The Complications of Pedigree Collapse

 

When constructing a family tree, perhaps we expect a diagram with lines stretching straight back into the past, never giving a thought to the possibility of tangled lines crossing and recrossing each other. However, when a family settles in a limiting area—whether the proverbial desert island or a small valley enclosed by impassible mountains—their children's choice of mates becomes limited, as well.

I never thought of southwest Virginia or the neighboring land in northeastern Tennessee as being land-locked in any limiting way. Apparently, when searching for a prospective spouse, some of my forebears may not have looked as far away as they could have done, for one DNA match found on my Tilson ThruLines results pulled me up short this weekend. I totally forgot about the possibility of pedigree collapse in this longstanding family settlement.

Working my way through the matches sharing my fourth great-grandfather, Peleg Tilson, I had just advanced to another of his daughters, someone with the rather common given name of Mary. To make matters worse, Mary happened to marry someone with a name designed to create an even more challenging research prospect: John Brown.

I didn't have much detail on this couple, other than the information I had gleaned from an old Tilson genealogy published in 1911, but supposedly, the first DNA match I had for this ThruLines entry shared far more genetic material with me than I had come to expect.

Most of the matches connected to me through Peleg Tilson's descendants are at least my fifth cousins, sometimes even fifth cousins once removed. If a cousin at that distant level of relationship shows up in my matches at all, the centiMorgan count is generally very low. True, according to Blaine Bettinger's Shared centiMorgan Project at DNA Painter, a fifth cousin once removed could share up to eighty centiMorgans with me—but could also approach zero. An expected average is likely to be around twenty one centiMorgans, but in many cases of my Tilson cousins, the numbers dwindle precipitously lower than most people consider reliable.

Contrary to those minuscule matches, though, the DNA match with the highest count under Peleg's daughter Mary came in at fifty eight cMs, which surprised me with its stark difference. Taking a closer look, I realized this match was already tagged in my records as a match—for a different ancestor. That other ancestor came from my maternal grandmother's Broyles side of the family, while the Tilson line reaches down to her husband's line.

While I already knew this DNA cousin was connected through my grandmother's Broyles aunt, in seeing this result, I recalled that the aunt had married someone who came from a family with a long history of calling that corner of Tennessee home. With yet another unhelpful name to research—this family was named Jones—rather than taking the usual approach to checking ThruLines results from the ancient ancestor forward in time to the current generation, I worked my way backwards on the ThruLines results. I wanted to see just how this Broyles cousin was connected to my Tilson line.

Thus, I worked my way through documentation from this Jones cousin, backwards in time until the Jones surname gave way to that other research challenge, the Brown surname. Along the way, I spotted collateral lines with names too familiar to be coincidental name twins, and my head ached with thoughts of how much this tree may call for cleaning up duplicate entries. Cousins marrying cousins and other near misses make for many déjà vu moments in family history. Time to warm up that "merge with duplicate" button on my family tree.

Wills and Their Ways

 

It is sometimes aggravating, after finally finding the will of a brick-wall ancestor, to discover that the hoped-for Big Reveal isn't quite up to our standards. After all, if that beloved wife were such a dear companion, why didn't her husband even mention her name? In wills, I've learned to expect a full accounting of all children's names, too—but have sometimes been sorely disappointed when locating the coveted document.

It is those frustrating ways that our ancestors might have had—leaving things unsaid when we most expected them to be more explicit—that I want to muse over today. As it turns out, I did uncover a Broyles descendant's will last week which almost—but not quite—left me pondering what it is we wish to find in wills, and why we sometimes don't find it.

I mentioned, yesterday, one observation that dawned on me during this mental journey: that perhaps it is nigh impossible to read some names and details in wills due to a combination of sloppy handwriting and faded ink. But in the reading of this Broyles descendant's will last week, I may have stumbled upon some other dynamics which might translate into a more forgiving way to look at our ancestors' wills.

Let's take a look at the background story behind researching this will. Though my Broyles research goals extend from my Most Wanted ancestral line for January, I am still working behind the scenes to trace my fifth great-grandfather's descendants down to the sixth cousin level for use in connecting with DNA cousin matches. From Adam Broyles' daughter Jemima and her husband Joseph Brown, I've gone step by step through all their descendants. Right now, I'm working on the lines of their grandson James Rice Brown (1827-1915).

I noticed that James' son George died in 1896, a very difficult time for the object of my research to disappear off the scene, considering that he married Fannie McAfee after the 1880 census. This unfortunate situation thus left me little recourse for discovering their children's identity. (Well, there still were ways, but considering I'd be looking for the household of one Fannie Brown, you can imagine all the ways this search could take a wrong turn.)

Thus I was quite pleased to locate a copy of the will of George Brown, and read it through. While George did—unlike some men regarding whose wills I have been disappointed in the past—actually give his wife a name, in several places he mentioned his children only as "our younger child" or "our youngest child."

That is where the thought occurred to me that perhaps George Brown, unlike most of us who tend to defer unpleasant tasks until a more "convenient" time, was the type of person who liked to keep his personal affairs well organized. Perhaps the nebulous terms for his children were meant to make the document all-inclusive without actually naming all the children because, at his age, he might have more children born to him in the future.

Eventually, George did mention the name of two of his children—sons James R. Brown and George M. Brown—but I couldn't be sure those were his only children. Granted, the will continued at length with several stipulations—for instance, explicitly stating that his wife's father, Joseph M. McAfee, "have nothing whatever to do with my estate"—but before I ever reached the end of the document, a few more thoughts occurred to me.

Due to finding George's obituary in the October 29, 1896, edition of The Morning News of Savannah, Georgia, I realized his was a sudden and unexpected passing. Not quite yet thirty five years of age, George Brown was just entering the prime of his career, serving as solicitor general "of the Blue Ridge circuit," and traveling to Atlanta for some political purpose when he was stricken with what physicians called cholera morbus.

His death on October 28, 1896, apparently came quickly. His wife, perhaps summoned to travel to Atlanta due to the seriousness of his illness, or perhaps planning to join him a few days after he began his business trip, arrived too late be at his side before his passing.

What was surprising to learn, when I read to the end of George's will, was that despite his young age, he had drawn up the will only months before his unexpected demise. The will was dated June 26 of that same year, 1896.

As it turned out, my guess about additional children was well founded. I got brave and looked for census records for all possible widows named Fannie Brown in his hometown of Canton, Georgia. One household in 1900 showed sons named James and George, just as their father had mentioned in his will. 

That household also included a five year old daughter Margaret, and a three year old son named Joseph—perhaps named after George's uncle Joseph Emerson Brown, once a governor of the state of Georgia. Born in January of 1897, young Joseph arrived not quite three months after his father's passing. Though at that point unnamed, he was likely on his father's mind when he drew up his will.    

An All-Time High for Understatements

 

The columnist for the local Society section of South Carolina's The Greenville News was fairly gushing when she penned her column for Sunday, December 11, 1949:

The photograph on the front page of today's society section...is of particular interest here (an all-time high for understatements) for the bride is a Greenville girl...

As it turned out, I wouldn't have stumbled upon that newspaper clipping if it weren't for a few preceding details. The first on that list would be my dogged pursuit of all distant cousins descending from my Broyles ancestors, immigrants to the 1717 Germanna settlement in colonial Virginia.

