Let's Just Assume . . .

Setting aside all those comments which can be made about the risks of assuming, let's recall for a moment the scientific necessity of the willingness to formulate hypotheses. If we can't test an educated guess, how will we ever know whether it's true—or false?

In order to figure out who these other Rileys were, whose names were swirling around the one-page document drawn up at the end of our William F. Riley's life in 1906, means we need to formulate a reasonable hypothesis of who they might be, then devise a way to test it. It seems possible that one might have been a grandchild—possibly even a married grandchild, thus doubly hiding the Riley surname in her roots. Thus, our task is to figure out just how that Mary Riley and Bettie Taylor, mentioned in the Soldiers Home records, might be related to William F. Riley—if at all.

To test that hypothesis means we need to build a tree, starting from the Riley child we know, and moving forward in time to her children, thus William Riley's grandchildren. If any scenarios match—or, conversely, do not match—the names we have listed in William's Tennessee Soldiers' Home records, then we have our answer.

To start, let's revisit what we know about William's daughter Mary. She it was for whom a newspaper transcription was attached to her Ancestry.com record by another subscriber, claiming she was involved in a paternity suit. Whether that was, indeed, our Mary Riley, we may have to ferret out. But for now, let's just stick to what we can find about this Mary.

Finding records on the right Mary Riley can be a challenge, considering such a common name, so I'll stick close to the record trail, especially from the start, when connections with the parents we already know are more apparent. Thus, we start with her father William's first census record after his 1852 marriage to Eliza Jane Thompson in Washington County, Tennessee. In 1860, that was the Riley household in nearby Greene County, where daughter "Mary E." was now six years of age.

By the time of the 1870 census, Mary was predictably ten years older, but her family had moved from Tennessee to Putnam County, Indiana.

It was in March of 1871 that the news article appeared in a Greencastle, Indiana, newspaper, alleging Mary was the claimant in a paternity suit, but until I can verify that report by accessing it myself, my only recourse is to fast forward to the next census record and see if there was a child in Mary's household who was born around that time. However, when we access the 1880 census, we find Mary in a home with two daughters—yet neither of them was born in 1871.

Mary, by this time, has married local shoemaker John Shellenbarger—on June 1, 1872, the same day as her sister Rachel married William Taylor Froggett—and continued to live in Indiana at least through her appearance in the 1930 census. Even if she did return to Tennessee to be with her mother at the passing of her father William, she would not have been referred to as Mary Riley; her name by that point would have been Mary Shellenbarger.

If both of William's daughters—Mary and Rachel—were out of the running for being the true identity of either the Mary Riley or Bettie Taylor named in the Tennessee document, who could those two Tennessee entities be? Neither of Mary Shellenbarger's daughters would fit; their names were wrong. And Mary's sister Rachel didn't seem to have any daughters to fill the parameters for the identity of Bettie Taylor, either.

There was one tantalizing other bit of evidence, however: that only Bettie Taylor in the 1900 census, back in Washington County, Tennessee, just happened to be born in 1871, herself.

Junkman Froggett

A timeline, based on newspaper snippets, of how one great-grandson of William and Cassie Riley—my own third great-grandparents—came to be known as "Junkman Froggett" of Decatur, Illinois:

March 3, 1930, down on his luck and taking a nighttime walk along the railroad tracks, Henry Froggett is not only held up at knife point for his money—which amounted to only $2 in change in his pocket—but the pants in which pockets the money was found.

January 3, 1935, charged with the theft of a garbage can, Henry is held at the city jail, where he explains he thought it had a hole and "was just a piece of junk." While police felt this was a lead that might link Froggett to other recent garbage can thefts, Henry hoped he could be released from jail before that Friday, when he was supposed to report for work at a new work-relief program.

January 4, 1935, "Junkman Froggett" is released from jail, as no formal complaint was filed against him when the owner of the missing garbage can came to retrieve his property.

May 4, 1937, two Decatur men—yes, including our Henry—are held in the county jail, charged with petit larceny for stealing fifteen chickens from a local woman's home.

November 26, 1940, two men—and Henry remains the only constant in this duo—plead guilty in county court for petit larceny of an inlet grating from the city, and are sentenced to six months at the state farm. Apparently, the strategy of switching from chickens back to scrap metal didn't work for Henry.

July 14, 1943, struck by a freight train at a railroad crossing at 10:00 p.m. the previous night, Henry Froggett was found the following noon by a passerby, and is now recuperating at the local hospital from injuries to his back and arm.

