How Cousin Barney Got His Name

Sometimes when we pursue our family history research, it's easy to see how family members got their names. Some families recycle the same names through several generations, even having first cousins of approximately the same age with exactly the same name because the cousins were named for the same grandparent. For example, my great grandmother was baptized Pelagia because Sicilian naming customs dictate that the second daughter is named for the maternal grandmother. She had a first cousin also named Pelagia, another second daughter.

But sometimes names are given not to honor family members, but other people or things that the parents admire. Such turned out to be the case with my Cousin Barney's name. Who is Cousin Barney? In my perpetual quest to find more family lore and photographs, I track distant cousins. Well, maybe the stuff ended up in their branch, not mine, right? And so I found Barney, my second cousin twice removed who was also interested in family history. When I first contacted him about five years ago, he was the sole caregiver for his wife who had Alzheimer's. All he could manage was the occasional short phone conversation, or a brief letter. Barney lives four hours away, and does not do email, but his wife's steadily worsening condition meant that visits were out of the question.

Last winter, his wife passed away.  I wanted to invite Barney to visit me when the weather warmed up, but life intervened. My father ended up having a quadruple bypass and valve replacement. I spent the summer going back and forth between Florida where he lives and Illinois, where my home is. More time passed, and a few weeks ago, a letter appeared from Barney asking when we could get together.  As he pointed out, he is 88 and who knows how much longer he is going to be able to travel.This galvanized me. I called and said "Come as soon as possible!" He had to come to us because I still have a couple kids at home.

Barney arrived bearing several large photo albums and many, many stories. We had a fascinating visit. I recorded  him talking about growing up in the New Orleans area in the 1930s and 1940s, and we identified and scanned photos. Because I had done more research, I was able to identify some family members that exceeded even his considerable memory. He was able to give me an understanding of many of our ancestors' personalities, an aspect that the research does not always uncover. By the end of the visit, I asked him, "Barney, how did you get your name?"  He tilted his head to the side and looked at me quizzically.

                                                         
                                               Cousin Barney and I during our visit. Selfie courtesy of us.

His full name is Barney McCoy Landry Jr. I look at that name and think that he and his father must have been named for somebody in particular. Were there McCoys in his father's family that we don't know about? But Barney had no idea why he and his father had been given that name. He said jokingly, "Well, I have eliminated Barney Oldfield, Barney Fife and Barney Rubble as being the person I was named after." Okay, great. But I was curious, because I could not remember any figures from U.S. history with this name.

We had about fifteen minutes before he needed to hit the road so that he would be driving back home in daylight.  I googled "Barney McCoy." I started finding the names of several other men whose first and middle names were Barney McCoy followed by different surnames. Interesting. Clearly others had also been named for a Barney McCoy, and they didn't necessarily seem to be related. Several, but not all were born in the 1890s like Cousin Barney's father. One man was listed on the Vietnam Veterans' Memorial in Washington D.C., and clearly was much younger than the other Barney McCoy Somethings. Then I started to come across references to a song.

On Google Books I found  The Alabama Folk Lyric: A Study in Origins and Media of Dissemination by Ray Broadus Browne. Under the heading "Unhappy Love Songs" the author discusses a song called, you guessed it, "Barney McCoy" beginning on page 123. He states that it was a widely popular song in the 1870s, but that someone did not think to print up the words and music until 1881. Subsequently, it appeared in dozens of songsters, or sheet music collections. This is very interesting in light of the fact that Barney's grandmother was born and raised in Baldwin County, Alabama.

Song lyrics documented by Ray Broadus Browne, courtesy Google Books

                                            

Catharine Serena (White) Freeman Landry was born in March of 1859 to Asa J. White and Isabella Presley. She and her first husband Harry Freeman moved to Newton, Texas at some point in the mid 1880s between the births of their second and third children. Harry died in 1890 and was buried in the Watson Chapel Cemetery in Bleakwood. A historical marker explains that most of the people resting in that place worked in the lumber industry in Bleakwood.  So we have a probable motivation for why the Freemans moved there. Baldwin County Alabama, where they came from, also had a large lumber industry as well as a turpentine factory.