By now in this plodding process, I had already run into anecdotes about the extended Brown family descending from my fifth great-grandfather Adam Broyles' daughter Jemima. I discovered my relationship to the real Georgia Brown immortalized by the 1925 hit tune, Sweet Georgia Brown. Yesterday, I realized I was related to an airline pilot determined enough to stare down the Cuban government and be the first to win the right to fly his passengers back home to the United States in the same hijacked airliner in which they had unexpectedly arrived.

Along this same family line of William Carroll Brown, direct ancestor of both those distant cousins I've mentioned, I ran across another story, the one referred to by the Society columnist above. The woman in question, the bride causing such breathless commentary, also descended from this same William Carroll Brown. Like some of William's other children, the bride's grandmother had also named her child after her father, William Carroll. Unfortunately, she only had one child, who in turn became a father of only daughters.

No matter; this man named one of his daughters by that same middle name, spelled as Carroll, instead of the more expected spelling for a woman's name. As I traced his daughter Carroll through life and added her to my Broyles family line, I ran into trouble when I started entering the name for her husband.

Unfased by the fact that anyone could have more than one middle name—after all, these are southern families I'm researching—I began entering the name of the groom. Alfonso...Antonio...Vicente...

When I was done recording the groom's name, I had taken up two full lines of print in his entry on my Ancestry.com tree. Something was clearly up here. No one has a name that long.

So I googled it. Sure enough, the prospective groom had made a name for himself when, at the age of seventeen, he bet $500 that he could fly a plane under the Tower Bridge in London. He won. He went on to compete in horse races, bobsled teams, and, eventually, car races.

Somewhere in the middle of all that, he met—incredibly—and married my mother's fifth cousin, Helen Carroll McDaniel of Greenville, South Carolina. Hence, the Society editor's amazement that someone from a town the size of Greenville would become the wife of the Eleventh Marquess of Portago, Grandee, a Spanish aristocrat.

Of course, I wouldn't have uncovered a story like that if I didn't pursue those collateral lines to make it possible to connect distant cousin DNA matches to their rightful place in my family tree. True, it takes a lot of sifting through countless stories before discovering some of the ones I've shared over these few weeks since the beginning of the year. For instance, in the past two weeks alone, I've added 476 documented names to my tree, which now contains 32,209 people.

Granted, that focus on one line—driven by research goals outlined at the start of each year in my Twelve Most Wanted plan—means the other lines see no action. For my in-laws' tree, I made zero progress in the past two weeks, simply because I won't focus on that part of the family until this coming April. That tree still remains at 30,715—same as it was two weeks ago. But when I do shift to cover the research goals for my mother-in-law this spring, I'm sure I'll stumble upon a few fascinating stories there, too, as I work to plug those distant cousin DNA matches into their right places in her tree.

In the meantime, I'll keep adding those distant cousins and linking them to DNA matches, all the while on the lookout for another story about the extended family. 

Discovering Some Broyles Cousins

 

Do you ever take the opportunity, in researching your DNA matches, to discover the stories of the distant cousins who link you to your matches? Although I've finished working on the Broyles family, my Twelve Most Wanted research goal for January, behind the scenes, I'm still working on bringing down the lines of descent in my family tree on the collateral lines of those Broyles ancestors. Sometimes, I run across stories which I just have to share. I'll take this weekend's two opportunities to tell you about a couple distant cousins I discovered along this research trail.

When you come across a distant cousin's story through research, do you ever get a strong feeling about that cousin? Sometimes, that feeling can be positive, but this past week, I worked on one Broyles descendant whom I have to admit stirred up some negative feelings. Take this as true confessions of a Genealogy Guinea Pig, but in the end, I'm happy I got to "meet" this cousin.

First, let's set the stage—at least, genealogically speaking. We'll begin with a man born in 1851 called Asbury Churchwell Latimer. With a name as distinguished-sounding as that, you might think he was born with a silver spoon in his mouth.

That was not exactly the case for this man. Born in Abbeville County, South Carolina, he was fourteen years of age when the Civil War drew to a close, leaving the entire South in an impoverished state, and his own family unable to provide him with a decent education. Thus, he chose the practical approach, threw himself into farming and business to make a success of himself.

Asbury Churchwell Latimer chose, despite these financial challenges, to marry early. He chose as his bride one of my distant cousins descending from the Broyles family of my fifth great-grandfather's daughter, Jemima.

This Broyles descendant, Sara Alice Brown, just happened to be a niece of Georgia governor Joseph Emerson Brown. Whether, in the midst of raising the family of five children which she bore to him, Asbury's wife ever talked politics, I can't be sure. But by 1890, when he was nearly forty years of age, Asbury Latimer decided to turn his attention to running for office, becoming a congressman for his state and eventually their senator. It is from the memorial remarks at his sudden passing while in office in 1908, still available to read online now, that I draw much of the information on his early life.

That, however, is not the cousin I wanted to talk about today. Remember, this is only setting the stage, genealogically, for the one I want to mention.

As I worked my way through the descendants of "A. C." and Alice Latimer, I started first with researching their oldest, their only son whom they named William Carroll, after Alice's father. Perhaps owing to his father's political influence, son William chose to go into the legal profession, moving to Atlanta, Georgia, to establish his own practice. He must have been quite successful, for he married a beautiful daughter of a socially prominent family of Paducah, Kentucky—think thoroughbred racing—and raised four children in Atlanta.

All went well until, like his father before him, William Carroll Latimer died in 1927 before reaching the age of fifty. His oldest child, whom he named after himself, lost a father when he was only seventeen.

Perhaps I should have gone more lightly in my judgment of this distant cousin. After all, that kind of loss can have repercussions throughout life. Besides, it didn't help my prejudiced position to accidentally assume that the two-year-long marriage I discovered between a woman and "William C. Carroll"—ending childless in divorce so soon afterwards—was a document belonging to William Carroll Latimer when it really should have belonged to William Craig Latimer. Not the right guy.

Like his father before him—perhaps because it was the thing a son was expected to do—the junior William Carroll Latimer went into the practice of law, and soon claimed a socially prominent bride from among his mother's circle of acquaintances back in Kentucky. While strikingly beautiful, and eventually the mother of his firstborn child, William's wife became, before the next ten years were up, his first wife. William married again, returning to the social scene in Kentucky for a second bride, and subsequently fathering another two children.

If it were only for chasing genealogical details through documentation, a story like that would have left me disappointed in this newly-discovered cousin due to my own point of view. Thankfully, though, there were ample newspaper reports and other resources to tell some of the rest of this man's story.

Although William was well into his thirties—not to mention, married and a father—at the beginning of the second World War, he chose to leave his job to join the war effort. Gaining "duration leave" from the company where he was employed, he joined the Army Air Corps, as he had long since left his work as an attorney to train as an airline pilot.

One of those thoughtful but unnamed lovers of history who decided to archive an article from the news output of the old Brookley Field in Mobile, Alabama, was the first to help me see this distant cousin with a more three-dimensional view. From a news clipping there in Mobile from October 18, 1942, I learned that First Lieutenant W. Carroll Latimer spent his time as a test pilot, including running such World War II machines as the "Airacobra" for which his six-foot-two frame seemed an unlikely fit.

