Tracing Vina's Path

In trying to confirm whether each of the wives of George Banfill was actually sister to the other, one way to produce evidence to that fact is to view records of the children of George's first marriage. We have tried that for two of George's three children—Charles and Hazelle—and come up empty-handed. There is, however, one other opportunity: George's daughter Vina.

To try and track Vina's life story, though, turns out to be more challenging than one would expect. The easy part is finding her, along with her younger sister Hazelle and her brother Charles, in the 1900 census, back in Wichita, Kansas, in the household of her parents, George and Myrtle Banfill. There, we learn that Vina was supposedly born in April of 1896.

By 1910, Vina had lost her mother, and her widowed father had moved the remaining family—by now, only Vina and her sister Hazelle—back to Douglass, to the home of his widowed mother, Mary Banfill.

After that point, it becomes challenging to track Vina, mainly because of her several marriages. In 1920, we can find her in the Kistler household, but it is not apparent just whom she has married by that surname until we find a Social Security record for her subsequently deceased son Jack. Then, we learn that her husband's name was George.

Again, in 1930, Vina's changed identity was a challenge. The census reveals she was by then living in Oregon, and married to Earl Hacker. But in the 1940 census, she was in California—in the same county where I live, incidentally—widow of a man named McIntyre. Her daughter Dollie, from her marriage to George Kistler, was now married to Lindsay Douglas and living in the same household.

Where Vina ended up next, I cannot say at this point. I can't find any record of her death—perhaps owing to yet another married name—though I can find a record of her Social Security application, which was the point of this search in the first place.

And it is there that we face another disappointment, if we are hoping for verification that Vina's mother was sister to George Banfill's second wife Clara Alice. On that record, Vina reports that her father's surname was Banfill—which we already knew—but that her mother's name was not Hoover, but Mary Baum.

Baum? Where did that come from?!

Actually, there may be a logical explanation. Remember, Vina and Hazelle were raised, as teenagers before their father's second marriage, by their widowed grandmother. Her given name just happened to be Mary. And while Mary is one of the most common given names for daughters, if we take a step back in George's own family history, we can find an explanation in the census before Vina's birth and even before George's first marriage.

In the 1880 census, George Banfill was still an eight year old boy in his parents household—home of Levi and Mary Banfill. But George's parents didn't live on their own property; they actually lived with his father's in-laws. And their surname actually turns out to be Baum. Could it be that, having been raised by her grandmother, Vina automatically provided her grandmother's maiden name when filling out the Social Security forms? We can't say for sure, but the records sure vindicate us for having such a guess.

Still, that leaves me no wiser about the identity of George's first wife. For now, that may have to suffice us, until more documentation turns up, online. After all, I won't be traveling to Kansas again, any time soon.

In the meantime, though I have no photographs of George's children by his first wife—whoever she actually was—I do have a photo of each of the children of George and Clara Alice Banfill. You'll meet the first of the two, tomorrow.

The Rest of Her Story: Clara Alice

Perhaps the reason little Myrtle Knapp—the wiggleworm in the photograph from Tuesday's post—used only her middle name was that Clara was both her first name and that of her mother. The matriarch of the William Malphus Knapp family was known as Clara Alice.

The elder Clara was widowed fairly young—she was thirty four at the time—when her husband passed away in 1908. By then, though the family had moved from Kansas to Washington state, they had returned to the midwest, this time to Oklahoma. The widowed Clara Alice Knapp was easily found in that same location in Major County, Oklahoma, by the time of the 1910 census, living with her eight children, along with her father, Samuel Hoover.

Meanwhile, about two hundred miles away, Clara Alice's deceased husband's aunt—thirty one year old Flora Knapp, whose photo we saw yesterday—was by then married to Roy Jones and living in Douglass, Kansas.

The house immediately next door to the Jones' residence was a household with the exact opposite configuration of Clara Alice's situation back in Chester, Oklahoma. This was the home of Mary Banfill, whose widowed son, George, was living with his two teenaged daughters, Vina and Hazel.

While I have yet to find any documentation that Aunt Flora served as a cunning matchmaker, you are welcome to come up with your own guess as to how George Banfill in Kansas met Clara Alice Hoover Knapp in Oklahoma.

It wasn't long after those two 1910 census records were compiled, including the two households separated by nearly two hundred miles, when a couple met at the Major County courthouse in Oklahoma to exchange vows and blend their families. On October 10, 1912, George Banfill and Clara Alice Knapp became husband and wife.

By the time of the next census in 1920, George and Clara Alice had a family comprised of three of her children—Robert, William Milton, and Florence Knapp—plus two children of their own: Harold and Nila Banfill. In the 1920 census, George's two daughters had already moved on, and by the time of the 1930 census—by then, moved back to Douglass, Kansas—the only children remaining in the Banfill household were those George and Clara Alice had in common.