October 14, 1943, while walking uptown from his step-daughter's home at 8:30 p.m., Henry Froggett is struck by a passing automobile, an apparent hit-and-run incident. His body slumps in the darkness, and he sustains injuries to his shoulder and head. A local hospital confirms that he also received internal injuries.

October 16, 1943, Decatur police learn that the driver of a Model A Ford had swerved at the scene of the hit and run incident, realizing in the darkness that there was a body in the road. The driver had gotten out of his car and directed traffic around the slumped body so as to avoid any further injury before an ambulance could arrive.

October 16, 1943, funeral services are held at the Moran & Sons Chapel at 10:30 a.m. for Henry Froggett, with burial at Greenwood Cemetery.

November 12, 1943, the coroner's jury returns the verdict that Henry Froggett, aged 61, died as a result of injuries when struck by a hit-and-run driver. The driver has not yet been found.

Whether Henry Froggett—whom Decatur residents once knew as "Junkman Froggett"—was perpetually down on his luck, or just had a maddening knack for getting things wrong, is hard to tell from this brief litany of his appearances in the local news. Perhaps his was a life doomed from the beginning. Or perhaps we need to consider his shortened and struggling lifespan in parallel with history's own timeline of bad luck episodes in the 1930s and 1940s.

Regardless of the truth of the matter, finding these vignettes of his life's struggles evokes a pathos I couldn't escape. While citizens of one 1940s city in Illinois may have rolled their eyes in impatience at yet another of Henry Froggett's antics, I imagine it might have been hard to be the one living the life of Decatur's Junkman.  

 

 

Accused of Mooching

I'm not certain you can call "mooching" a legal term, but it was a term which could land a person in jail—at least in 1940s Decatur, Illinois. Discovering that the local newspaper applied that charge to a man who turned out to be my second cousin twice removed elicits two responses from me. One, of course, has to do with genealogy—you knew that; otherwise, why share it here?—and the other happens to have the potential to be a risky fascination on my part.

Delving into our roots can be risky in its own right. We start out, thinking well of our parents and assuming they came from worthy stock. We move from the generations we knew personally and step into the unknown of those who have gone before—and left us not a trace of information on their origins. Eventually, we step back from the family tree we have constructed and realize it has taken a shape vaguely reminiscent of that Norman Rockwell painting, "A Family Tree," which at its root included both a princess and a pirate.

After having discovered uplifting stories in my own family tree of people who managed to rise about their life's hardships to achieve notable accomplishments, I slammed right into a brick wall which, once chipped away, revealed a few tales I hadn't expected. That's when I realized I was staring at news reports which answered the risky questions I've always wanted to ask.

You see, in our decade of plenty—along with its paradox, the proliferation of the "homeless"—I have always had that inexplicable desire to approach one of these unfortunate people and have an "open" conversation with them. Something along the lines of asking, "How did you get to this point in your life?"

Whether the answer would be coming from a victim of post-traumatic stress following a tour of military duty, or coming from a young person plagued with mental illness (or simply under the influence of debilitating substances), it might end up being an answer delivered in a less safe manner than my unreasonable self might expect. So I have always kept a respectful distance and kept my mouth shut. But one always wonders....

Yet here, in the quiet of my own home, I've poked away at news records of a bygone era and run into a report of someone being jailed for "mooching." On December 28, 1942—right in the midst of the season proclaiming "peace on earth, good will toward men," an unidentified Decatur newspaper provided a small announcement under the headline, "Accused of Mooching."

Henry Froggett, 60, who police accused of "mooching" on the streets, was held in county jail today under a warrant charging vagrancy.

I never would have discovered this unfortunate turn of events for any man named Henry Froggett, if it weren't for the genealogical chase which led me, in search of my third great-grandparents' place of birth, to trace their grandchildren's life trajectories. From William and Cassandra Fincher Riley in North Carolina, I had wandered across the mountains to northeastern Tennessee, where they settled and saw at least two of their children marry in Washington County. From there, their son's family moved onward in Tennessee and eventually to Indiana, where their granddaughter Rachel Elizabeth Riley had married a man by the name of William Froggett.

The unfortunate Henry Froggett of the newspaper report was Rachel and William Froggett's youngest son, who had somehow stumbled his way from the family home in Putnam County, Indiana, to the city of Decatur in Illinois. And it wasn't simply that he was down on his luck that Christmas season of 1942; his, it turns out, was a story filled with instances of a hard luck life. This was just the kind of story which could obliterate my determination to stay the course and stick to my research goal. I had to take the detour.