Back to his regular job with Eastern Airlines after the war, Carroll Latimer piloted such more decidedly docile routes as New York to Miami. However, if you remember the times during the late 1960s in which such routes ran the risk of sudden, unplanned itinerary changes to Cuba, such became the case for Captain Latimer.

Headlines in newspapers, such as this one from South Carolina, noted one such hijacking in February, 1969: "A fat man with a sick father in Havana hijacked a jetliner Monday." Pulling out a gun and informing a steward of his intentions, the man convinced the cabin crew of his argument and the pilot, our cousin Captain Latimer, complied.

That move, of course, brought complications—more than the kind we might assume. In such hijacking cases, according to one report on the incident, the Cuban government would allow the pilot and crew to return home on the "pirated" craft, but the Cuban policy was that all the passengers be retained in Cuba until another plane be sent from the United States to retrieve them. This involved busing the passengers to another airport location ninety miles away from Havana for their return flight home.

It wasn't until I found the story retold in his own obituary that I began wondering whether Carroll Latimer had decided, once on the ground in Havana, to trade his pilot's skill for his attorney's training in negotiations. As his family shared in his obituary, 

Once on the ground, he refused to leave his passengers and after much deliberation with the Cuban Government, became the first pilot to fly a hijacked plane, with all its passengers, out of Cuba and back to the United States.

I'm not sure why discovering stories like this helps me appreciate my distant cousins as the real human beings they are. But they do. They've convinced me to become a fan of searching the Internet for family names, checking newspaper archives in hopes of finding tidbits like these, looking in unexpected places for the kinds of details which range far from the traditional Birth-Marriage-Death routine we regularly document. Yes, that framework is important—after all, we need to make sure we've identified the right ancestor—but the joy of genealogy, in my opinion, still finds its spark in discovering the stories.

    

A Broyles Tidbit

 

Every so often in exploring the extended branches of my family tree, I run across a surprising detail. Let's just call today's example a Broyles tidbit, for I wouldn't have found this little snippet, had it not been for this month's research project on the Broyles family.

However, it's not exactly the Broyles family at this part of the story, so let's first take a moment to glean some background. We've been following the descendants of the founding immigrant couple to the Germanna settlement in 1717, Johannes and Ursula Broyles. One of their grandchildren, Adam Broyles, was my fifth great-grandfather. To Adam and his wife Mary, at least seven children were born. I've specifically been exploring Adam's daughter Jemima's family and descendants this past week.

That daughter, often referred to as Mima, was married in what is now Washington County, Tennessee, at about the time of her father's death in 1782. Mima's husband was a man by the name of Joseph Brown, but whether that man was one and the same as the Joseph Brown appointed by Adam Broyles as his executor, I can't say.

It was said that this Joseph Brown was also a Revolutionary War soldier, but sources reporting details on his life and untimely death in 1800 seem to be in disagreement. Nevertheless, there is quite a bit of interest in this line of a man with such a common surname, for at least two of his descendants became notable figures in history. One of the descendants of Joseph and Jemima turned out to be Joseph Emerson Brown, a four-term governor of the state of Georgia. Perhaps following in his father's footsteps, that Joseph's namesake son Joseph Mackey Brown also served two terms as the state's governor. 

That, however, is not the line I want to share with you today. Instead, let's wander down the line of descent from another grandson of Joseph and Jemima, William Carroll Brown. It was William's oldest son, George Thaddeus Brown, who eventually followed in the political footsteps of his more well-known uncle, Governor Joseph Emerson Brown. But not at first.

Born just before his uncle's final term as governor came to a close, George Thaddeus Brown turned his attention not to politics but to medicine. A practicing physician in Atlanta, Georgia, he later followed the example of his political relatives and served in the Georgia state assembly.

Following George T. Brown's second marriage, the couple welcomed their firstborn child, a daughter, in 1912. Since George was a popular member of the Georgia governing body, it is perhaps no surprise to learn that official announcement of his child's birth was made during the summer session of the legislature. Not only that, but the baby was apparently named by a resolution passed by both houses of the Georgia legislature on August 11, 1911, according to a report in the Atlanta Constitution.

That charmed life for the Browns' daughter did not fade after babyhood. In the mid-1920s, George, his wife Avis, and their daughter Georgia and younger son Melville were living in New York City. During that time, George Brown somehow met up with a man named Bernard Anzelevitz, better known as vaudeville entertainer and bandleader Ben Bernie. George shared the anecdote about his daughter's "adoption" by the State of Georgia thirteen years prior, and that snappy story must have resonated with the musician.

Ben Bernie and his orchestra made a recording of the tune supposedly inspired by Dr. Brown's anecdote, and released it in June of 1925. The piece—predictably called "Sweet Georgia Brown"—enjoyed a five week run on the charts at the number one spot, and over the decades has continued to capture its share of remakes. A 1949 version eventually was adopted in 1952 as the theme song of the Harlem Globetrotters, and has seen many more renditions made since then.

About Georgia Brown herself? She died in Florida in 2002, at ninety years of age. Even her obituary mentioned that quirky legacy of the well-known jazz band ditty, a story I would not have known, had I not pursued the collateral lines of my Broyles ancestry. Though the real Georgia Brown was a fourth cousin to my maternal grandmother, I doubt even she was aware of the connection. But I wouldn't be surprised to hear that that was one tune she'd be dancing to when it first was a hit. 

      

 

Looking that Gift Horse in the Mouth

It's all very well and good when we receive an unexpected gift of the names of a long-deceased relative's parents, but despite such serendipity, it's best to look that gift horse in the mouth. Unsourced recommendations can turn out to be not much more than hearsay.

So it is with the volunteer-added note on Cassa Rinehart Brown's Find A Grave memorial about the names of her parents. We originally stumbled upon Cassa's name, if you recall, by following up on a clue from the wills of two related men in Perry County, Ohio. That clue was the repeated appearance of the name Isaac Brown; as it turns out, his wife Cassa was a Rinehart, married in Perry County in 1837.

My first question, in making that discovery, was whether the stated parents—Cassa's parents were said to be "William and Lila Ingram Rinehart"—actually lived in Perry County, Ohio, at the time of Cassa's wedding. Being that the year of her marriage pre-dated the conveniently more-detailed census returns of 1850 and beyond, census records would not be entirely helpful, but it was reassuring to see that there was, indeed, a William Rinehart resident in Perry County at the time of the census immediately after her wedding.

The 1840 census showed this William living in Pike Township, which, if you recall, was the same location in which our main interest, Simon Rinehart, also owned property, as well as the Isaac Brown whose name kept appearing in my mother-in-law's ancestors' wills.

In addition, while William Rinehart could possibly be a common name—in other words, with the likelihood that there could be more than one person with that same name in the same region—one headstone in Perry County could very well be his. Situated at the First Methodist Church cemetery in New Lexington—not only county seat for Perry County, but also located in Pike Township—a burial for someone named William Rinehart was marked January 18, 1869. Though the Find A Grave memorial does not include a photograph of his headstone, a volunteer there noted that the marker was inscribed, "aged 82y 9m 12d."

