Three Young Siblings

 

Not all the photographs we rescue from antique shops are hundred year old gems. Some abandoned family collections include more recent treasures.

Such was the case when a thoughtful fellow researcher alerted me to the cache of family photos at a local antique shop belonging to my former mother-in-law. When I went to the store to rescue what I could find of Marilyn Sowle Bean's collection, there were many pictures of family members whom I remembered including in the tree I built for her family.

There were, however, many others I didn't recognize. Some of them emerged from the "who is this?" pile and staked their claim in the "known family" pile as I sorted through each picture in tandem with building out the collateral lines in Marilyn's family tree. Considering Marilyn was born in 1928, most all of her relatives are now long gone. Matching names and faces would have been a challenge, had it not been for Marilyn's persistent habit of labeling everything.

Remembering that Marilyn, an only child of a woman who was oldest of nine children of Oliver and Ragna Brague, grew up in southern California without meeting many of her mother's siblings back in Wisconsin—let alone her cousins—I was surprised to see how many photos she had of her mother's nieces and nephews. While the miles may have prevented the families from getting together in person, I suspect a lot of letter writing took place over the years, accompanied with family photographs.

One such photo, likely sent first to Marilyn's mother and eventually passed to Marilyn, was of three young children born to her mother's youngest sibling. That baby brother, Daryll Brague, was born only a few months after Marilyn, herself, putting Marilyn in the unusual position of being older than her own uncle.

Just as Marilyn would have done, her mother was likely the person who affixed the careful label naming the three children, followed by the explanation of whose children they were—Daryll and his wife Harriet—and, most importantly, the date the picture was taken.

I wonder whether Marilyn ever got to meet her young Wisconsin cousins—or even her aunts and uncles who were nearly the same age as she was. The two branches of the family seemed so separated, by the point at which I knew them. I wonder, too, whether any of them still have a copy of this 1962 photograph, and pull it out of its spot in their family albums to compare facial details with the most recent arrivals among their great-grandchildren.

 

The Proliferation of Orphan Photos

 

The school tradition, in the past half century or so, of printing sheets of wallet-sized photos of elementary grade students will likely proliferate into an extreme case of unidentified—or orphan—photos in many of our inherited family picture collections.

Just think of it: little Janey comes home with an envelope stuffed with pages of miniatures for proud parents to snip and send far and wide. If grandma, grandpa, and all the doting aunts in the family carefully tuck away those miniature portraits for fifty years, who is next in line to inherit the multiplied echoes in each unidentified collection?

Fortunately, the sole remaining school photo in Marilyn Sowle Bean's forsaken collection did have a label—enough of a clue to help me discover just who claimed that earnest gaze and Mona Lisa half-smile. Above the recognizable handwriting of Marilyn herself was a child's signature, telling me instantly that whoever this was, she struggled with dyslexia.

"Carolyn Cublert" was the child's signature at the top of the photo's reverse, followed immediately by an adultlike correction, "Culbert."

Marilyn's due diligence with such labeling duties provides us the guidance to understand why the girl's photo was in her collection. "Aunt Verna's girl at about ten," Marilyn wrote, followed by the date, 1951. Verna was sister to Marilyn's mother, Olive Brague Sowle. Since Olive was the oldest of Oliver and Ragna Brague's nine children, she was seven years older than the couple's fifth child, Verna.

In what might have been seen, among high school sweethearts, as a couple made for each other led to the marriage of seventeen year old Verna to her beau from La Crosse, Wisconsin, named Vern. Vern and Verna were married in 1933—though not at home in La Crosse. Theirs was a marriage in Houston County, Minnesota—not only over the county line from La Crosse, but also across the state line.

Carolyn was the third child of Vern and Verna—and the last. By the time Carolyn was seven, her mother had married widower Arthur Hjelsand, who eventually, at least by some reports, adopted her three children as his own, adding yet another surname for Carolyn to struggle with.

I can't determine when, but at some point after that, Verna and Arthur moved their combined family to the Philadelphia area, where Carolyn's own 1963 marriage license application was published in the Philadelphia Inquirer under her adopted surname. For years after that, she and her husband resided in a New Jersey town, where they raised their only son, but by 1984, she had succumbed to cancer at the age of forty three.

Now knowing her story, I can see why that earnest gaze from the ten year old's photo strikes me as wistful—not only from her unfortunate end, but from the possibility that there may be no one to find who would treasure having that ten year old's photo once again. But for an unexpected disease, Carolyn would likely still be there in her community in New Jersey, perhaps passing her own photo collection on to her grandchildren, instead of being remembered only through a thumbnail sketch from her cousin's lost treasures rescued from a local antique store.

 

Above: Photo, along with its inscription on the reverse, of ten year old Carolyn Nancy Culbert, also known as Carolyn Hjelsand, as a student in La Crosse, Wisconsin, in 1951.

