Searching for Outlaws

 

It was a long time ago when I first heard the term "outlaws" applied to relatives of relatives—a word delivered with a smile and a wink, the first time my cousin introduced me to some of his relatives who weren't exactly mine.

There's been a lot of family history that's been researched after that first discussion of "outlaws" but that cousin has never let me forget the story of his side of the family. While he has been extremely helpful with my pursuit of our mutually shared line—my paternal, his maternal—he has his own family story which spans generations and includes fascinating stories, too. In gratitude for how he has helped my research, it's only fair that I take a month to assemble and organize what I've found on his other side of the family.

The Eggert story is the story of enterprise and invention, with a unique business handed down over the generations. Sometimes, in the hearing of it, my mind tends to collapse the generations, yet another reason for getting the details down on paper. And paper it will be, for my cousin's oft-repeated request has been for me to print up a family tree so he can refer back to it in real life, rather than via a computer screen. There is just something about the tangible-ness of grasping—literally—the ins and outs of relationships, especially through multiplied generations.

For my last of the Twelve Most Wanted monthly research goals for this new year, in honor of my cousin's long-time support of my research, I'll revisit this "outlaw" line of my father's brother-in-law's ancestors from the New York City metro area.

 

Remembering Auld Acquaintance

 

While we are well into the new year—at least, past most of the celebration—I can't leave the season without remembering one sentiment oft repeated in song by people who probably don't even recognize the phrase's meaning. As I've been working my way through DNA matches lately, one connection got me to thinking about those old acquaintances—in particular, older family members I'll no longer see, who were the connecting link to other members of the extended family.

Some people jokingly call these folks "outlaws" as a abbreviated way to say relative-of-a-relative. The South apparently uses the shorthand, "kin." I'd like to borrow from this new year sentiment for my next-to-last Twelve Most Wanted target for 2022, in naming one entire family line as my focus to research next November.

The family in question is the Gramlewicz line from Żerków, Poland. True, Gramlewicz is the maiden name of my second great grandmother, wife of Mateusz Laskowski of the line I discussed yesterday. I worked on that line as one of my goals in a previous year, with disappointing results, and would like to revisit the effort again this year.

What I learned from the last time was that there actually were two different Gramlewicz lines in that tiny town for the limited time period in which I could find online records. Maybe those two lines connect further back in time. Maybe they don't. But I did see that the other line has a descendant who, as a fresh immigrant in New York City, stayed with my great-grandfather, Anton Laskowski, upon her arrival in the new country—and called him "uncle" in the first American census after her arrival.

Turns out she wasn't quite the niece that label led me to believe. Perhaps she was using the label much like our parents taught us to call their close friends—not really a relative at all, but at least a respectful way to address one's elders.

I'd like to see if I can find more on this family—and not just for this one "auld" acquaintance; there's another. That "niece" had a younger brother whose granddaughter reached out to me via email years ago. We spent some time evaluating our respective family trees, but didn't quite find the correct connection. In remembering this other "auld" acquaintance, I'd like to tackle this Gramlewicz mystery once again in the coming year. 

Sometimes, There's a Reason for Connecting

There are some times when you just need to get together with family. Sometimes, those are joyous events, like the Thanksgiving holiday we just passed, or the Christmas celebration we're looking forward to.

Other times...

I should have known that, when a distant family member wants to reconnect, it might be a gesture that comes with a reason. But, for some reason, I just don't think to prepare myself for such possibilities.

I mentioned yesterday about the missed opportunity to reconnect with a distant relative—our family facetiously calls those in-laws of in-laws "outlaws"—with whom I had lost contact. That day, thankfully, came with the chance to make up for that lost moment, if only by a long—and tearful—phone call. After my sister-in-law had died, six years ago, I lost contact with the other side of her family when they moved out of state. Her widowed husband, after several years, decided to return to California. Unfortunately, his health was ailing, and, well...eventually, that health problem caught up with him early this week.

It was his grandson who had tried to contact me the other day, and only yesterday in that phone call did I find out why. He so wants to reconnect with family, especially during this time of loss. Not knowing my address—it had been years since I had last seen him—he drove around my neighborhood until he thought he located the right house. How brave of him to leave a note on the door of a house which might—or might not—have been the right place. The last time he was here, I think he was just a kid.