The names of the three Freeman children all appear to be family names. But in 1891 Catharine remarried, this time to a French immigrant named Emile J. Landry. She had three additional children with him, and all three of them have names that were outside of the family, after some famous individual, or in her son Barney's case, after a song that Catharine must have adored in her youth. Her youngest son was named Henry Ward Beecher Landry, after the minister, abolitionist, lecturer, and womanizer, Henry Ward Beecher, who was the brother of Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of the famous anti-slavery novel Uncle Tom's Cabin.  A biography of Beecher by Debby Applegate is entitled The Most Famous Man in America. Beecher was a household name, widely published and widely quoted, and he embarked on a lecture tour of The West in 1884. Could Catharine have heard him speak and then later named a son for him?  Maybe.

Catharine's first child with Monsieur Landry was named Jesse Corbet Landry. Again, I have found many men named Jesse Corbet followed by another surname, but thus far I have not figured out if Jesse Corbet was either a living or legendary individual. There was a Jesse Corbet enumerated in the 1866 Alabama State Census, but more research is needed to say whether he is the namesake.

How did Barney react to the knowledge that it's highly probable that his name came from an old Alabama folk song? With great excitement! After I pieced together that theory, I went onto YouTube to see if I could find a recording.  As we listened to the old scratchy rendition of the song, tears filled his eyes.  An understanding of how we got our names is a crucial part of everyone's identity.

                                              https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5t1qAYgNang

Tracking Down the Right Dates

It all started when I was trying to figure out some dates. Well, a lot of dates, actually.  I am writing a book called Resilient City: A Timeline of New Orleans History. One of the reasons why I started this project is that the city's tricentennial is in 2018. Another is that I have done so much background research about New Orleans that it would be nice to have it all organized in some kind of chronological fashion so that I can easily locate facts for my family history research. But I digress...
So I decided that because Mardi Gras is such an important part of the city's cultural heritage, that I should figure out the dates and add them to the timeline--the dates of all 300 Mardi Gras celebrations.

That turned out to be easy for the mid-twentieth century on. The New Orleans Public Library has a list of Mardi Gras dates from 1948 forward on their website. Thank you NOPL!

But how was I going to fill in the dates for all the Mardi Gras from 1947 back to 1718? Hmm...I decided it might be easier to locate a list for Ash Wednesdays rather than Mardi Gras, so I googled "historic Ash Wednesday dates" and bam, I found the website called "Easter Dates from 1901 to 2078" by the University of Bamberg in Germany. Danke schoen.

Now I could subtract a day off the Ash Wednesday dates and have my Mardi Gras dates. But that still left 1900 back to 1718. Back to the Google search results. There was the website of the U.S. Navy Astronomical Department.  Yes, the U.S. Navy.  They have a search box where one can type in a year and receive the dates of its Ash Wednesday and Easter Sunday. And, glory be, it went back to 1583, the beginning of the Gregorian calendar. Semper Fortis.

So then it was a little tedious, because I had to type in the years one at a time into the search box, but then I would be rewarded with the Ash Wednesday date for the year which was easily adjusted to my Mardi Gras date.  I was feeling smug--until I hit the first year in which Ash Wednesday fell on March 1.  The problem there is that during Leap Year, February has 29 days instead of 28.  So then I had to figure out if the particular year I was looking at with the March 1 Ash Wednesday was a leap year or not.  How to do that?

This is where my reference librarian training comes in really handy!  I knew that I could determine that by using a perpetual calendar, which is a  list of different calendar formats which correlates to another list which identifies which calendar format applied to which year.  So by consulting the perpetual calendar, I knew when the March 1 Ash Wednesdays had a February 29 Mardi Gras, and which had a February 28 Mardi Gras. Are you with me? So it took a couple hours to work through all 300 years, but eventually I had the correct Mardi Gras dates plugged into the timeline.

Perpetual calendars can also help with other date identification problems. Have you ever run across a document which refers to something happening on a day of the week, but you don't know which date that was? I do, and so find myself turning to the perpetual calendar often for help. They were formerly located only in print almanacs, but now are available online for free.

A little know-how can help us to solve date quandaries in our research, and to record precise dates for events.

Figuring Out Where They Worshipped

Religious records can be enormously helpful.  They provide information about individuals and families when civil records are missing, incomplete or incorrect. They sometimes provide more information than the equivalent civil record provides. For example, the marriage record of a religious institution might list the full names of the bride and groom, while the civil record only lists first and last names.  Also, because the religious officiant was often of the same ethnicity as the people he was creating records for, and literally spoke their language, he may record details that are more, well, detailed! For example, a civil record may list Germany or Ireland as a birthplace, while the church record would list Talge, near Bersenbruck in Hanover or County Cavan in Ireland.

