When That Face Looks So Familiar

Sometimes, the faces we see in photographs do not have the same look as they did in earlier versions of themselves. Other times, well, if the face still looks familiar, then run with it!

The very answer I was keen to find with the photographs I shared with you yesterday and the day before becomes the crux of the matter with yet another photograph. The older man in Tuesday's photo, who seems to be one and the same as the younger father in Wednesday's picture, is, in my mind, no other than the man in today's portrait of a mature couple taken in South Bend, Indiana.

Could it be the same man? Or am I being too hopeful about identifying a family to whom I can send these abandoned photographs?

If the man we've seen in the past two days' pictures is the same as this man, it makes a lot of sense that he and his wife would have had their picture taken in South Bend. The man and his wife—whom I believe to be George and Elmira Wymer of Marshall County, Indiana—had one daughter, as we've already discussed. This daughter Maude, her husband and her oldest two daughters were likely the younger family posing along with parents George and Elmira in Tuesday's photograph.

Maude's husband, Jesse Reed, apparently died sometime between the 1905 birth of their only son, Loyd, and Maude's subsequent June 1907 marriage to second husband Elbert Harris, a widower living in Michigan. Eventually, the blended family of Maude and Elbert Harris moved to South Bend, where they appeared in the 1910 census.

It would make sense that doting grandparents George and Elmira Wymer would move from their home in Marshall County to live in South Bend near their tragedy-struck daughter during that time period, but especially so upon the arrival of new grandson Franklin Harris in 1909. Then, too, recall the time squeeze in dating these photographs: grandpa George himself passed away in 1912.

If it weren't for what amounts to a timeless facial appearance for that grandfather—added, of course, to the helpful hint on the first photograph, naming Elmira and Maude as part of the Wymer family—I would have been left with three unidentified photographs.

Some people have faces and figures which change as they age. But young or mature, Mr. Wymer's appearance seemed changeless enough to decidedly spot him in all three pictures.

Above: Photograph of George and Elmira Purkey Wymer, taken in South Bend, Indiana, circa 1910. Photograph currently in possession of author until claimed by a direct descendant of the Wymer family.

Refocusing on the Goal

While it may be tempting to lose ourselves in the myriad questions about the Goodman family of Tennessee and Illinois—and, eventually, their descendants in Malheur County, Oregon—we need to keep our eyes focused on our goal. In the case of the photographs I found of Annie Goodman Tucker and her family, that means building a viable tree to see where she fits in the family constellation, and then, hopefully, see if there are any descendants out there who would be interested in receiving the Goodman and Tucker pictures I found in that antique shop in northern California.

Granted, the Goodman story has been somewhat confusing. It appears that Annie's mother, Sarah Baldwin Breeden Goodman, was once again widowed while living in Nashville, Tennessee. With three—or, if Dollie was indeed another child and not just a nickname for Alice or Emma, four—daughters, widow Sarah's primary interest was likely in marrying them off, or at least insuring that they were not left destitute at her own passing.

In the case of oldest daughter Annie, that meant marriage in 1884. For daughter Alice, eight years younger than Annie, hers was another marriage, this time in 1886. Yet, for the daughter in between Annie and Alice, it was a different scenario: work in Nashville as a single young woman, then marriage in 1893. And Dollie? All we know about Dollie was that she was in a photograph taken with Annie in Oregon. Who knows what became of her after that—or whether she was actually another Goodman daughter, or merely one of Annie's other sisters with a sweet nickname.

The challenge was figuring out just why a widow in Nashville would decide to drag her two daughters all the way to Jersey County, Illinois, to be married. What was the connection? We discovered the unexpected clue—at least as it was recorded in the marriage record—that Alice Goodman was not born in Tennessee, as one would expect from her parents' residence, but that she was born in Alton, Illinois. There was also that confusing switch of names for the Goodman father, from Henry in the census records to Andrew in Alice's marriage record—and even in a later Nashville city directory for widow Sarah. Could Sarah have actually traveled to Illinois to marry again, herself? I have seen that exact scenario before, in other families.

The connection to Illinois, from our current perspective, is fleeting for the Goodman daughters. Alice, once married to John Harris in Jersey County, lived there with their sole son Earl in 1900, but by 1910 had moved—I suspect along with several others from Jersey County, including Alice's sister Annie—to Malheur County, Oregon. As reader Per pointed out last Friday, another ten years and Alice's husband and son had returned to Illinois without her—the 1920 census indicated that John Harris was widowed—where they remained, according to both the 1930 and 1940 enumerations.

The story for oldest sister Annie Goodman and her husband Samuel Tucker was much the same. Living in Nashville, she married in Illinois in 1884, then by 1900, was living in Oregon. Judging from that 1900 census, their move was both earlier and more gradual than Annie's sister Alice: they remained in Illinois until after the 1887 birth of their daughter Eva, then stayed in Nebraska for the birth of five additional children. The Tuckers left for Oregon after the summer of 1899. However, like her younger sister Alice, Annie died relatively young, by the end of 1925.