Sometimes, the older generations don't see the need to talk about themselves, or about their life—which in many cases was full of hardship—or where they came from, or what kinds of experiences or even thoughts they had when they were growing up. Like many others, that was how this grandpa was to his family.

And now, he is gone. And has taken his stories with him.

Maybe.

Perhaps it was therapeutic for me, after our phone conversation came to a close, to poke around Ancestry and see if I could build this grandson a more complete sketch of his family. I spent a good part of the rest of the day doing that, when I would normally have spent a Saturday working on my own trees. So, admittedly, my own biweekly count—especially for the tree that I need to polish up before my SLIG class in January—is not as great as it could be.

In the meantime, though, I tapped into a stream of data, including multiple photographs, for this young man's grandfather's family. I had remembered enough of the names from years of phone conversations with my sister-in-law to realize I was on the right track. I'm so excited to be able to share this, when he drops by later today, with a grandson who maybe never realized this part of his grandfather's life story.

And yet, now that I've sized up my own progress for the past two weeks, I didn't do so badly, after all. I managed to add 175 names to my mother's southern lines, bringing the total on her tree to 16,051. Thanks to stumbling across an unexpected obituary on my mother-in-law's side of the family—a very distant relative in that case—I was able to add three generations of names to one branch of that line, giving me an unexpected forty three name boost to total 15,804 in that tree. Of course, the other two trees I count—my father's and my father-in-law's trees—remained the same, as my research goal until January is to focus on my mother's line.

But what drew my attention for the weekend was to work on this young man's own tree. Hopefully, by the time you read this, I'll have had the opportunity to share with my sister-in-law's grandson-by-marriage a bit of the story of his own family's experiences, at least for the last three generations. Maybe, in turn, he will be the one to help his cousins share a nearly-lost heritage with their own children.

The Final Escape

While John Hogue—if it was, indeed, our John Hogue—may have survived the blast from the 1944 mining disaster up in Shinnston, West Virginia, chances were against him for long term survival in his chosen profession. Most coal miners who survived the more immediate occupational hazards of their trade would eventually succumb, likely from a more insidious and slow-acting threat to their health, whether from Black Lung disease or from other coal mining-related respiratory diseases. Even after concerted effort to improve working conditions for coal miners later in the twentieth century, the sad statistic was that, for career coal miners working more than twenty five years, prevalence of Black Lung disease was still at thirty two percent. In John Hogue's day, it was likely worse.

While I have no way yet to determine what finally claimed the man's life, the Hogue obituary, published in the Charleston Daily Mail on August 16, 1956, mentioned he died at his home—then in Ridgeview, just south of Charleston—"after a long illness."

Perhaps, given John Hogue's life story, for him to have attained the age of seventy one may have been considered sufficient. Remembering he, at one point, was not slated to have lived beyond his thirties, it may have been an outright blessing. Added to the hazards of his most recent occupation would have been the baggage of a fugitive's lifestyle and youthful indiscretions with unnamed addictive substances, all potentially detrimental to one's lifespan.

Whether seventy one—or ninety one—it is never enough for the one who is living it. Nor is it sufficient for the family members that person leaves behind. In Hogue's case, considering his 1940 marriage, you know he had to have left a young wife, and possibly also children. That, in fact, was confirmed in his obituary, noting three daughters, "all at home."

Left behind, in addition to his immediate family, was his brother Andrew, who with his wife had moved from the Hogues' hometown of Charleston to Beckley. Another brother, a military man then living in southern California, and a married sister still in Charleston, also survived him. Both his half-brothers and his unmarried half-sister from his mother's first marriage were all gone now.

With his late-life marriage and his children still living at home in the mid 1950s, the likelihood of that next generation still being with us—somewhere—sets me wondering. Do those children even know about the tumultuous past of their father? Was that reprieve and narrow escape from dying the death of a condemned man now a family legacy to be passed down through the generations? Or, like many men of that era, did John Hogue simply put all that unfortunate experience behind him—and behind the closed lips of family members who would prefer not to relive the trauma by repeating the tale?

Then, too, with a story so unusual, so incredible, I feel the pull to pursue additional contemporaneous documentation to glean every detail of the full story. Some of that would entail pulling records from archives in Manitoba and Ontario, as well as stateside in West Virginia. And, as the story itself became embedded within a larger social context of not only fading public support for capital punishment, but the escalation of concurrent war-time involvement both in Canada and the United States, it would reflect the interwoven aspects of such impacts as these.