When 1940 arrived, however, the couple had moved far afield of either midwestern state. They now showed up in the Great Valley of California, living next door to their son, Harold, himself a married man with a two year old son of his own. George and Clara Alice apparently remained in that California location for the rest of their lives, for George was buried in the Modesto Pioneer Cemetery in 1947, and Clara Alice followed in 1948.

For those who aren't familiar with this part of California, Modesto is located in Stanislaus County, the county just to the south of the one where I live. Though I found photographs of their families—both the Knapp family and the Banfill family, whom we'll meet next week—up in Sonora, which is a drive away in the foothills, I consider this to be a possible explanation for how pictures of a family from Kansas and Oklahoma might have ended up in California at all.

Best of all, though, I now can say I might have a better idea as to why the Banfills might have held on for so long to the picture of Aunt Flora.

Above: Close-up of Clara Alice Hoover Knapp from a Knapp family photograph taken circa 1898; photograph currently in possession of author until claimed by a direct descendant.

A Knapp Family Collection

Sometimes, the photographs I find at Gold Rush Country antique shops don't come from far away. Sometimes, they come from down the street.

After having located photographs coming from as far away as Poland, Germany, and Montreal in Canada, that's what turned out to be the case for the last set of family photos we've been reviewing. All those Brockman and Purkey family photos I've been sharing these past few months were likely recent possessions of a Brockman descendant who settled in northern California for those golden retirement years.

The same thing is likely happening now, as we move from the many photos connected to that Sonora, California, estate to a collection of pictures from what I believe is a totally unrelated family. Many of the photos in this set were well marked—albeit irritatingly on the face of the picture, rather than more discreetly entered on the reverse. The photos also had one other distinguishing mark: they were each stored in a clear plastic container, sealed with tape—likely of the type that would make a proper archivist cringe. As much as I believe in the sanctity of provenance, I couldn't shake the compulsion to gingerly remove the photos from their encasement, so—confession time, here—they are freed, at last.

Now, to get down to the business of researching just who these people were so we can see their likenesses sent home to family. We'll begin with a little overview of the patriarch of the family, a man named William Malphus Knapp.

"Malfus," as it turns out, is an important middle name to keep in mind. As this William was named after his father—also a William, though his middle name was different—the two were differentiated by the use of the younger William's middle name. And that, as we see through various spelling permutations such as the example in the 1880 census, is how we can find him when an abundance of hits for a name as common as William Knapp overwhelms us.

Though I was able to locate "Malphis" as a young teenager in his parents' household in Douglass, Kansas—making him one of 369 inhabitants of a city whose founding occurred after young William's own 1867 birth—don't think he remained a resident of rural Butler County for long. Perhaps because his father was a carpenter, and thus of an occupation enabling the family to travel to find work, or perhaps because of his family's history—his father was born in Ohio to Canadian parents—William, too, eventually moved on.

That twenty year gap from the 1880 census to the next available United States enumeration has been bemoaned by many researchers, and with this next step in the younger William's chronology, I add my voice, once again, to this chorus. Still, we can read the tea leaves in the murky recording of the 1900 census, and realize that, after his birth in either Indiana or Michigan (each census gives a different response), his path led him to marry an Illinois gal who had moved to Butler County some time before the 1885 state census.

According to the 1900 census, William married Clara Alice Hoover around 1891, and they welcomed the first of their many children, Richard Samuel, in November, 1892. From that date through the 1897 arrival of their daughter Corintha—named after William's by then long-deceased mother—the family remained in Kansas. With the addition of their son Charles, as we can see from the enumeration itself, the Knapp family was now resident in Klickitat County in southern Washington State.

If William Malphus Knapp had remained in Washington, I might have considered my acquisition of his abandoned family photos as just another case of a collection sent, over the years, to a relative in nearby California. In this case, however, I think it is a bit more convoluted than that simple conclusion. You see, not much after that 1900 census, William returned to the midwest, where he died in Oklahoma in 1908. By the time of the 1910 census, his widow and children remained in Major County, living with Clara's father, Samuel Hoover.

If William and Clara Knapp ended up in Oklahoma, though, what was the connection that brought all those Knapp family photographs to a home near Sonora, California, location of the antique shop where I found them? It's in the subsequent generations where I think the answer lies. Before we get to that point, though, let's meet the rest of the family, which will be easily accomplished, thanks to the information provided on each picture.

Whoever kept that set of Knapp family photos was someone intent on remembering exactly who they were, for each one came with a thorough label. For today, we'll begin with the picture of William Malphus Knapp, himself, and tomorrow, I'll begin introducing the rest of his family to you.

Above: Photograph labeled "William Malfus Knapp, born May 8, 1867 at Chesterton, Porter Co. Indiana, died April 20, 1904 at Chester, Major Co., Okla." Photograph with written entry as found at antique store in Sonora, California. Photograph currently in possession of author until claimed by a direct descendant.