Tracing Harriet

 

To trace Harriet Blain's whereabouts after the tragic death of her husband John, it helped to follow the trail of another man.

His name was Benjamin Johnson, a forty three year old bachelor from England who sailed to America around 1891. By 1910, he settled in Fredonia, Kansas, and worked at a glass factory. Along with a coworker from New York, a man half his age, he boarded at the home of the widowed Mrs. Harriet Blain at 819 Seventh Street.

That was when the 1910 census was compiled on April 15. By August 10, the nearby Neodesha Daily Sun ran an insertion on the front page listing the latest marriage licenses. Two residents of Fredonia were the sole names featured in the boxed notation: Benjamin Johnson and Harriet Bell Blaine.

Tracing Harriet and her second husband from that time onward became a blur. Somehow, by 1920, Benjamin Johnson appeared in the annual directory, not for any place in Kansas, but for a city in northern California. His address was listed as 1436 S. San Joaquin Street in Stockton, California.

A surname like Johnson could complicate matters for family history researchers, and Stockton's directory presented such a factor. Fortunately, of the two Benjamin Johnsons in the city directory, only one was identified as a glassworker. In 1920, the likelihood of a woman being listed in a city directory would be slim, and there was no entry for Mrs. Harriet Johnson—if, indeed, they had actually married back in Kansas in 1910.

However, turning to the 1920 census, there was an entry for a Harriet Blain in the enumeration for Stockton, California—at 1436 S. San Joaquin Street. To be sure, it was our Harriet, for her four daughters were named in the household, but no Benjamin Johnson. 

At the time, Harriet was working as a practical nurse in private homes, according to the census record. Her eldest daughter Emma was by then twenty years of age, Rozella seventeen, and the twins thirteen years old. But where was Benjamin?

According to the 1920 census, Harriet was listed as divorced. I have yet to find any record of the divorce proceedings, including which state drew up the document, but it is clear that Harriet wouldn't have moved her daughters so far from Kansas if she had coincidentally traveled that distance while separated from her second husband.

That brief blip of an appearance in the 1920 census was followed not long after with a tiny insertion in the Stockton Daily Evening Record in May of the following year. Harriet had died on May 22, 1921, and was buried at Park View Cemetery in Manteca. Her funeral announcement noted that she was mourned by "many sorrowing friends in attendance" at the chapel of the B. C. Wallace Funeral Home, but contained no mention of any remaining family, though her daughters all survived her.

Having lived in Stockton before the 1924 cut-off for recognition in our county's First Families program, Harriet Isabel Blain Johnson was indeed eligible for the certificate program—but one could hardly call her a pioneer in the region, nor someone who had set out to establish her home in our county. She was more a victim of her circumstances than her intentional agency. And yet, she would qualify for recognition as the program is currently laid out.

As for Benjamin Johnson—the right Benjamin Johnson, immigrant glassworker from England—it was clearly he whose death notice appeared in the city's Daily Independent on the first day of September, 1928, with the promise of a funeral notice to follow. While so far, I can find none following for the "native of England," nothing in the original notice mentioned any family members. Perhaps he became one of those many emigrants who, leaving their native home, traveled alone to a distant land, never to be heard from again.