So we are all in agreement that church records are valuable, but here's the tricky part: how do you figure out which church your ancestors attended? Okay, here is where we separate the men from the boys, as the old expression goes. Truly determined researchers are willing to engage in the detective work that is often necessary to figure this out, and then additional effort to track where the records now reside. Here are some approaches that have worked for me...

Abandon Assumptions

Sometimes, we think we know what religion ancestors were, but either they changed religions, or because a religious institution of their denomination was not available where they lived, they attended a church of a different denomination from the one you assumed they attended. Yes, assumptions about our ancestors can hinder our research process greatly! So instead let's look for clues about what the correct religion really was.

Finding Clues in Other Sources

1. Work backwards and check sources that the ancestors generated last. First look at death notices and obituaries. They are not the same thing, and there may be both. Death notices list the bare bones details of how and where a person died. Obituaries list more information about the deceased including surviving family members, biographical details, and details about the interment and any accompanying religious services.

You probably looked for these in the local paper where the person died. But have you looked in the papers in other localities where the person lived including the birthplace? Have you looked in not just the mainstream local paper, but in ethnic newspapers that match the deceased's background?What about publications of the deceased's church, fraternal/social organizations, and college/university? Have you checked the newspaper where his siblings and children lived at the time of his death? These are all possibilities, and sometimes the information in different publications can vary.

This obituary appeared in the May 22, 1903 Jessamine Journal, a newspaper in the area where the deceased's sister lived. No obituary for Dr. Hollis has yet been found in Kansas newspapers where he lived.

Even if the obituary does not come right out and say which church the deceased attended, it may provide the name of a religious officiant. Ah ha.  Now we can try to figure out where the officiant worked. How? First, I always try a simple Google search putting the name in quotation marks. And I try a lot of name variations. For example:

"Rev Louis Kohlmann"  "Rev L. Kohlmann" "Lewis Kohlmann" and Kohlmann minister Chicago

If the obituary holds no clues to the religion at all, it may still list the undertaker, or the death certificate will. Sometimes the undertaker's records list which religious officiant presided.

2. The place of interment itself may be a clue. The cemetery may be affiliated with a current or defunct place of worship. This may be obvious (e.g. St. John's Lutheran Cemetery) or it may be hidden because the cemetery has had a name change over the years. Do your background research on that cemetery. Also, some cemeteries that are non-denominational are sub-divided into sections that are for members of specific organizations or religious groups.

3. Look at articles in county histories and other biographical reference works. They sometimes list both religious and political affiliations.

This article in the History of Clay and Owen Counties, Indiana, p. 431, shows that Mr. and Mrs. Holmes belong to different churches!



4. Civil marriage records such as licenses and returns are another place to check, because both can list the name of the party who performed the ceremony. If this person is a civil servant such as a judge or a justice of the peace, then you are out of luck. Either the bride and groom were not particularly religious, or a religious officiant was not handy, or they were of different faiths and it was too hard to decide whose religious leader to use for the wedding ceremony.

                                      Cook County, Illinois civil marriage record of  my great grandparents.

This is the marriage license of my great grandparents Carl Brandstetter and Maria Wiederer, Austrian immigrants who married in Chicago in 1909. It lists the officiant as "Rev. Louis Kohlmann" of the German Evangelical Fredens [sic] Church. I could find nothing googling that church name, but using the variant search terms technique for the minister's name worked to find information. Some of the hits included newspaper articles, references to him in others' genealogical research, and digitized books on Google Books and Internet Archive that listed religious and charitable institutions. Kohlman's church was more typically called the Church of Peace. I also discovered it was located at the corner of Josephine and 52nd Streets.  Another reference on Rootsweb explained that the church had moved and changed its name and denominational affiliation over the years.  It was now the Palos Park Memorial United Church of Christ, located in suburban Palos Park. They still hold the records.

            Maria Wiederer and Carl Brandstetter's wedding photograph, 1908. Courtesy of  Joan Johnston Wedemeyer.

I shared this with my mother, who first phoned the church office, and then, when the secretary was having trouble locating the record, asked permission to drive over and examine the church book herself. So she did, and found that their June 1908 marriage was not recorded in the book until six months later, at the very end of the 1908 marriage records section. Apparently, Rev. Kohlmann had forgotten to write it down soon after conducting the marriage, but remembered it several months later, just as he was starting the the new section in the book for the 1909 marriages.