Though that cemetery Find A Grave entry did not include a memorial for Delilah Inghram Rinehart, there was a memorial there for someone named Lucinda Rinehart, which, as the memorial noted, was inscribed at her 1844 death to say she was the daughter of "William and Delia Rinehart."

If this William were indeed one and the same as Cassa Rinehart Brown's father, we would be quite fortunate, for we should be able to find his entry in both the 1860 and 1850 census records. And sure enough, in that same Pike Township in 1860, there was a listing for a seventy-five-year-old farmer named William Rinehart—and in his household was a sixty-six-year-old woman named "Delila." Added bonus: both were born in Pennsylvania.

So, if the William we've found in those two references turns out to be the same as Cassa Rinehart Brown's father, that puts his own birth around 1785 or 1786. That, of course, is reasonable for a father's age at the time of Cassa's own birth in 1816. What doesn't work, in this massive relative-grab of nested family tree building, is William's birth in light of Simon Rinehart's own birth around 1774. Whatever the relationship between Isaac Brown, the man who served as Simon Rinehart's executor, and Simon himself, it wasn't so clear-cut as that of brothers-in-law—if, that is, we have the right names and dates for the Rinehart relatives we've already discovered.

The down side to all this is that I wasn't able to find William or Delilah in the census record for 1850 in Perry County, despite their presence there in Pike Township in both 1840 and 1860. Finding them in 1850 could possibly outline the names of other Rinehart relatives so that we could better identify this branch of the extended family. It seems the more we look, the more jumbled the record becomes.

Warming up to Some Hints

It's a wonderful thing to discover that we can do an end run around what we thought was a genealogical brick wall. To glean any hints from such an effort, though, we need to be willing to do some research on our ancestor's collateral lines.

In the research problem where I'm currently stuck, I need to find three details. First, I need to find the names of the parents of my mother-in-law's third great-grandfather, Simon Rinehart. Following that, it would be nice to determine the name of Simon's wife, the mother of Sarah Rinehart, the woman born in Kentucky who somehow made her way back to her dad's home in Greene County, Pennsylvania, to marry James Gordon. And finally, the icing on the smashed-brick-wall cake would be to determine if the mother of Sarah's brother Jesse was the same as her own mother, or was another woman with the same given name of Ann.

Fortunately, all of these players in my current mystery ended up in the same place: Perry County, Ohio, where they moved from Pennsylvania, sometime during the early 1830s. Yet, try as I might, I have not been able to find any records to indicate the names of Simon Rinehart's parents, a task complicated by the existence of another Simon Rinehart whose tragic demise was recalled by local lore for over one hundred years after the fact, back in Greene County, by a tree linked to his name, marking the exact spot of his murder.

That was in 1779. Our Simon Rinehart was obviously quite well and living in Perry County for decades after that point, and though he would have been of an age to have been a son of the doomed other Simon Rinehart, the ill-fated older Simon had not left behind any namesakes.

Yet, no matter where I looked for other documents on our Simon Rinehart, I found no records linking him to his parents. Nor could I find—online, at least—any verification of the maiden name of his wife Ann, though circumstances of the birth of the two eldest of Simon's children lead me to believe Simon may have been married twice.

So now, I've resorted to what I do in any case which seems to confront me with a genealogical brick wall: I look for details on collateral lines. Unfortunately, though, researching the siblings of Sarah Rinehart Gordon proved unsuccessful. What would be next? Looking for any aberrations I could possibly find.

It was in Simon Rinehart's will that I stumbled upon a clue: a name which I had recently seen in yet another will related to this extended Rinehart family. The clue came in the form of the name Isaac Brown. Though I had no idea whether this would become a collateral line or not, I began building a tree for this new suspect, and then for his children.

Following the line of this one Isaac Brown, neighbor of Simon Rinehart and appointed executor of Simon's estate, it turned out there was, indeed, a worthwhile clue to follow up on: for whatever reason, Isaac also had a family member whom he named Simon.

Now, granted, Simon—at least during that time period—was not an uncommon given name. But there it was in the 1850 census—albeit hard to read—in the form of the nine year old son of Isaac Brown. In the midst of more commonly-chosen given names in their family like Matthew, Robert, and John, was the name Simon, oldest son of Isaac and Catherine Brown.

Just to be sure I was reading that handwritten entry correctly, I moved on to the 1860 census to check. Sure enough, there was a nineteen year old son named Simon. And though his father was again reported as having been born in Virginia, his mother was listed as a native of Pennsylvania. This would be the location of Greene County, previous residence of both the Rinehart and Gordon families. The hints are getting warmer.

And then came the Civil War. By then, this Simon Brown would have been in his early twenties, a prime candidate to be in the thick of battle. Afterwards, the 1870 census for Perry County revealed no sign of a Simon Brown.

The rest of the story, however, was that somehow, in the midst of war, Simon Brown had made his way to Pickaway County, where he married Martha Alexander in December of 1863 and, after the war, settled with his wife and their two children in Henry County, Ohio.

Along the way, chasing after this son of Isaac Brown, I picked up some tempting clues. One was a Civil War record, filed under the transcribed name of Simon Rineweart Brown. The other, a Find A Grave entry showing a headstone labeled Simon R. Brown, came with a volunteer-entered memorial under the more complete name of Simon Rinehart Brown.

Now, despite the fact that even Find A Grave volunteers have been known to make mistakes, that's more to my liking. But, of course, it means answering another question: why would Isaac Brown name his oldest son after the neighbor whose will subsequently listed him as executor?

Above: Marriage return for Simon Brown and Martha Alexander, dated December 23, 1863, and filed in the records of Pickaway County, Ohio; image courtesy FamilySearch.org.

Getting the Right Isaac Brown

When one particular name keeps appearing in the important papers of an ancestral family for whom little else is known, it pays to ask a few questions. Like: who is this guy? And why was he in my ancestor's life?

That is exactly the task we'll embark upon, now that we've seen the name of Isaac Brown mentioned in the wills of both James Gordon and his wife's father, Simon Rinehart. We'll take some time today to see what can be found about this Isaac Brown of Perry County, Ohio—and then continue next Monday to follow up on the clues we've found.

Just as a review, we've already discovered that while James Gordon met and married his wife Sarah Rinehart in Greene County, Pennsylvania, she was actually born, in 1795, somewhere in Kentucky. We've also learned that several of the folks who lived in Greene County in the early 1830s all decided to make the move to the central Ohio location of Perry County. That Ohio county was the scene where, in 1840, Sarah's husband James Gordon drew up his last will and testament, and where her father did the same in 1853.

In both instances—and for unknown reasons—both men chose to include someone named Isaac Brown in their proceedings. Since inclusion of a name in a will is not a trifling matter—there is likely an important connection to be discerned here—it may be helpful for us to follow this trail. After all, we still don't know who Simon Rinehart's parents were, despite the well-known story in Tenmile Country of one pioneer with that same name—Simon Rinehart—who tragically lost his life at an early age. Furthermore, we have been unable to confirm the maiden name of our Simon's wife, thanks to conflicting information from different sources.