The tragedy of the rise and fall of dynasties is usually reserved for the sagas of the famous and the powerful, but in an ancestral trajectory that arced with the pinnacle of America's first Supreme Court Chief Justice and maintained its dignity through the respected men and women taking their place in the subsequent generations of the Hogue and Patrick families, the same dynamics play themselves out in the microcosm of John Syme Hogue's lifespan. As much as he descended from a "well respected" and "long prominent" family in the Kanawha Valley region, the final token representing his life remembered was nothing more than a humble stone marking his existence in the family plot back home in Charleston. From the looks of it, one would never have guessed what that dash between the 1885 and the 1956 entailed.

Above: Photograph of the stone marking the grave of John Syme Hogue at Spring Hill Cemetery in Charleston, West Virginia. Photograph courtesy of Find A Grave volunteer Pj; used by permission.

Relatively Well Off

When Judge North of the Calhoun County, Michigan, Circuit Court sentenced John Hogue on the morning of April 22, 1926, that was the last that was heard in the newspapers of Hogue's fate for quite a while. Though he had been accused of committing the same crime in Madison, Wisconsin, as he had in Battle Creek, Michigan, try as I might, I could locate no further mention in newspapers archived from Madison for the next two years.

That said, do we presume Hogue was free to return home, once he completed his term at the Jackson Prison in Michigan? And if so, what was he to expect, once he materialized after a more than ten year hiatus while engaged in the kind of escapades that would reduce a mother to tears?

Granted, the Marshall Evening Chronicle, at the beginning of Hogue's court hearing in April, had included a parenthetical mention that his parents were "well to do." But just how well were they doing at this point? Back at the stage of the urgent pleading for his life when Hogue was facing the gallows in Windsor, Ontario, a West Virginian newspaper had noted on May 10, 1917,

Hogue's parents are poor but respected residents of Charleston.

Still, that same paper, The Fairmont West Virginian, had earlier put it that Hogue's parents "are well known and respected residents," a somehow different spin than "poor but respected."

That was how the paper put it on May 2. Two days later, the elder Hogues' financial standing was elevated to "one of the leading families of the Kanawha Valley" and

at one time owned considerable property in and about Charleston.

Perhaps the Hogue family fortunes fluctuated, depending on editorial slant—or who was on board to save John Hogue at the moment.

That was back in 1917, that frightful moment when Hogue was about to face the conclusion of the matter in the shooting of a Canadian immigration officer. Now, after serving at least ten months of a year's prison term in Michigan for prior crimes committed there over a decade before, one can presume he was simply released on parole and permitted to return to his home state of West Virginia. What was he about to find there?

It might be reasonable to assume that a homecoming might be an awkward proposition. One wonders what he might find after his embarrassing absence. Still, despite what he had done in those ten-plus years, his return was more likely to be after the manner of a prodigal than an outcast.

For one thing, remember that his younger brother had been the driving force behind his rescue from the gallows. Even in Michigan, a Marshall Evening Chronicle report provided the clue that Andrew Hogue was still very much involved in his wayward brother's well-being.

Andrew Hogue of Charleston, West Va., was here today to see his brother, John Hogue, at the jail. The latter is the man brot [sic] back from Windsor, after serving nine years for murder in Canada on a charge of robbery in Battle Creek.

The awkwardness of showing up on his doorstep, back in Charleston, would have been somewhat defused by the conciliatory gestures extended by his gracious brother, no doubt. But what about the rest of the family?

With the difficulty of obtaining issues online of the local newspaper in Charleston from that time period, it is hard to gauge the reception John Hogue might have received upon his arrival home.

One thing was certain, though: there was one member of his family he would never see again. If information given on Find A Grave is correct (and sometimes there are mistakes provided on some memorials), John's sixty seven year old father—the man for whom he had been named—made it just long enough to learn that his son's life had been spared, but not long enough for the wayward child to have returned home. John Syme Hogue senior apparently passed away in Charleston on September 16, 1917.