        The marriage record of Charles [Carl] Brandstetter and Mary [Maria] Wiederer at the Church of Peace in Chicago, now the Palos Park Peace Memorial United Church of Christ, 10300 W. 131st St., Palos Park, Illinois.

This should teach us to be very thorough in our searches, and to examine all records personally when possible.  Now, one might assume that this couple belonged to this congregation because they were married there. Nope. A search of the membership lists did not turn them up, although a Henry Brandstetter was found, who may have been a relative of the groom. We know from family knowledge that the bride was Catholic, and that the groom was an Evangelical protestant who disliked the Catholic church, but tolerated his children being raised as Catholics. We also know that the protestant ceremony was a concession to the groom, but that the bride longed for a Catholic ceremony as well.  She did not get her wish for many years, but it finally occurred on April 22, 1931 at Sacred Heart Church in Chicago. So one has to search for additional church records for this family in multiple religious institutions in a range of years outside the norm.

     

Solving Mysteries: Annette's Disappearance and Joseph's Name Change

My great grandmother Isabell McAvin, who we called Mammaw, used to tell a strange story.  One day when she was a young married woman living in New Orleans in the 1920s, a woman knocked on her door. She was middle-aged, had red hair, and held a box.  The box held a  birthday cake, and she said she had brought  it for my great grandfather Joseph. Puzzled, Mammaw accepted the cake for her husband who was at work, and then the woman left--she had not wanted to wait for his return. Mammaw later said, "I should have guessed who she was." Perhaps she should have considering what had happened a few days earlier.

My great grandfather, Joseph McAvin was an engineer who worked for the Grinnell Company designing fire sprinkler systems for buildings. One of the architects he met at work was named William R. Burk.  "My mother was named Burk," he casually told the architect, "but she is dead."  "Who was your mother?" Burk asked. "Annette Burk," Joseph responded. "Annette is my sister, and she is not dead." Stunned silence.

Soards' New Orleans City Directory, 1927, p. 1024

Let me back up a bit.

In 1892, Joseph's parents John McAvin and Annette Burk were married at St. Joseph's Roman Catholic Church in New Orleans, a massive brown brick building, the largest church structure in the South. They had known each other from living in the same neighborhood. Annette was an Episcopalian, but had agreed to the Catholic ceremony to please her new husband. Like many young couples in those days, they moved in with John's family into a humble shotgun duplex on Cleveland Avenue. John worked as a laborer, and the couple had two sons, Burk on September 15, 1893, and Theodore, exactly one year later.

                                                   St. Joseph Roman Catholic Church, 1802 Tulane Ave., New Orleans   Image from Wikipedia

But soon Theodore became sick, with a horrible malady, marasmus, that caused his small body to wither. It can be caused by malnutrition, but also by viral, parasitic, or bacterial causes. The stress on his poor parents as they helplessly watched him fade away can only be imagined, and it may have contributed to the breakup of their marriage, for within a couple years Annette left. She left not just her husband John McAvin, but also her surviving son Burk, who was then about four.

Where did Annette go?  For years, I speculated about this. She must have found a high roller, I thought. Maybe she moved someplace more glamorous, for New Orleans has always been a fairly provincial place. My second great grandmother Sophie Annette Burk was a mystery. But once I started researching her, many decades after these events unfolded, I got my answer, and it was surprising.

I was able to find her fairly easily because in New Orleans women are listed by their maiden names in many records, even after they are married, due to the French influence on their laws and civil administration. Annette had not gotten very far at all. She "married" another man named Frank Klevorn, a manager of a factory that made cloth sacks, and started another family of six children with him in New Orleans. I put married in quotation marks because she was never divorced from John McAvin. I can imagine him saying something like this:" Fine, leave.  But I'm a Catholic, so I'll never give you a divorce. Never. Nor will I ever give you any reason to be able to get one. And you're not taking my son." So Annette had a choice to make. Either stay in the marriage in order to keep her son Burk, or leave and leave her son behind. She chose the latter. The fact that she was not officially married to Frank must have bothered her, because she did try to get a divorce several years later. I sent off for the case file on microfilm through a Family History Center. She claimed a divorce on the grounds of desertion. John McAvin responded, it's not true, and you can't prove it. She couldn't. Case dismissed.

    Annette Burk McAvin is listed in the 1900 U.S. Census with her partner Frank Klevorn and their daughter Sadie. Notice she reported she had been married four years (untrue), and that she had born four children, only one of whom was living (also at least partly untrue).