Of course, seeking an Isaac Brown in Perry County won't be as easy as it seems. In 1850, for instance, the county contained over twenty thousand residents, and stepping back a decade won't help our search much, as the population was barely one thousand residents less in 1840. Finding the right Brown—even if his given name were Isaac—will be a challenge.

And that, as it turns out, is what we are presented with: the challenge of finding the right Isaac. In the 1850 census for Perry County, there were no less than seven men with the name Isaac Brown in Perry County: three in Harrison Township, two in Salt Lick, and one each in Clayton and Pike Townships. Added to that was the eighth possibility: a gentleman going by the initials I.S. Brown, who might also be an Isaac.

However, if we consider that, in 1850, Simon Rinehart lived in Pike Township, we can start our hunt-and-peck procedure with this one candidate: the Isaac Brown whose census entry was listed not far from the page in which Simon's own entry was written.

Of course, nothing is ever easy. This particular Isaac, whom I thought would so conveniently fill the bill as brother to Simon's wife Ann—whoever she was—turned out to be born, not around Tenmile Country in Pennsylvania as would fit nicely with our plot line, but in Virginia.

Hint: Virginia does not fit the preferred narrative.

Moreover, pushing our tree-building luck ahead ten more years doesn't do much for any discoveries. While there was an Isaac Brown in the 1860 census, that Isaac's wife was not the same as the Catherine listed in the 1850 census—if, indeed, the abysmal handwriting was trying to communicate that message to us. In 1860, the wife was listed clearly as Cassa, not Catherine.

I tried pushing forward yet another ten years, selecting the older children, in case Isaac himself was no longer living, but I realized yet another roadblock standing between that questionable 1860 census and the decade beyond: the Civil War. That oldest son likely served in the Union Army by that point, and may have been lost to all by 1870.

Still, I took the children one by one, to see what I could discover about this Isaac Brown family, and followed the trail. It wasn't long until I discovered a middle name appended to one of those children which made me nearly shout out loud: it wasn't a connection to Simon's wife at all. It wasn't a Wise. Nor was it a Wiley. It was a Rinehart connection. With Simon, himself.

When That Name Keeps Showing Up

Today, there are quite a few unanswered questions about Simon Rinehart, the man who was my mother-in-law's third great-grandfather. Though we know he was likely born in southwestern Pennsylvania about 1774, we don't know who his parents were, and thus have no idea of any possible siblings, either.

Not only that, but the only details we do know about him are that he had a wife (or perhaps two) named Ann, and children named Sarah, Jesse, Hannah, Lucinda, and Charlotte. With those children's dates of birth spread over twenty three years and the family's travels spanning three states—Pennsylvania, Kentucky (where Sarah was born in 1795), and Ohio (where Sarah and her husband, James Gordon, settled, along with the rest of her father's family)—you would think a record somewhere would answer more of my genealogically-oriented questions.

Not.

I won't rehearse all the attempts I've already made on this puzzle; if you're curious, you can read the posts tagged Rinehart from the last couple weeks' work. There is, however, one last-ditch attempt to be considered: to look at the will of Simon Rinehart, which was presented to the probate judge in Perry County, Ohio, on March 8, 1853.

This is the will which, frustratingly, neglected to actually name Simon Rinehart's "beloved wife." The will was brief, consisting of three directives, plus the usual legal terminology. Signed by the testator's mark, as he couldn't sign his own name, it gave the name of the two witnesses as Peter Long and Matthew Brown.

The interesting point about this will, though, was that Simon named not one but two executors. One, of course, was his only son, Jesse, who at the time of his father's death would have been about forty six years of age. Despite Jesse's mature age, his father deemed it best to appoint a second executor, a man named Isaac Brown.

Now, if you recall, there has been no mention of a surname like Brown in all the wanderings I've made through the Rinehart family history, as well as that of the two possible maiden names for Simon's wife Ann. And yet, we know by experience that those names which appear for executors—and even witnesses—are not pulled out of thin air. Very few men trawled the neighborhood—or queried the guys hanging out, for example, down at the local pub—to see who might be up for executor duties, come reckoning day. Most men named in an ancestor's will were chosen for a specific reason, and that reason oftentimes was a family tie.

What was curious about one of the names presented in Simon Rinehart's 1853 will was that I thought it was vaguely familiar. Though it wasn't a name I recalled seeing in my mother-in-law's family tree, I did remember seeing a name like that in another recent will I had reviewed. I went back to look, retracing my research steps until I found it: the name of a witness to the 1840 will of Simon Rinehart's son-in-law, James Gordon.

The Gordon name, you might recall, had been one of those surnames showing up first in the colony of Maryland, then moving to Tenmile Country in southwest Pennsylvania about the time of the Revolutionary War, and, finally, on to Perry County, Ohio, by the early 1830s. Though Simon Rinehart's oldest daughter Sarah was born in Kentucky, her family had moved back to Greene County, Pennsylvania before the birth of her brother Jesse in 1806, thus situating Sarah to meet James Gordon and marry him there by the end of 1819.

Sarah and James Gordon had a large family, with seven of their children born in Pennsylvania before their move to Ohio by 1832. Though their eldest son, Bazil, had barely reached the age of majority before James passed away in 1840, James appointed him to be executor of the Gordon estate, along with Sarah as executrix. However, that document also included the names of two witnesses, one of which was, as I suspected, Isaac Brown.

Whether the two documents identify the same person when they name this Isaac Brown, I can't yet tell—though given that the dates of the two testaments were only thirteen years apart, it is quite possible they both refer to the same man.

The trouble is: we are now researching a man by the surname of Brown. While, agreed, we are not talking Smith or Jones, we are still challenging ourselves to identify who this Isaac Brown of Perry County, Ohio, might have been—furthermore, to see if we can figure out why both James Gordon and his father-in-law might have called upon this Isaac Brown to interject himself into the most personal of their financial affairs. That is a question which may take some time to unravel.


Above two insets are excerpts from, first, the 1853 will of Simon Rinehart of Perry County, Ohio, and second, the 1840 will of James Gordon, also of Perry County; images courtesy FamilySearch.org, free to access, following completion of sign-in for permission to log on.

Thirza's Hospital

Thirza's photograph from the 1920s has made its journey home. Cole family researcher Karen told me she received it, and then sent me something you'll surely be interested in knowing about, as well.

Remember how we discovered that Thirza Browne Cole ended up actually owning and running a hospital? What Karen sent was a copy of a local newspaper article on Thirza's presentation to the ladies' auxiliary of a current-day hospital in the same city where she lived in Lodi, California.

The newspaper clipping itself is unfortunately undated, but I suspect it was an article which ran in the Lodi News Sentinel. Since Thirza passed away in 1979, judging from her picture which accompanied the article, the report was likely written in either the 1960s or early 1970s. Unfortunately, there are no online newspaper archives carrying an extensive collection of that publication, and those dates were not included in the scanty collection of Lodi issues in the Google News archives. As for dates, we'll have to remain blissfully ignorant.

What was useful was the detail Thirza shared with the (unnamed) reporter, especially about her years after first arriving in Lodi. According to the article, "Hospitals: Past and Future discussed at Branch meeting," Thirza's medical career spanned almost forty years.