Perhaps the elder Hogue's demise partially explains those family descriptions as "poor but respected." It would be unbearable to think that his son's escapades had contributed to his relatively early death. Then again, about the only mentions of the Hogue family I could find—other than the news of the John Hogue court case—were often linked to sales of property on the steps of the county courthouse. These, likely, provide the back story to The Fairmont West Virginian's characterization of the family as "at one time" owning "considerable property" in the Charleston area. Though possible loss of his son likely weighed heavily on the elder John Hogue, it seems it may have come on the heels of bad news of an entirely different type.

 

Life on the Installment Plan

Just think of this as the story of one man's life sentence on the installment plan.

John Hogue, the convicted murderer in Ontario whose life was spared in an eleventh-hour reprieve by the Canadian government, may have seen his life sentence in Canada eventually reduced to a mere ten years, but that wasn't the end of his debt to society. Apparently, there were more charges to face.

Battle Creek, Michigan, for instance, wasn't about to give up on seeing justice served in the March, 1916, safe-cracking case at the Arthur B. Mitchell Billiard Hall—although authorities even ten years later still insisted that the crook's real name was James Gordon. That little event had netted John Hogue a cool $422 on his way to Winnipeg, Manitoba.

Back in 1916, it was Battle Creek's detective G. W. Colby who, in vain, had chased the suspect all the way to Toledo, Ohio, only to find he had just been released after questioning by authorities there. Now, on April 1, 1926, it was Sheriff G. W. Colby, accompanied by Calhoun County prosecutor Cortwright, who finally got his man when he traveled to Detroit to meet up with the Ontario provincial police escorting Hogue across the border. A lot had happened back in Michigan since Hogue last blew through town.

Marshall, the county seat of Calhoun County, in which Battle Creek was situated, was the scene of the trial in circuit court the morning of April 22. Since officials at the Kingston penitentiary where Hogue had been incarcerated in Canada had reported that he had been "a model prisoner," perhaps he had shown some signs of reform. In his own mind, apparently, he believed himself to be a much different man than the one who had last darkened the doors of Battle Creek, for in this case, he had "hoped for release on probation."

Authorities in Calhoun County saw otherwise for, according to that day's Marshall Evening Chronicle, Hogue was duly reminded that

the crime for which he stood charged in Calhoun County is a serious one.

Somehow, the incongruity of all that had transpired in the past ten years of Hogue's life suddenly slapped me in the face. Here, after narrowly escaping the death sentence for murder, the man has been retrieved to stand trial for a theft of less than five hundred dollars—admittedly of much more worth then than it is today, but still of no comparison to the value of a life lost—and the court chooses to remind him that the crime "is a serious one."

In the end, the judge turned out to be quite lenient, even in this "serious" case. He chose to give the minimum sentence—one year—and then was quoted in the newspaper as commenting,

With your good time you'll have to serve only about ten months. Furthermore I am going to recommend that when you are released on parole that you may live outside the state.

That, essentially, provided the green light, after serving his sentence, for Hogue to return home to live near his parents in West Virginia, "who are well to do."

What a fortunate turn of events and best-hoped-for outcome for Hogue—except for one thing. According to The Escanaba Daily Press—that spot as far away from Battle Creek as one could get and still be in Michigan—their April 1, 1926 report mentioned one other point of business:

A message today was received from Sheriff Thomas Shaugancy [sic] of Madison, Wis., indicating Stewart or Hogue is wanted there for blowing two safes in February, 1916.

If Michigan never forgets the wrongs committed against them, why would Wisconsin?

Still Stewart in Their Book

James Stewart, alias James Gordon, alias James Andrews, alias John Hogue, safe blower of a decade ago and convicted murderer...

So went the opener of yet another newspaper article on the still-unfolding saga of John Hogue—this one from the Escanaba Daily Press of April 1, 1926. Though Escanaba is about as far away from Battle Creek as you can get and still be in Michigan, its interest in the Hogue case—or the Stewart case, as they still presumed—revealed just how intent the people of Michigan were in seeing that the man, whoever he was, pay his debt to society for crimes committed in Battle Creek a full ten years beforehand.

If you thought Hogue was still sitting in a cell at the Kingston Penitentiary in Ontario, you and I both missed something. Embedded within the lead to another Michigan newspaper's coverage of the 1926 chapter of the unfolding Hogue story—this time, from the Marshall Evening Chronicle on April 22—was this surprise:

John Hogue, who stood in the shadow of the gallows, and who at the last moment secured a commutation of sentence to life and later to ten years....

Somehow, I missed that last detail. To ten years? How did that happen?