Wait a minute you are thinking.  What about Joseph? Where does he fit into all this?  I'm getting to it.  After Annette left, John went to talk to the priest at St. Joseph's, the grand brick warehouse of Irish Catholics on Tulane Avenue. He asked the priest to change his son's name in the baptismal register, which the priest did. Burk McAvin was forever transformed into Joseph Ferdinand McAvin. After all, if the boy's name had remained Burk, his wife's maiden name, John would constantly be reminded of the wife who left him. Instead, he chose Joseph, which was the baptismal sponsor's name, and Ferdinand. The reason why he chose this middle name is a mystery because there are no other Ferdinands in the Burk or McAvin families, but it may be that the name change occurred on May 30, St. Ferdinand's feast day, and it was the priest's suggestion.  Whatever the reason, it was an inspired     choice because St. Ferdinand is the patron saint of engineers, young Joseph Ferdinand's future profession. I was able to piece that together because in the church record book, a priest crossed out Burk and wrote in Joseph Ferdinand.

However, John never bothered to change his son's name legally. His civil birth record to this day officially lists his son as Burke [sic] McAvin. But all Catholics know that it's only church records that really count anyway, right?  The other thing John did was to devise a story.  His son was only four, too little to really understand what was going on between his parents. So he told the boy that his beautiful redheaded mother had died and gone to heaven. John's mother Mary, an immigrant from County Cavan, Ireland, and his sister Kate, who both lived with them were in on the fiction. The boy must never know that his mother left him willingly.

                                                         Orleans Parish birth record, v. 105, p. 767--notice that Burk is misspelled.

Joseph, though a motherless only child, grew up with loads of attention and support from his father's relations, in part because he was the only grandchild, which was astonishing in an Irish Catholic family. But his father never married again or had any more children, his Uncle Willie's wife Annie never had any children, his Aunt Mary died in trying to bring her first child into the world unsuccessfully, and Aunt Kate was a maiden lady. They all must have lavished lots of care on him. There is a series of photographs that have survived of Joseph taken every year or two in beautiful dress clothes. Perhaps Aunt Kate the seamstress made these outfits. Gradually, Joseph grew up, married Isabell, and had two daughters of his own. As his career flourished, the couple was able to stop renting houses, and they built a house on Catina Street in Lakeview, a new neighborhood. Life was good.

                                                        Joseph McAvin upon his confirmation, circa 1906. From the author's collection.

But after his surprise encounter with his mother's brother at his workplace, Joseph learned the truth, that his mother was still alive and living in New Orleans. Soon after she would deliver a birthday cake to his house, an attempt to reconnect after all those years.  Joseph's father John had already died several years before this revelation occurred. His grandmother and Aunt Kate were already gone, too. Joseph must have turned to Uncle Willie for an explanation. But he did not have long to either ponder any of this, or to get to know his newly found mother. Joseph had a busy career which caused him to travel. In order to know how to best design the fire sprinkler systems, Joseph would study fires to understand how they spread. On November 6, 1929, he was doing business in  West Monroe, Louisiana, about a four hour drive from New Orleans. The country was still reeling from the stock market crash on October 29. While there, he consulted with the local volunteer fire department. He and Dr. Carney, one of the members, jumped in the doctor's car to go out on a fire call.  While rushing to cross some railroad tracks, the doctor's car stalled. Both men were killed by the Illinois Central passenger train No. 238. Both men left wives and young children. Joseph was 38 years old.

                                                                             From the State Times Advocate, November 7. 1929, p. 7

If he had lived, perhaps Joseph would have had a relationship with his mother and his half brothers and sisters. However, any connection between the family branches died with him, and so my grandmother Dorothy and her sister Mary Bell never knew their paternal grandmother, or her other children. They were never even told their grandmother's married name, Annette Klevorn. She had quietly married Frank Klevorn in 1927 after the death of her first husband John McAvin. The couple took the ferry across the Mississippi River to Gretna and had the ceremony at St. Joseph's Catholic Church there, where no one knew them. I wonder how much of this story Annette told the priest who performed the ceremony? How much did her other family know? That part of the mystery I will never solve.

Finding Mrs. Brown

A few days ago I started thinking about a neighbor who lived next door to my family when I was a child in the 1970s. Her name was Rachel Brown, and she was quite elderly then. She was a widow, and sometimes when I was out playing in the yard she would approach me in order to chat.  I was a good sport and knew it was polite to talk to her, but inside I was thinking rotten things, like how she had trapped me again, and how those curly white hairs on her chin sure moved up and down as she talked.