Thirza got her start in a practical way: after graduation in 1911 from the Red Cross Hospital nursing school in Salida, Colorado, in 1915, she and her husband, William Cole, moved to Lodi. At the time, Thirza had been taking care of her mother-in-law, who had recently suffered a stroke. In the course of providing that care, Thirza became acquainted with several local doctors, who then asked her to take on some of their own cases of patients needing extended care.

By the time the 1918 influenza epidemic hit Lodi, several local doctors fell ill along with their patients. This left two main doctors, operating one small hospital facility, to serve the stricken population of Lodi—at that time, a city of just over four thousand residents—and a makeshift emergency facility was set up on the upper floor of a local bank. Several "practical nurses" bore the load of caring for those smitten with the disease, and Thirza Cole was asked to take charge of the emergency center.

Not long after that—July of 1921—Thirza and her sister, Nellie Yates, together bought a nearby hospital called the Mason Hospital. This was the former home of one of Lodi's popular doctors, Wilton M. Mason, which he had converted into a hospital. Thirza and Nellie did extensive work to the facility over the years, but the building certainly wasn't anything of the magnitude of the type we think of today when we consider hospitals. There were several rooms for patients, plus a room for surgery and a room for "sterilizing." That was it.

Nor were the services at the facility as specialized as those we'd expect from a hospital today. It was not unusual, for someone undergoing surgery, to have Thirza administering the anesthetic—usually ether. Then, if X-rays were required, they might "occasionally" be done by Thirza, as well, since she had been "taught X-ray" in Colorado. As the newspaper article explained, "Nursing in those days embraced many facets usually associated today only with specialization."

If the building needed painting, the two sisters would be there, doing the work themselves. Of course, any equipment updates were a cost Thirza attended to, as well. Nellie stayed with her sister to launch the business and oversee it in its formative season, but after seven years, she returned to Colorado. Thirza operated the hospital for twenty nine years, selling it in 1949.

The building once known as the Mason Hospital is still standing today, though it certainly is no longer a hospital. In its current re-iteration, it serves as a board and care home for seniors, a much sleepier ambience than in its heyday. The old Mason Hospital sits just north of the downtown area on the same main street which traverses the entire downtown shopping district, today a tony collection of bistros, wine tasting stops and antique shops.

It was a treat to find an old photograph of the Mason home on a Facebook page called "Historic Lodi," a picture taken from the time long before its establishment as a hospital. Dr. Mason, it turns out, was one of the first residents in town to own an automobile, as documented in a photograph preserving the memory of not only his home but his horseless carriage. Click through the embedded photo from a year ago to view the actual page on Facebook and explanation of the photograph from long before Thirza Cole and her sister bought the place as one of Lodi's hospitals.

Posted by Historic Lodi CA on Thursday, May 25, 2017

Mildred Finds Her Way Home

Just a baby whose infant photograph taken in Greeley, Colorado, somehow ended up in California, Mildred "Rigg" turns out to be someone whose descendants live not far from me. And thankfully, now that I've corresponded with two of those family members, Mildred is heading on her way home.

Mildred's picture was one of several added to the photograph collection of Thirza Browne Cole, another Greeley resident who moved, eventually, to northern California. I'm still not sure what the connection was between Thirza and the family of baby Mildred—even after puzzling over it with her descendants—but I think it's safe to say it was just another token of how much Thirza seemed to care for those she met along the way in life.

As I've done for the other abandoned family photographs sent home, I first looked for descendants among those posting their family trees on Ancestry.com. With a little time and an eye to detail, it is fairly easy to determine those who have put in a lot of time on their research, as opposed to those for whom genealogy is just a passing fancy. I like to look for those for whom this means a great deal. I also like to seek out the closer relatives, rather than those over-zealous researchers (like me) who have constructed enormous trees with multiple branches of very distant cousins.

The researcher I found to make first contact with, in Mildred's case, deferred to a closer relative, and forwarded my information along to this person. I am happy to say this recipient is apparently one who has had a longstanding history of researching family, for he mentioned using Ancestral Quest as his genealogical software, a program first developed in 1994 and most often associated with the Personal Ancestral File program formerly provided by FamilySearch.

I'm always encouraged when I discover that an effort in "giving back" actually goes to benefit those who helped newbies like me, decades ago, because I recall that time period as an era in which there were so many who freely gave of their time and expertise to help others develop their genealogical research skills. This little token of rescuing abandoned family photographs is my way of giving back, in memory of folks like those, back in the 1990s, who helped me when I first tried to bridge the gap between the hand-to-hand combat of wrestling with real, live—and dusty!—documents in archives to viewing their pristine facsimile in virtual format online.

So today, off goes Mildred to a descendant who understands the efforts of genealogical research and values remembering the inter-generational connections between family.

Above: Photograph of Mildred "Rigg" from Greeley, Colorado, dated about 1898; picture currently on its way home to one of Mildred's descendants.

The Telltale T

No, T is not for Tax Time, though I can certainly understand such a guess on a day like today.

T, in this case, is for Thirza, and just as I was preparing to send Thirza's picture home to a Cole descendant, its intended recipient, Karen, sent me a little interesting clue.

Remember Thiega? That scrawled name with the spelling which caused me so much doubt? How's this for a possibility? Wouldn't you think this handwriting said "Aunt Thiega" instead of Thirza?

That happens to be Thirza Cole's signature on a letter to Karen's parents, back in the 1940s. You can see how a beleaguered researcher might feel confused.

But that's not the only thing about that handwriting sample. There was something else. Remember that much older photograph I stumbled upon, from that same expedition up to California Gold Country to rescue some more abandoned family photos? The one of the elderly couple, Grandfather and Grandmother Browne from Grand Rapids, Michigan? It didn't have Thirza's name on it—as had all the other photographs I found from her collection—but it did have one other detail.

See if this handwriting looks familiar to you.

Just in case you think that T might have been a fluke, here's another handwriting sample received by Thirza's nephew and niece—subsequently passed to their daughter, Karen.

In my opinion, the handwriting on the reverse of the Browne grandparents' photograph is that of someone in her later years, but no matter when it occurred, the curious flourish over the T in both the Thirza signatures and the T in Timothy remain consistent. Whether Timothy and Caroline were indeed the names of Thirza's paternal grandparents or simply the grandparents of whoever wrote the original entry remains to be uncovered by additional research. But it's an encouraging clue. One that couldn't possibly have been discovered without input from another genealogist intent on collecting everything available about her family history.

Because She Said I Could

It may seem like I've been in a tailspin the past week or so, but behind the scenes has been some activity. This week will be the time—at last!—to start sharing how some of the photographs in the Thirza Cole collection will be going home.

But before I unwind the stories of the connections—remember, this was a collection of pictures of unrelated (as far as I can tell) individuals—I wanted to get permission to share one thing: a picture.

No, this is not another photograph rescued from an antique store in the foothills of northern California. This picture already has its home. But I think, once you see it, you will appreciate having had the chance to see it too.

The picture, you see, comes from the very person who will soon be receiving the photo of Thirza Browne Cole, herself. I am very glad to be able to send Thirza's picture home to this researcher, someone I found through her thorough family tree posted at Ancestry.com. What a collector of family photos this woman is! You can understand why it's a reassuring feeling to be able to add to her collection: family photos evidently mean much to this person, and she is willing to share them on her family tree at Ancestry.