Knowing that I could find all the Essex area newspapers from that time period in Ontario online, I tried in vain to locate any mention of that latest change in sentence.

Lest you assume this Hogue fellow lived a charmed life, think again. Apparently, not even he knew about the surprise in store for him upon his release from prison that year. Back in Manitoba—a place full of people who also had a vested interest in watching Hogue's every move—the Brandon Daily Sun noted on April 8, complete with the usual litany of aliases,

John Hogue, alias James Steward, alias James Gordon, pardoned murderer from Kingston, Ont., penitentiary, professed complete astonishment when turned over to Battle Creek police by Ontario officers. The transfer was made on a Detroit-bound car ferry from Windsor. Hogue declared his rearrest an unexpected and unpleasant development.

Of course, if he had been reading the Escanaba Daily Press, it wouldn't have been such a surprise to him, since back on April 1, the headline there had announced the plans, "Paroler will be arrested."

The Marshall Evening Chronicle provided the explanation for this abrupt change in plans: Hogue was charged with burglarizing a Battle Creek pool hall ten years prior. Being the county seat of Calhoun County in which Battle Creek was located, Marshall, Michigan, would be the location of the newspaper of record for that county's proceedings, and was likely keen to get the scoop on any reports concerning the long-awaited suspect Stewart, er, Gordon, er, Hogue. Once again, John Hogue would be getting his day in court—whether he wanted it or not.

 

Puzzling Over an Editorial Device

Delving into newspaper archives can be a great way to gain insight into the story behind the stories in a given ancestor's life—as long as you pick up the knack of reading between the lines. Still, there may be pitfalls in that approach.

That certainly turned out to be the case in pursuit of the psyche comprising one John Hogue, the man we now know as one of Canada's convicted murderers during those tumultuous years during World War I. Possibly displaced as prime headline in a news vortex that sucked national attention away to far distant current events across the Atlantic, the story of John Hogue's narrowly missing a fate of swinging on the gallows in Ontario dropped off the radar at about the time news reached home about the devastating casualties just sustained at Vimy Ridge.

Still, before that point, there was much to glean from the newspapers, and I've trawled through every report I could find. One, in particular, I want to revisit now as an example of how that hope of analyzing one's family history subject may sometimes backfire on a researcher.

This particular report on John Hogue appeared in the Brandon Daily Sun, a newspaper back in Manitoba, where Hogue had begun his long deportation journey in early 1917, and from which he had just completed a three month jail sentence. The article was datelined "Windsor, Ont., Feb. 13," shortly after Hogue had shot a Dominion immigration official in Ontario, in the course of attempting an escape.

The setting for the news story was the Windsor jail, where Hogue was being held for trial, scheduled for early March. Undoubtedly, thoughts uppermost on his mind would have been the very real possibility of a death sentence, and how that likelihood would spin out in his various relationships.

That, at least, was how I presumed it might have been. Reviewing the article now and giving it a second thought, I'm not sure it provides the same glimpse into his psyche as one might have presumed—a little fact checking persuaded me to think differently about the man's current state of mind, at least at that point.

Let's take a look at the article, and then I'll explain what I mean. From the page five article, under the title, "Alleged Murderer Disposed of Property":

James Steward, alias Wm. Anderson, alleged murderer of Marshall Jackson, of Winnipeg, who will stand trial in March, has disposed of all his earthly possessions. He has willed his diamond scarf pin to a sister, Margaret Ashworth of Evansville, Ohio; a small savings bank account deposited in a Des Moines, Iowa, bank, to another sister, of Travers City, Mich.; a valuable traveling clock to Inspector of Police Mortimer Wigle, of Windsor; a rain coat to Fred Steward, his night guard at Sandwich jail.

In addition to questions about implications for professional ethics in regard to the last two bequests, it turned out there were other doubtful details about the revelation of this criminal's first installment on last wishes.

On its face, this appears to be a wonderful opportunity to confirm this man's family circle—but if you thought that at first glance, think again. Remember, this is the man whom people were led to believe was named something other than his true identity; what makes us think he would correctly name either of the two sisters he had mentioned?

