After the Wedding, What?

With a wedding date of June 29, 1908, the newlywed Mr. and Mrs. William H. Crago would surely show up in some record by the time of the 1910 census.

One would think.

However, as far as I can tell from my mere-mortal-search-capability vantage point, there is nothing to be found for the couple in that census year. Not in Michigan. Not in Minnesota, the groom’s home of late. Not in Colorado, where shortly we will see part of the family surface.

Of course, spelling wreaks its havoc on search engines. I’ve seen variants for Crago ranging as far afield as Craigo, Cragoe, Creago and the associated substitutions with the initial letter K.

But why wait for spelling to do its magic charms? With the plain name at face value—"William Crago" exactly as the man spells it—there seem to be hundreds of namesakes to choose from. The surname Crago isn’t as unusual as I had thought it might be.

Which leaves us to muse over a puzzle: the next sign of the Crago family is—as we knew it would eventually be—in Colorado Springs, the very town where Catherine Cook Crago’s cousin Clement Flannigan had settled.

There, by the time of the 1920 census, the household has grown to accommodate two small children. Son William, now age 9, was born in Minnesota just after the 1910 census was taken, leaving us with a shadow indication of the family’s whereabouts for that previous census. And daughter Jean followed with her own entrance onto the Minnesota stage at a more modernly sensible distance of three years.

The only one missing from this 1920 census record in Colorado is the very one for whom the household is named: the father, William H. Crago, Senior.

For, as we shall see tomorrow, the mining engineer extraordinaire has been in great demand for his expertise the world over. It will take some work to piece together the path his life has taken since we last saw any sign of documentation for him at his Michigan wedding.

Photograph: The Antlers, a resort hotel opened in Colorado Springs in the early 1870s just after the founding of the city; via Wikipedia; in the public domain.