Look carefully at the composition below, and you will see as the little girl in the center, none other than Thirza's only daughter, Pauline, the one who, widowed, died in her early twenties. Pauline's parents, Thirza and William Cole, stand behind her. Will's brother Howard and his wife Bertha complete the picture.

The picture affords us a wonderful snapshot in time for Thirza and her family—an earlier version of the woman whose picture I found, plus a glimpse at what her husband and daughter looked like, too. Of all the ones in Karen Cole Eaton's many uploaded photographs on Ancestry, I think I'm drawn to this one the most.

Thank you, Karen, for sharing so many of the Cole family memories in picture form. It's such a treat to know that Thirza's photograph is going to a family history keeper who cares so deeply about preserving the family story!

Above: Photograph of Thirza and William Cole and their daughter Pauline, standing behind William's brother Howard Cole and his wife, Bertha. Photograph courtesy of Karen Cole Eaton; used by permission.

Still Stuck

Whatever technical glitch locked up my longstanding account at Ancestry, I'm not sure, but I do know—at least after ninety minutes of phone conversation—that it is a problem which will take at least another day to resolve, if not more. I can guess about the source of my difficulties, but hey, I'm not the tech expert.

So I wait.

Meanwhile, Thirza's father Thomas Browne continues to elude me. It didn't help, of course, that he didn't quite make it to the 1900 census. But it wouldn't have hurt, either, if those other census records could have provided a consistent report. Right now, I'm not sure which one to believe.

I already knew something was suspect with the 1880 census. Granted, the Brownes were nearly newlyweds, with their daughter Thirza only one year of age, as reported in that census year. And yes, their home in Weld County, Colorado was home to a town—Greeley—which had been established only eleven years earlier as an experimental utopian society and didn't gain official city status until 1886. With a history like that, it would not be surprising to learn that residents had come from all over.

Thomas Browne's entry, however, seems to have been left blank in the original. The handwriting for the report of his place of birth—as well as that for each of his parents—seems to be quite different from that of the rest of the enumeration sheet. All three blanks were entered in a different hand than the rest of the form, with the abbreviation "Ill." Yet, for both his daughters, the spot for their father's birthplace was left blank. One wonders what the case actually was for this scenario.

Waiting to verify with the next census does us no good, as we've already discovered Thomas' likely demise by 1892. And trying to find him in the previous census, as a single man with the oft-bemoaned common surname Brown would be next to impossible. Even taking the presumptive move of searching for a Thomas Brown with parents Timothy and Caroline brought up nothing of use.

There was one other solution, though—and one I'd already begun exploring. Remember the 1885 Colorado state census? The one where I got baited by the 1880 discovery of next-door neighbors Harvey and "Baby" Pollock and went off on a rabbit trail to discover whether "Baby" was Ralph? Well, I forgot to go back and see if I could find Thirza's family whereabouts in 1885.

So now's the time to check that out.

With this one document, I now have the only other resource upon which I can pin the birth location of our specific Thomas Browne. Hopefully, this one was a more accurate report. Whether it was or not, though, one thing is certain: neither Thomas' father nor mother were reported born in Michigan. The verdict on this pursuit, according to the 1885 tally?

Thomas was from Ohio, and both his parents from Pennsylvania.

While it doesn't cement any connections between the younger Browne and his (potential) parents in Grand Rapids, Michigan, this 1885 record at least provides us a picture of the entire Browne family—sans the one child lost in infancy—in one place.

Above: Excerpt of 1885 Colorado state census for the city of Denver in Arapahoe County, showing Thirza Browne Cole's childhood household. Image courtesy FamilySearch.org.

Locked Out

Hmmmm...as if being in a holding pattern, waiting for the funeral of a sibling to be planned and subsequently coming down with the flu isn't enough...you'd think hauling my miserable self out of bed for a few minutes to write a sorry excuse for a post would at least go smoothly. After all, what was I going to write? That I am still having problems locating Thirza Browne's father—let alone his parents?

Thanks to a fluke of technology, apparently, I can't even access my account at Ancestry.com to refer to the few details I've parked there in a private, unsearchable tree which I use for my genealogical sandbox. And no, it isn't because I failed to renew my account. What I'm wondering is if my antiquated user name—assigned to me during those halcyon days when Rootsweb used to be its own entity—is the sticking point.

All that, however, will have to be resolved later in the morning, not in the wee hours when my far west time zone works against me. Everything—even a Utah-based company—runs on east coast time.

There are, however, other resources, all which will have to be considered without the ability to refer back to the research I've already done on the family. Online tools are great—but only when they're accessible.

That search effort, however, didn't yield much. I tried FamilySearch, looking for a Timothy and Caroline Brown or Browne who might have lived—or died—in Kent County, Michigan, home of Grand Rapids, the place where the photograph I found was originally taken. I tried burial records via Find A Grave, but the only Caroline I found was someone married to a William, not a Timothy. Checking out Seeking Michigan wouldn't work, because the dates are too recent for tracking down my mystery Brownes.

Sometimes, it just helps to know when to quit. I'm getting the clue that now would be an opportune time.

Brown, Browne —Tomayto, Tomahto

It doesn't help, when researching a family's history, when even the family members can't be sure which way to spell their own surname. Especially with a name like Brown. How hard can that be?

In the case we brought up yesterday, the size of the original photograph leads me to believe it was actually a carte de visite. It measures approximately two and a half by a little over four inches, much smaller than the cabinet cards which supplanted that earlier format.

If so, that dates the picture to approximately the 1860s. That, if it is indeed a picture belonging in Thirza Cole's photograph collection, would be a reasonable time to place her grandparents—if we can trust her father's 1880 report that he was born about 1848. If Thirza's father Thomas Browne was the oldest child of this parents, that might put the unknown couple's dates of birth around the mid 1820s. Perhaps they would look that "seasoned" by the time this photo was taken.

Or not. That's a lot of ifs.

There's one other thing. Perhaps you already noticed it yesterday. The front of the photograph bears the words, "Jackson,"—presumably the studio's name—and "Grand Rapids, Mich."

In 1880, Thomas Browne reported his birth being in Illinois, not Michigan. His daughters' subsequent own reports of where their father was born do indeed vary from enumeration to enumeration, but they never seem to settle on Michigan as the reported location.

A cursory glance at records in Grand Rapids for that time period didn't seem to reveal much information linked to that name, either.

But there's one constant in all this. Just like all the records I've seen on Thirza's family, even on the back of this photograph, family members were undecided about which way to spell their ancestors' names.

One entry, the first, presuming from the order of appearance, gave the name in a tight, neat hand: "Grandfather + grandmother Browne." Following that entry was a scrawl much like the one causing me the grief of hesitating between the name as "Thirza" or "Thiega."

Perhaps this was the one whose handiwork we've already observed on others of Thirza's photo collection. Whoever it was, it was someone who decided the spelling should be "Timothy and Caroline Brown."

Another Browne Photo

Working with common surnames—like Brown, for instance, no matter whether it has that fancy "e" at the end or not—can be frustrating.