But let's, for a moment, give him the benefit of the doubt. Since we already know his true identity as John Hogue of Charleston, West Virginia, we can take a look at his family tree. As it turns out, he did have two sisters. Well, amend that: because his mother had been married twice, he had an older half-sister as well as a younger sister. However—and I know this won't come as a surprise to you now—neither of those sisters was named Margaret, let alone Ashworth. Plus, each of his sisters spent their entire lives in their hometown, back in West Virginia, not in Evansville, Ohio, or Travers City, Michigan.

Come to think of it, there isn't even any such place as Evansville, Ohio—not according to Google Maps or any Internet search. (Well, there was one result that came up on MapQuest, north of the point on eastbound Interstate 80, just before the split with Interstate 680, approaching Youngstown. But I couldn't replicate that information anywhere else.) Evansville, Indiana, yes (on the Ohio River, even); but not in Ohio. Perhaps our traveling yeggman had gotten his directions wrong.

But let's assume, for a moment, that this Margaret Ashworth was a real person. Was there anyone by such a name anywhere in Ohio close to that time period? As it turns out, there were no results on Ancestry.com for such a name in the 1920 census—but there was someone by that name in Youngstown in the 1930 census. Could that be some sort of clue?

Why did the article name one sister, but not the other? Why, indeed, did the paper include the name of a city that didn't even exist? Were these just editorial mistakes? Or can we even believe that the man had family scattered over all the midwestern United States—and bank accounts, too? Why would the newspaper's readership even care what an alleged murderer's possessions consisted of—or where they were bound after his demise?

Whether an editorial ploy or manipulative move on the part of Hogue, himself, this little display of histrionics tended to make me less sympathetic to his cause. It hatched all sorts of unanswerable questions, foremost among them considerations of the psychological aspects they might be revealing. Was this Hogue, attempting with pathos to sway the public (or at least the potential jurors), or was it simply reformist agitators seeking to disrupt the traditions of Canadian jurisprudence with a change in public sentiment?

Above all, hadn't anyone thought of the implication of such a statement before a verdict could even be reached in Hogue's court case? Why give away all one's "earthly possessions" before judgment has been pronounced? Wouldn't that have been considered an admission of guilt?

This type of agonizing over past newspaper reports may well be beyond the purview of what is meant by an "exhaustive search" for genealogical answers. To sort it all out, I'll likely resort to transcribing each of the many newspaper articles I've found, arrange them in date order, and set them aside to gel for a while before picking them back up for a final review. Sometimes, my brain needs a respite like that.

A story like this comes with baggage—a lot of context which simply can't be ignored. Although we'll need to revisit just one more stop along the way to John Hogue's commutation of execution to a life sentence, after that, it will be time to move along to the next episode in his story. You know this story couldn't just stop there.   
 

News of Friends and Associates

When researching the history of a man prone to changing his alias as many times as he slips across state borders, it becomes necessary to have other devices to help keep track of his whereabouts. Tracking John Hogue through the years of 1916 and 1917 from his birthplace in West Virginia to his alleged residence in Cincinnati to his various escapades in the midwestern United States and Canada seemed convoluted enough, but when newspaper reports failed to point the way, I often searched under his aliases. Sometimes, though, even they lost me.

Though the search for John Hogue's whereabouts started out as a genealogical pursuit, it certainly turned out to be much more than I bargained for. Still, I've found it helpful to take my cue from internationally-respected genealogist Elizabeth Shown Mills and her research tip to consider the "FAN Club" of the target person being researched. While that "FAN" originally referred to "family, associates and neighbors," with John Hogue essentially leaving his family behind in Charleston, I've taken to substituting that "Family" with "Friends."

Well, perhaps "friends" is too liberal an application. It might be more apropos to Hogue's situation to consider these people I've been tracing as associates. No matter which way they are classified, they help me reconstitute his story through the technique of cluster research, a concept well described by attorney and genealogy blogger James Tanner. (While his example demonstrates an application to geographical instances, my pursuit is more of a sociological exploration.)

As the newspapers of the various locales concerned with the disposition of Hogue's case in 1917 kept churning out headlines and (sometimes erroneous) narratives, I've been on a seemingly never-ending quest to catch up with all the reportage. I ran across a blurb, dated shortly after the commutation of John Hogue's sentence that May, revealing a glimpse of just what he might still have been doing, had he not been detained for that fateful deportation after serving the three month term in Winnipeg.