There was, however, another Goodman connection in the story. Whether it was a Goodman who was related to Henry Goodman, Sarah's second husband (at least, as far as I can tell), I have yet to demonstrate—though the roots for both Goodmans reach back to Virginia.

You may have already spotted that other Goodman connection in our discussion of the wedding of Annie and Samuel Tucker. There, in the marriage record, was the maiden name of Samuel's mother: Martha Goodman. And no, that wasn't a mistaken entry, for if her married name had been inserted in error, it would have been Tucker, not Goodman.

What was interesting about that other Goodman line—the one of Samuel Tucker's mother, Martha Goodman—was that her mother's name was Fuller.

Fuller? I've seen that name before! In fact, I believe I have a picture from that family mentioning the Fuller surname. And since refocusing on our goal means getting back to connecting these abandoned family photos with descendants of these families, let's see what we can find about the Fuller connection to this extended family.

The Sisters' Stories

Brick walls are sometimes best conquered by reading between the lines on the documents we can find on our ancestors. I'm seeing that borne out again, now that I'm puzzling over the photograph I found of Annie Goodman Tucker and Dollie Goodman, the sister I can't find in any documentation. In the meantime, discovering how Annie and her sisters grew up in Tennessee with half-brothers who were born in Georgia, I'm at a loss as to how to explain her marriage in Illinois.

All I want to do is find out just how Annie Goodman of Nashville, Tennessee, managed to travel to Jersey County, Illinois, to marry Samuel Tucker in 1884. Really. Oh, and also figure out just who her sister Dollie Goodman might have been—the one we found in the picture abandoned in a northern California antique shop.

While my guess that Annie and her widowed mom might have traveled to Illinois in the company of her half-brothers from her mother's first marriage didn't work out—all her half brothers died in Nashville, apparently—I still have one more guess to check out. That one leaves the answer in the hands of the girls' team: Annie's sisters from her mom's second marriage to Henry Goodman. But even there, it was obvious that her sister Emma was listed in Nashville city directories—at least up to 1887.

That left me with the task of looking up records concerning marriages for Annie's known sisters Emma and Alice; remember, I hadn't been able to find any record of a Goodman sister named Dollie, whether actual name or nickname, until I found a first mention of her in the Nashville city directory.

But Emma married a man by the name of John McCann in Nashville, and died there in 1929. It was obvious Emma wouldn't hold the key to any explanation of how her sister Annie ended up marrying a man in Illinois. Yet, as we saw yesterday, Annie's widowed mom, Sarah Goodman, and her other sister, Alice, seemed to have disappeared from Nashville city directories in the mid 1880s. As it turns out, that little hint, reading between the lines in the city directories, provided a clue to scour the records elsewhere.

What we already know is that Annie married Samuel Tucker in 1884 in Jersey County, Illinois. That, in case you are as geographically challenged as I am, turns out to be a distance of about 350 miles from their home in Nashville. Inquiring minds want to know: how did she meet him? How did she make that trip from Nashville to Jerseyville? I was puzzled, knowing the customs of that time period, and the possibility that Annie's father might already have passed away. It seemed unlikely that a young woman of that time period would just strike up a friendship with a bachelor from a town far removed from her hometown.

But what about that other sister, Alice? There was no sign of her continued residence in Nashville, nor any marriage record for her there.

As it turned out, that younger Goodman sister followed in Annie's footsteps, marrying a man in Jersey County, as well. Her intended was John T. Harris, son of Thomas P. and Nancy Tally Harris. They married in Jersey County on March 19, 1886, according to an entry in the Jersey County records. While the record listed Alice's father's name as Andrew—not Henry—we can be reassured we have the right Alice Goodman, for the witnesses to the ceremony were none other than Alice's sister Annie and Annie's husband, Samuel Tucker.

Reading between the lines on that record shows us one more unexpected detail about the Goodman family's connection to Illinois: Alice listed her place of birth not as Tennessee—which would have been expected, given her two older sisters were born there—but as Alton, Illinois, only twenty miles south of Jerseyville. Though Alice gave her age as sixteen at the time of her 1886 marriage, I tend to think she might have only been fifteen years old at the time, based on the fact that her name wasn't included in the Goodman household for the July enumeration of the 1870 census in Nashville.

At any rate, though the Goodmans lived in Nashville in 1870, sometime between that July 2, 1870, enumeration and the time of her birth, Alice and, at least, her mother were living in Illinois.

Why? After all, the Goodmans returned to Nashville after that point—at least until Annie's marriage to Samuel Tucker in 1884 and Alice's marriage to John Harris in 1886.

As it turns out, Annie and Alice weren't the only Goodmans in that part of Illinois. There may have been another Goodman connection.

The two excerpts above from the Jersey County, Illinois, marriage records are for Alice Goodman's entry (above) and her husband John Harris' entry (below). Both images courtesy FamilySearch.org.