We've already discovered that the photograph stash marked with the name Thirza Cole belonged to a woman whose maiden name was Browne. Finding out much about her early years has been a challenge. Had it not been for the unusual detail preserved in her own obituary, I'd likely not have been able to trace her whereabouts during that twenty-year span between the 1880 census and the next surviving enumeration.

But before that point? Even after wrestling with this family's history for weeks now, I am no closer to uncovering something fresh and new.

And then, reaching back to that stash of photographs I rescued from an antique store up in California gold country, I pull out another photograph and notice the names written on the back: Timothy and Caroline Browne.

Could they be Thirza's grandparents? Or just a coincidence, merely owing to such a common surname?

Finding Ophelia

Remember back last month, when I was wondering how to find Thirza—that woman whose abandoned family photographs I found in a northern California antique shop—and opted for searching in census records for her name plus parents, instead of looking for the younger siblings with the more common given names?

Well, I should have looked for Nellie and Mabel Browne, too—because they were the ones who held the key to figuring out what happened to Thirza's parents.

Amend that: I still don't know. Not really. Not the whole story. But I did find some convincing records, based on Nellie and Mabel being in the same household as someone named Ophelia. Only she wasn't still called Ophelia Browne. She had gotten married again.

It was the timeline in Thirza's own obituary, years later, which told me I might have the right family. After all, according to Thirza's obituary, she had moved to Sargents, Colorado, in 1892—"with her parents," the obituary had stated. And there, eight years later in the 1900 census, was a family with a Nellie and a Mabel "Brown" listed.

Only thing was, they were labeled as step-daughters to the head of the household, someone named Henry C. Allen. It would be logical to assume, then, that Henry's wife, Ophelia Allen, would be the mother of those two teenagers.

If Ophelia was the former wife of Thomas Browne, Thirza's father, then what happened to Thomas? The 1900 census said Henry and Ophelia were married for seven years, giving us an approximate year of 1893 as the date of their wedding. As it turns out, there was a marriage performed by a judge in Cañon City, the county seat of Fremont County, Colorado, on January 18, 1893. The two parties, aggravatingly, were listed simply as H. C. Allen and O. E. Brown, but their respective ages of fifty four and thirty seven seem to line up with the ages in the census seven years later.

Thanks to my brilliant deductive powers, that leads me to believe something must have happened to Thomas Browne during the year of 1892. As for proving that assertion, I have nothing yet to go by: no record that I can find—at least online—of his death or burial. All I have is the presumption that, since his wife remarried, she had been left a widow. Back in that time period, such logic could sometimes be held up—though not always.

As for Ophelia Ellen, formerly Browne, now Allen, there was a better "paper" trail. With a headstone boldly proclaiming her name as Ophelia Ellen Allen, Thirza's mother was buried, back home in Greeley, Colorado, in June, 1908. 

Constructing Thirza's Timeline

Granted, not every obituary contains as much detail as the one we read yesterday for Thirza Browne Cole, the woman whose photographs I found abandoned in a northern California antique store. Someone must have provided all that information in Thirza's obituary; the question is: who? By the time of Thirza's death in 1979, she had turned 101. Obviously, she outlasted her parents, but not only that: she long outlived her siblings, as well. In addition, she had already lost her only daughter through a tragic event in the 1920s. Who was still around to tell Thirza's story—especially with that type of detail?

The story, if it is correct, does help fill in some gaps in Thirza's history. To help place these events in date order, let's reconstruct her life's timeline. Here's what we now know about Thirza:

• She was born in Greeley, Colorado, on 27 June, 1877.
• In 1892, she moved to Sargents, Colorado, with her parents, Thomas and Ophelia Browne.
• At an unknown date soon after, she moved to Cripple Creek, Colorado.
• Soon after that, she attended the Red Cross hospital school in Salida, Colorado.
• On 28 September, 1895, she married William E. Cole in Denver, Colorado.
• In March of 1897, Will and Thirza's daughter Pauline was born in Colorado.
• By the time of the 1900 census, the Coles were back in Teller County, location of Cripple Creek.
• In 1915, she "first came to Lodi" California.
• According to the 1920 census, she was living in her son-in-law's household in Fresno, California.
• Around 1921, Thirza and her sister Nellie Yates purchased the Mason Hospital in Lodi, California, presumably after her son-in-law, Ralph Lee, passed away in June.

From that point on, Thirza remained in Lodi. That's the easy part to find, since she was listed clearly in the 1930 and 1940 census, as well as city directories.

What I still have questions about are the whereabouts of her family members. As much as her sister Nellie was mentioned as her business partner in buying the hospital, the woman remained in Colorado, as far as I can tell, through at least the 1940 census. And then, there's that small question about whatever happened to their sister Mable. And that other sibling named Adelbert.

More than that, though, is the question of what became of their parents. Thomas Browne seemed to have dropped out of the picture early. And his wife? Named Ellen in one record (the 1880 census), she is called Ophelia in her daughter Thirza's obituary. Is one of those two names her middle name? Or are we talking about two different women?

This is not simply an academic question. There is another reason why I want to know what became of the Brownes. You see, there is a matter of one more photograph. And the name on the back involves the surname Browne. I'm hoping the details from Thirza's own obituary will help lead me to her parents' whereabouts when they had their own obituaries drawn up.

Learning More About Thirza

Among genealogical researchers, a well-written obituary, once found, may be considered a blessing. Not only does the article contain the essentials of the deceased's parents' and siblings' names, but it includes highlights of the person's own life.

While Thirza Cole's obituary didn't appear on the front page of the Lodi News-Sentinel, as had her husband's back in 1947, it certainly bested his in length and detail. Since our primary interest in the Cole family centers on Thirza herself, that's a good thing; we've got quite a bit more to learn about this woman whose photo collection ended up in my possession by default.

Because of the length of Thirza's obituary—which ran in the Sentinel on Monday, January 29, 1979, buried on page seventeen—I'll save most of my commentary on this obituary for tomorrow's post, with the exception, of course, of noting that yes, she did live to be 101 years of age.

 Thirza M. Cole

     Thirza M. Cole, 101, of 207 Pleasant Ave., died Saturday morning in a local hospital following an extended illness. A native of Greeley, Colo., she was the daughter of the late Thomas and Ophelia Browne who were pioneers of that area.

     At age 15, she and her parents moved to Sargent, Colo., and then to Cripple Creek and then to Salida, Colo. She graduated from the Red Cross hospital school in Salida and later became the superintendent for several years.

     In 1915 she came to Lodi and six years later, she and her sister, the late Nellie B. Yates, purchased the Mason Hospital in Lodi and operated it for a number of years.

     She was the wife of the late W. C. [sic] Cole and mother of the late Pauline B. Lee.

     She was a member of the First Congregational Church of Lodi and a charter member of the Lodi Business and Professional Club of Lodi. She was an honorary member of the Lodi Womens Club and Circle Seven of the First Congregational Church.

     She is survived by her daughter, June Buck of Lodi, and two grandchildren.

     Services will be held at 2 p.m. Tuesday in the Gierhart & Wells Funeral Home with the Rev. Paul Donovan and the Rev. Vernon V. Robertson officiating. Private committal will be in the Lodi Cemetery.

     Friends may donate in her memory to the First Congregational Church, Grace Presbyterian Church or to their favorite charity.