Recall that John Hogue, in Winnipeg, had been arrested and tried as one William Anderson, along with his accomplice, said to be named "Sheeney" Holmes. Together, they had been in the process of blowing open a safe at the Robinson and Company departmental store in town. That was back in October, 1916.

By June, 1917, while Hogue—a.k.a. William Anderson in Winnipeg—was being transported to the Kingston Penitentiary in Ontario to serve a life sentence, his buddy Holmes was apparently still hard at work, back in Manitoba. This time, the scene of the crime was Portage la Prairie—nowadays, a mere one hour's drive west on the Trans-Canada Highway from Winnipeg. The June 11, 1917, Winnipeg Free Press carried the story under the tag line, "Suspected Yeggmen Arrested."

Of course, we've already learned what "yeggmen" are. But it was interesting to note what local journalists had not yet learned about what to call one of Holmes' other associates.

Among the three men arrested as yeggmen at Portage la Prairie Wednesday is "Sheeney" Holmes, according to an announcement made on Saturday by the Pinkerton's agency of Winnipeg. Holmes was a pal of William Anderson, now serving a life term for the murder of Detective Marshall Jackson. Both men served a jail term in Winnipeg, and were deported.

Well, perhaps "Anderson" was deported. Evidently, Holmes had still been left at large to do more damage. Not surprisingly, John Hogue's associate had learned one of the basics of his trade: always travel with an alias. The newspaper article noted Holmes' reinvented self:

Holmes gave his name at Portage as J. C. Little.

One had to wonder: if John Hogue had not been deported, what would he have been up to, at that point? Likely, moving on down the road to the next likely target.

As to the other players in John Hogue's universe of friends, associates and family, it was often difficult to trace this with certainty. Even when a story seemed to provide a solid clue, often the name proved a false lead, as we'll see tomorrow with another part of this episode in the Hogue saga.    

Life, Death, and the Big Picture

It's the beginning of May, 1917. What do you think is uppermost on the minds of most Canadians at that time? Certainly not the botched murder trial of John Hogue in Windsor, Ontario. There were many more earth-shattering headlines grabbing national attention.

Prime spot on national news coverage at the beginning of that month went to one item: the recent developments in the World War. Though the aggressions had begun back in 1914, and though Canada—as a British dominion—had conjointly become involved at that point when Britain had declared war on Germany on August 4, 1914, it wasn't until April 9, 1917 when all four of Canada's military divisions in Europe were engaged as a unified corps in one battle. That event was the Battle of Vimy Ridge.

By nightfall on April 12, 1917, the Canadian corps was in control of the ridge, but at the cost of nearly thirty six hundred killed and seven thousand wounded.

News of the losses began trickling back home by the end of April. In the May 4 edition of The Essex Free Press—only one column to the right of the blurb on the petition-gathering drive on behalf of John Hogue—the shocking revelation of losses began to hit the public.

Almost all of those given as killed in action are dated April 9th, the first day of the big fight. To-day's list brings the total casualties announced since that date to 10,064.

Do you think, in the face of that, there would be much attention given to John Hogue's predicament?

In such a context as this, it makes the American conjecture of just what the West Virginia governor did to secure agreement in Hogue's case a more uncomfortable premise. From The Fairmont West Virginian on May 10, 1917, the very day of Hogue's scheduled execution:

Ex-Governor MacCorkle interested himself in the case, and it was through him that the congressional appeal which proved so effective was made.... Hogue undoubtedly owes the commutation of his life to the argument made by each of the West Virginia congressmen, which was that hanging him at this time might be used in West Virginia to stir up feeling against Great Britain and interfere with enlistment.

Unlike Canada, the United States hadn't embroiled itself in the war until the very month in which Canada had suffered such losses at Vimy Ridge. Indeed, the new governor of West Virginia did take on a significant role in encouraging enlistment, once America took its stand on the war.

Still, knowing the bigger picture, both in West Virginia and in Canada, it made the Fairmont reportage seem even more smug as it continued,

That argument proved a convincing one to the Governor General of Canada evidently, and proved it very promptly, for the commutation of the death sentence must have been ordered within a few hours after the receipt in Canada of the letters of appeal sent there by the West Virginia congressmen.

No matter what the reason behind the granting of clemency, one point remained: John Hogue was still a prisoner in a place not only far from home, but in an entirely different country. And he was bound to remain there for the rest of his life.

At least, that is how it seemed at the conclusion of the episode in May. There was, however, this nagging demand for justice still waiting to be resolved in Michigan...  

