! There was Somerlid less than three blocks from the church. And, I still can’t figure out why the picture was taken in front of that church!

Maybe I should research the school and see if I could find evidence that classes were held elsewhere. I didn’t find anything like that, but I did learn that in 1919, Somerlid had 386 students.[1] What? All this time I had been thinking one room school house. This couldn’t possibly be a school photo. The students would have been split out by grade and there were all ages represented here.

Now what? Where DID they go to church? Back to those articles my great aunt had written. In the one entitled “Sketch, Life of Della (Schwarz) Van Horn”, written about her mother, I found a sentence that has me red in the face. “We went to Sunday School at El Bethel, a mission church of the First Presbyterian church, and enjoyed the celebrations of Christmas, Easter [when we could shed our long underwear and often wear a new dress] and a summer picnic.”[2]

Have I learned anything? I would like to think so, but in the event that I revert to old habits, I will have this post to remind me to not assume anything and to be much more open to other possibilities!

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[1] “7,168 Children Enter Schools Here on First Day of Session,” Pueblo Chieftain, 3 September 1919, p. 12; digital image, GenealogyBank (http://www.genealogybank.com : accessed 13 January 2018).

[2] Edna M. Van Horn, “Sketch, Life of Della (Schwarz) Van Horn” , 4 July 1986; unpublished manuscript in the possession of this author.

52 Ancestors #1: Edna Marjorie Van Horn (1899-2004), She Knew

Having finally decided to take up of Amy Johnson Crow's 52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks challenge, this is my first post. The prompt for this week was "Start" and this is how my obsession got started. 

Edna Marjorie Van Horn (1899-2004), She Knew, 52 Ancestors #1

Edna Van Horn wasn’t one of my ancestors.  She was my great aunt and the keeper of a quarter of my ancestors for decades.

In 1961, she inherited a bundle of letters written in German when her mother passed away. They were letters our German ancestors had written to her grandparents. It was then that she began tracing her family history. She had studied German in college, bought a very old German dictionary and proceeded to translate the letters on her own. All of her work was hand written or typed, multiple copies made using carbon paper. She sent copies of her family group sheets and other writings to her brothers and sisters while they were living and to her nieces and nephews later on. Eventually, she would buy a self-correcting typewriter. Still, that was a lot of hard work.

While in junior high and high school, I looked forward to the yearly updates on her travels, the friends she had made and the new information she could add to her family tree. The slide show was held most often at Christmas time with lots of good things to munch on and rum balls for the adults. It was interesting and colorful, but that was the extent of my interest.

In 1997 it occurred to me that I could give her a hand with her manuscripts. She was still typing them and retyping them and when she finished, she would have to pay to have them copied or printed. On the other hand, if I scanned them into my computer, she could rewrite and correct much more easily and we could print at home.

She thought that was a great idea so we spent a day going through her files and she sent me home with a pile of her writing to start with and a folder full of family group sheets so that I would know who I was working with. As I left that day, she told me she had just given me my life’s work. I laughed. Scanning, typing and printing things for her was all I had in mind.

Needless to say, she had the last laugh. In a couple  weeks, I’d done what I set out to do, she had clean copies of what she’d written, double spaced for easy reading and room for corrections. But, I had looked at those family group sheets. The bug had bitten. Hard!  She knew.

We worked together every weekend for couple years after that. When she moved to a smaller apartment, she sent most of the genealogy files home with me “for safe keeping.” She kept those for her toughest brick wall where she could continue working on him. On the day she changed her will for the last time, she told me that she had willed me everything in her room, “including the dirty socks.” She knew!