After David Met Olive

 

David Sowle may have spent most of his adult life in California, but he got his start in the tiny town of Onalaska, Wisconsin. There, his father had married Dora Moore, the daughter of what was deemed a "pioneer" family of that lumber region. Dora's family, in turn, had arrived in Onalaska generations before from the forested areas of Maine.

By the time David made his arrival in 1908, the town of Onalaska had been experiencing a twenty year long population slide to less than eleven hundred people. Meanwhile, the neighboring city of La Crosse was experiencing a steady expansion of their population through that same time period. It was inevitable that a young man during that time would look to the larger city for employment possibilities.

Though I may never learn how my mother-in-law Marilyn's parents actually met, in 1927, the La Crosse Tribune and Leader-Press was trumpeting the headline, "La Crosse Girl and Onalaska Man Married Saturday." David Sowle and Olive Brague exchanged their solemn vows at the parsonage of Saint Paul's Lutheran Church in La Crosse.

After a two week wedding trip to Chicago via Iowa, the couple set up housekeeping in La Crosse. That didn't last for long. After Marilyn's arrival the next year—plus a few more years of hard work in La Crosse—David and Olive moved their small family to southern California.

Apparently, they did not move alone. Though I can't determine who made the first move, it is easy to see that David's parents and sister also arrived at the same location. While the 1940 census showed David and Olive—plus young Marilyn—settled in Anaheim, Joe and Dora Moore Sowle and their daughter Josephine were living in neighboring Los Angeles. As David had, the elder Sowles stated they had been in California by at least 1935. Each family indicated their first stop in the state was in Los Angeles.

By 1940, Joe and Dora were in their mid fifties, so perhaps it is no surprise that they reported no occupation. Their twenty six year old daughter Josephine, by then already divorced and living with her parents, was working as a private secretary at a restaurant.

It's at a point like this when I wish I was researching a family which hadn't settled in such a big city as Los Angeles. A small town newspaper would pick up the kind of stories which could help a researcher piece together the timeline of an ancestor's life. Not so much the Los Angeles Times. And yet, I'm not left without any details on Marilyn's family—certainly not after having discovered that stash of family photographs put up for sale at a local antique shop.

While for "Aunt Jo" I don't have a tale written with many words, I am left with pictures—and isn't it those pictures which each are worth a thousand words? Tomorrow, we'll see what we can read into the several photographs I now have of Josephine Sowle from Marilyn's collection.

Photographs: Above, Marilyn labeled this snapshot "Mom + Dad 1928," making me wonder whether she had a specific event in mind. The photo most likely would have been taken after Marilyn was born that year, judging from her mother's appearance. Below: Marilyn labeled this one simply, "Dad," with his name written below. From the appearance of the landscape, this may have been taken near the hills that ring the Los Angeles basin, though it is hard to determine, due to the enormous population growth and urban expansion in the eighty years since their arrival in California.

 

California Dreamin'

 

There is something about California which has lured Americans from all parts of the nation—especially those snowy northern reaches of the country—to settle amidst the palm trees and golden opportunities, especially in the southern portion of the state. That was at least how life turned out for my mother-in-law's parents, escaping from Wisconsin to forge a new life in a sunnier realm.

Marilyn Sowle was once the possessor of the photograph collection which, unbeknownst to me, ended up in an antique shop here in my own town after her passing. Now that I've rescued a significant percentage of that collection, I realize there are several photos which might be worth returning to the descendants of distant family members I've never met. In the process of researching these connections, I'll be taking this week to share what I've found. But first things first: we need to properly introduce Marilyn and her family who once lived far from California in La Crosse and Onalaska, Wisconsin.

It was in the midst of a Wisconsin winter when Marilyn was born in 1928 to parents David and Olive Brague Sowle. Two years later, the 1930 census tells us that Marilyn's father was working as a shipping clerk for a La Crosse department store, while her mother had taken a position working at a nearby laundry service.

That scenario did not last for long—perhaps Marilyn's parents were doubling up on work duties in preparation for their move to California. Though I can't pinpoint the date when they left Wisconsin, the 1940 census indicated the Sowle family had made it to the Los Angeles area by at least 1935. By then, the enterprising David was working his way up in management at a canning company, and the family was living in the then-sleepy town of Anaheim.

Even in 1940, the family unit remained just the three of them: David, Olive, and Marilyn. My mother-in-law recalls that her mother, the eldest of nine children who had been expected to "help" with her younger siblings, recoiled at the thought of having a large family of her own. Yet perhaps there were other dynamics at play, even after the couple removed themselves far from the rest of their extended family.

It's that family they left behind which have become the faces peopling the photographs I never had a chance to see—until now. It is likely these were pictures handed to Marilyn after her parents' passing. As the dates recede backwards in time, Marilyn's own steady handwriting became replaced by labels in a hand I don't recognize. And that is where this research adventure will begin.

  

Photos: Above, a picture labeled "Marilyn Beverly Sowle 1929" from her first year in Wisconsin; below, a class photo labeled "6th Grade Benjamin Franklin, Miss Zorn, Anaheim, Cal."—a school still in operation in Anaheim, California. Marilyn is standing in the back row, sixth from the left.