I only knew that Mrs. Brown would talk a long time, about not much, and that during most encounters she would also insist that I have some of her cookies.  They were curious no-bake creations containing oats, chocolate, and I'm not sure what else. I was not very partial to them, but dutifully ate a couple anyway.  While I did not relish the cookies, I was happy when she also lavished some of her peonies on me.  Mrs. Brown's yard was then quite shady due to mature trees, but at one point must have contained quite a perennial garden, remnants of which remained. The eastern side of her prim, brick Georgian-style house was filled with common orange daylillies, but the backyard was filled with peonies, which she must have divided over and over again throughout the many years she lived there.  The flowers were huge, blowsy, and pale pink, with a strong sweet and spicy odor.  Mrs. Brown would cut me a huge bunch, and then one by one dunk the peonies in an old coffee can filled with water in order to get rid of the ants.  I loved those peonies, and would stick my face into the still-dripping blossoms to take in their scent.

Now that I'm an adult I realize that  Mrs. Brown was quite lonely, and must have been pretty hard up for company to chat up a shy, self-absorbed kid. Now how I wish that I had asked her about her life, where she was from, what she read as a child, and how she ended up in Clarendon Hills, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago.  But I never did, and of course it is much too late.  Mrs. Brown died before we moved away in 1982.  Her family members did not come during her final illness, but the very kind neighbors who lived on the other side of her were with her in the hospital when she passed away, holding her hand and praying with her.  God bless them.

A curiosity now seizes me about what her life was about, and I wonder if I can use my research skills to find out now what I never bothered to ask then?  These are the only clues I have to go on:

• Her name was Rachel Brown, middle and maiden names unknown. Sigh.
• She had been a teacher at some point.
• I remembered her husband's name as Clarence.  This I was not sure about because he was already deceased before we moved in to our house in the fall of 1969.
• Mrs. Brown and her husband had built their house on Mohawk Drive in the Blackhawk Heights subdivision. They were the original owners.

This didn't seem like very much to go on, especially considering how common a surname Brown is.  I called my mother and asked what she remembered, which was only that Mrs. Brown's relatives, either nephews or nieces, had lived in Colorado when she died, and that she had a black Studebaker.  Pretty flimsy.

In historical research one works backwards. So I needed to first figure out her death date.  I looked in the Social Security Death Index at www.familysearch.org.  I found a Rachel Brown who had died in October 1977 in DuPage County, Illinois, and who was born 5 January 1890 in Columbus, Ohio.  The death date seemed right. In 1977 I was twelve years old--still too young to appreciate Mrs. Brown and her attentions to me. Also, the birth date meant she had been 87 when she died. This, too, seemed right.  The Mrs. Brown of my memory was a very short, stooped lady with white hair done up in a top knot and secured with a hairnet. She wore sensible shirtwaist dresses that seemed too big for her.  The one feature she had that must have been little changed were her dark brown eyes.

If this information was correct, I should be able to locate her and her husband pretty easily in the 1940 U.S. Census.  However, I did not know where they were living in 1940, because our subdivision was not established until after World War II during the late 1940s on land which had once been the Basset & Washburn Greenhouse and Nursery. I remembered this, and was able to confirm it in the online Encyclopedia of Chicago. I searched for a Rachel and Clarence Brown in Illinois in 1940. Nothing. Either I had the husband's name wrong, or they did not live in Illinois in 1940.

I went to Ancestry.com and did a general search for a Rachel Brown who was born in Columbus, Ohio in 1890.  A few records in, I found indexing for a social security application.  One Rachel Brown, née Rachel Lulu Smith, who was born in Columbus in 1890, had applied in Illinois.  This looked quite promising, but, ugh, why did Mrs. Brown's maiden name have to be Smith?!

Next, I went back to FamilySearch and quickly located her marriage license.  Rachel Lulu Smith, age 36, had married Charles Herbert Brown, age 49, on  21 August 1926 in Columbus, Ohio. All of their parents' names were listed, as were their signatures.  Jackpot! I was on to the right Rachel. And I was ridiculously pleased to learn that her middle name was Lulu, her mother's name.