Finding "Clews" in Indiana

The one imperative, after staying the course to follow a research goal, is to avoid, at all costs, being lured down a rabbit hole. If you have known me for any length of time at all, you already know those bunny trails are my weakness. Therefore, I strengthen my resolve by reiterating my current research objective: to find a death certificate for a sibling of my second great-grandmother Rachel Riley Boothe. This, I needed to do for the sole purpose of confirming not only the names of her parents, but the location of their birth, as well. That detail had unfortunately been omitted from Rachel's own document.

Thus, after having come up with a blank for Rachel's sister Mary, our only recourse was to trace the line of Rachel's brother William F. Riley. The down side to that effort was my doubt regarding whether I had located the right William Riley in Washington County, Tennessee. Nevertheless, having found a marriage record for one man by that name in said county, I took the chance of following this William and his wife, Eliza Jane.

We've already followed them long enough to track them from Washington County to nearby Greene County in Tennessee. And then, suddenly and with no explanation that I can find, a family with the same exact details disappeared from any spot in Tennessee and were magically whisked to Putnam County, Indiana.

Well, almost exact. The three children's names were the same, and their ages exactly ten years older. Their places of birth matched previous records. The only difference was that Eliza Jane Riley had magically been transformed to Elizabeth Riley. Close enough, but still allowing for plenty of doubt.

Regardless, I decided to pursue this bird-in-hand. After all, what could go wrong? All I needed was to follow the chase, no matter where it led me, until I could locate a death certificate for William Riley.

Silly me. I lost my resolve when I clicked on child number one. William's oldest—a daughter he and his wife had named Mary, just like William's own oldest sister—had been born about 1854 in Tennessee, just as we had seen in previous census records. But when I went onto my account at Ancestry to build her profile, I was greeted by a multitude of those shaky-leaf announcements of hints about Mary's life. Somebody else had already been hard at work augmenting the hint collection.

Unlike the usual hints from the Ancestry service, Mary's hints were not the pedestrian census records or vital records we come to expect. Another subscriber to the service had decided to share the wealth from a linked newspaper archive and had posted several articles. One such article happened to include the name Mary Riley, with the title, "Riley vs. Bugg Paternity Suit."

I reminded myself that this was not part of my research plan.

If, realizing that I really am going to move away from that bait, you feel disappointed, you know exactly how I felt at leaving such a bombshell of a headline. But persevere, we must.

I moved on from Mary's life and list of confirming documents to the next of William's children. This brought me to the daughter he had likely named after his other sister, my second great-grandmother Rachel. William's daughter—her full name was Rachel Elizabeth—led a rather conventional life, it seemed. She married a man in Putnam County having the same given name as her own dad—William Froggett—and with this man, she raised five children, four of whom survived at least until the 1900 census was enumerated.

Perhaps the appearance of normalcy lulled me into taking a further look at this family constellation. After all, my habit is to chart all my ancestors' collateral lines, and the possibility of a DNA match from this line prompted me to start building out Rachel Elizabeth's own line. But there it was again: evidence of a zealous fellow Ancestry subscriber, wanting to share all the newspaper articles gleaned on the children of Rachel Elizabeth and William Froggett.

By the time I had gotten to Rachel's oldest son—also named William—I had already learned that he had been charged with larceny, horse thievery, and attempted murder. And not all at once.

Further, by 1900, this son had managed not one but two successful jail breaks. By the time of an undated newspaper clipping posted in the "hints" section, he had escaped with three other prisoners skillfully enough that officials were confessing to the media that after two weeks of searching, all they could manage to do was find "clews to the whereabouts" of only one or two of the four. Our William and one other turn out to have been "the most difficult of the four men to follow."

Unfortunately, the undated news clipping was from a service I don't subscribe to, so I tried to locate the article through the two services I do use—but with no results. I did, however, find other reports from across the state of Indiana on our recalcitrant William Froggett. He apparently had quite a reputation.

Pulling myself away from this pursuit—remember, it wasn't exactly my research goal—I moved down the list of children and away from research kamikazi. I moved on to another of the Froggett offspring. That didn't help. As it turned out, William Froggett's younger brother had a colorful past of his own. And yet, his was a story which was totally different than his big brother's tale. I may have had good intentions, but you know I can't just bypass this one without saying something...