Saying “I Do”

Somewhere in the midst of Samuel Bean’s winning streak in the local chess tournament scene, his younger son was embarking on a winning streak of his own. Now safely back across the Pacific and honorably discharged from the Marine Corps after the war in 1946, Earle Raymond Bean had made his way back home to Alameda, California. Some time after that point, he made the acquaintance of a young lady from Southern California by name Marilyn Sowle.

How Earle and Marilyn met, I have no idea. Though she was born in Wisconsin, Marilyn was living with her parents, David and Olive Brague Sowle, in the southern California city of Anaheim by the time of the 1940 census—though she was hard to find, courtesy of a census worker who evidently heard her name as “Maryland.”

Some time after that point, Marilyn’s parents divorced, her mother remarried and moved up to northern California. Though Marilyn favored her father and remained in the Los Angeles area through her high school years, perhaps it was on a visit with her mother in the north that she may have had opportunity to meet Sam’s son.

I can only guess, though. Despite the many opportunities I had in the past to ask, I never did hear the story of how they met.

Worse, I still can’t find any record of her marriage to Earle Raymond Bean—or Earl Ray, or whatever other version of his name might have been used. It could have been a small ceremony in Alameda. Or Los Angeles. Or anywhere in between. Who knows; maybe they made a run for Reno. The maddening thing is that there is absolutely no mention of them in FamilySearch.org’s index of California marriage records up through 1952.

Why would I suspect a limit of 1952? Because by March of 1951, they were already the proud parents of a firstborn son.

Sam’s first grandchild had made his appearance.

Knowing? Or Knowing About?

As I open the mystery box of unidentified faces in unmarked photos, I sift through them in the hopes of finding someone I recognize.

I do.

Incredibly, looking much the same as the subject of yesterday’s post—“The End” of the Bean family line, Greg—there is a photo of a tall, thin man with dark, curly hair.

He is not Greg, though, but Greg’s father. If it weren’t for the generation that separated them, you would have thought they were twins. Take a look back to yesterday’s post and see for yourself.

There are actually two pictures that I can identify for sure—and a third that I wonder about (which I’ll share with you tomorrow). It’s eerie, looking into that face. I feel like I know the man—and yet, I never met him. His life, cut short, was over long before I could have made his acquaintance.

And yet, all my adult life, I’ve carried that feeling as if I knew him. It was all because I knew his son.

How many times have we talked about “knowing” someone, though, yet not really knowing them? Sometimes, we make that delineation between “knowing” someone and “knowing about” someone.

As I go through the genealogical record of Earle Raymond Bean, though, it turns out that, not only did I never actually know him, I don’t know much about him, either. Despite all the stories that have been shared with me over the years, I find that I don’t even have the date of his marriage, nor even the place of his birth. Because those dates are relatively recent, online scans of documents to assist me in this search are not available.

I do know that Earle Raymond Bean was born in 1926 in California, most likely in the county where his family had moved—Alameda County, east of San Francisco. He was born to Samuel and Maud Woodworth Bean.

It was Maud—or at least the Woodworth family—that Earle could thank for the unusual spelling of his first name. What his fellow childhood classmates and teachers didn’t realize was that, in his case, Earle was not a misspelled first name, but a family surname carried by several relatives in previous generations.

Earle, however, succumbed to modern convention and dropped the “e,” adding one more check-point to my research, whenever I sense a lack of progress.

Long after he was gone, though, his wife took care to tell me the finer points of that story. She—the former Marilyn Beverly Sowle—was a southern California girl. Technically, though, she was a SoCal transplant, having been born in Wisconsin to David and Olive Brague Sowle, who had decided to head to Los Angeles early in their marriage.

Funny how I can know all this detail about their lives—down to the last “e” in a name—and yet not know some pertinent details for the genealogical record.

While I feel so much like I know this man and his wife—Earle Raymond Bean and his intended, Marilyn Beverly Sowle—there is so much I don’t know about them.

While I can gaze at the detail of the snapshot of their wedding reception and realize that the picture hanging above their cake is the same one that has hung in my sister-in-law’s house to the end of her own life last November, I can’t tell you when that couple cut their wedding cake.

While I can tell you when Earle Bean was born, I can’t even tell you where—though I can provide my guesses as to which town in northern California it might have been.

I can’t even tell you where the photo (top left) was taken—though I can tell you it was in jest over Earle’s height (if I remember correctly, he was six foot six inches tall) relative to Marilyn’s petite frame.

I can tell you Earle served in the United States Marine Corps, as close as you could get in Iwo Jima without being in that famous picture on that eventful day.

But I can’t really tell you much else about him. Except for one thing: when he died. I know it was December 11, 1955, because I’ve seen it on his headstone at the Golden Gate National Cemetery in San Bruno when I went to say goodbye to his wife. After all those years apart, Marilyn could never find another to love, and once again was at his side.