Now I had multiple possibilities for where I could go next. First, I quickly located Rachel and her husband in the 1940 and 1930 U.S. Censuses now that I knew his name was Charles, not Clarence. They were living in Chicago, and he was an insurance agent.  Then, I was able to locate Rachel in Columbus, Ohio in 1920 and 1910, but not in 1900. Curiously, I cannot find her with her parents, George H. and Lulu M. Smith in that enumeration. She would have been ten years old then.

From the two censuses I did find, I learned that Rachel was the eldest child, and had a sister Frances  who was many years younger than she. Her father was a locomotive engineer, and her mother Lulu disappeared between 1910 and 1920. Her death date on 18 December 1913 was located on www.findagrave.com, and confirmed by an indexed death record on FamilySearch. This left Rachel in charge of her little sister--no wonder she hadn't married until she was 36!

I also located Charles Brown with his family in Fitchburg, Massachusetts. It turns out that he is one in a long line of Charles Browns, and his grandfather garnered fame as the inventor of the automatic cut-off steam engine. He ran a factory called C.H. Brown & Company which manufactured the engines.  Among his clients was Thomas Alva Edison.

                                           from Fitchburg, Massachusetts Past and Present, digitized at The Internet Archive

It turns out that Mrs. Brown's husband had had a first marriage. In 1903 he married Marion Elsie Gorham in his hometown.  The couple is listed in the 1910 U.S. Census living on Beacon St. in Fitchburg. There are no children in their household, and the enumerator recorded that his wife had had no children. Whatever the reason, their marriage did not last, because Charles Herbert Brown is listed as being divorced when he married his second wife Rachel Smith. By the way, he is listed in that 1910 census as "Herbert C. Brown." I find that many individuals flipflopped their first and middle names in records. It may be that he was called by his middle name in daily life to distinguish him from his father and grandfather, both of whom lived in the same town, and both of whom had the first name of Charles.

Mrs. Brown, the second Mrs. Brown that is, also had an interesting family. Her maiden name of Smith had undoubtedly been Schmidt just a couple generations before she was born, for her paternal grandfather Henry G. Smith, a baker was a German immigrant.  His wife Catherine Mary Thomas also had an English sounding surname, but her father also was a German immigrant. Mrs. Brown's maternal grandparents were William Fankhouse and Rachel Bower.  The Bower surname may well have begun as Bauer, one of the many German surnames that means farmer.

Many of the men in Mrs. Brown's extended family, including her father and grandfather Fankhouse, worked for the railroad in Columbus, Ohio. A few different railroads went through town, including the Ohio Central. Until the third train station was built in 1897, the numerous trains arriving daily caused a major traffic problem in town.

                                              
                                                          The third Union Station, Columbus, Ohio from Wikipedia

Mrs. Brown attended her hometown school Ohio State University, which allowed her to live at home and care for both her younger sister and father. She graduated in 1913 at the age of 23. The Makio, the OSU yearbook of that year featured her graduation photo, and reported that she was a member of the College Equal Suffrage League--she lobbied for women's voting rights.  Go Mrs. Brown!

She was also a member of the Literary Society and the Philosophy Club. The following quote accompanied her photo: "Black were her eyes as the berry that grows on the thorn by the wayside."
This was taken from the poem Evangeline by Longfellow. Not all the quotations in the yearbook were that complimentary. And I did recognize those fine dark eyes looking out from a much younger version of Mrs. Brown than the one I remembered.

After graduation Mrs. Brown began teaching at the Fair Avenue Elementary School in Columbus, a position she held until her marriage. The school was housed in a truly impressive structure of red bricks.  Her father died in January of 1926, and then she married in August. A coincidence? I don't think so. Her father died of liver cancer, and so was probably ill for a long time. I think Rachel postponed marrying until her father was gone. She supplied the information on his death record, and must have also grimly made the funeral arrangements. She also waited until her sister was sixteen, and so could be left without guilt, to finish high school perhaps living with another relative, and there was big circle of them in Columbus.

                                                                   
                                                                Fair Avenue School No. 1, Columbus, Ohio

Soon after that wedding, Mrs. Brown moved to Chicago with her husband. They lived at a couple different addresses in the East Beverly neighborhood.  After about two decades in the city, they built a house in the small western suburb of Clarendon Hills. That move may have coincided with Mr. Brown's retirement, as he was about 70 years old then. He died in 1967.

My family moved next door to the widowed Mrs. Brown in August of 1969. She had already been alone for a couple years and needed company. Now I know her story, part of it at least. Everyone has a story. Every story matters.