Life After Death Sentence

Though convicted murderer John Hogue's life was spared when numerous Canadian and American officials interceded on his behalf, he was by no means free. His was merely an exchange of execution on the gallows in the courtyard of the Sandwich jail near Windsor, Ontario, for a life sentence in prison.

Hogue's eleventh-hour reprieve arrived only days before his scheduled May 10, 1917, hanging. With the final plea having been made on May 2, the reply arrived—in the form of a brief telegram—on the evening of May 4,

word being received last Friday evening by Governor Wanless of the Sandwich jail that Hon. C. H. Doherty, minister of justice, had commuted the death penalty to life imprisonment in Kingston Penitentiary.

How did John Hogue receive the news? According to The Essex Free Press on May 11, 1917,

News that he had been saved from death on the gallows was taken to Hogue shortly after the condemned man had finished a hearty supper. He received it calmly, but after being returned to his cell talked feverishly to the guards, expressing gratitude to those who had saved him.

No explanation for the decision accompanied the message. That, however, was not to say that others weren't willing to jump in and fill in the void of that official silence. Back home in West Virginia, a newspaper in the city of Fairmont provided a glimpse at one claim—an explanation that took into account yet another overarching news trend eclipsing the minutiae of Hogue's personal trial.

Above: Aerial view of the Kingston Penitentiary, taken circa 1919 by the Bishop Barker Company. Photo courtesy of Canada Patent and Copyright, Library and Archives Canada, PA-030472, online MIKAN no. 3259972; copyright expired.

Who Pleads for Hogue?

It is understandable that the family of a condemned murderer might wish that his life be spared. If that family had the means, it would be just as plausible that they would obtain whatever goodwill they could recruit in effecting any clemency. And that they did, from the far-removed distance of West Virginia, reaching across the international boundary to the domain of the Canadian province of Ontario, in an attempt to spare the life of John Hogue before his scheduled execution on May 10, 1917.

Not as understandable was the effort put forth by the people in the very city in which the case was tried: the city of Windsor. Yet that is apparently what happened, beginning with a petition placed in circulation in late April, 1917. Addressed to the Honorable C. J. Doherty, minister of justice, the instrument was "seeking executive clemency" in the case of John Hogue, convicted earlier in March for the murder of the Canadian deportation officer escorting him to stand trial in Michigan on charges of safe blowing.

By this time, the appellate division of the Ontario Supreme Court at Toronto had already denied the appeal made on behalf of Hogue. According to the April 27 edition of The Essex Free Press, the "efforts to save John Hogue" were then taken up when

Adjutant Squarebriggs, officer commanding the Windsor corps of the Salvation Army, placed a petition in circulation last week.

From the opposite direction, action was being taken at home as well.

William E. Chilton, member of the United States senate for West Virginia, has addressed a letter to Hon. C. J. Doherty of Ottawa, minister of justice, in which he vouches for the high citizenship of Hogue's family, and expresses his belief that John Hogue did not shoot intentionally.

Theirs were not the only pleas. According to a later edition of The Essex Free Press, "numerous petitions had been sent to Ottawa by Canadian and United States citizens." In addition,

The governor of West Virginia, where Hogue was born, and other prominent men of the Southern States also interceded at Ottawa.

Despite such widespread support for John Hogue's plea for clemency, don't let yourself be persuaded that his reprieve was merely a token bestowed upon the privileged class. During the time in which Hogue was apprehended, charged, tried and sentenced, Canada was undergoing a concurrent reformist thrust which decried capital punishment in general. Associations like National Prison Reform Association—two years after Hogue's trial to become the Canadian Prisoners' Welfare Association—boasted the effective leadership of statesmen such as Robert Bickerdike, MP, who introduced bills to replace the death penalty with a life sentence, the very proposal made in Hogue's case during that same time period.

Whether the petitions in Hogue's case carried many signatures or few, whether the political clout of the American politicians was impressive or inadequate, it is likely that the predominant voice in the struggle was actually that of the Canadian reformists calling for a sea change in their overarching administration of justice.  

 

Life — According to the Locals

The uproar of chasing a fugitive—murderer, at that—who remained at large for upwards of forty eight hours certainly was news consumed voraciously by the populace back in Michigan and Wisconsin (scene of several crimes attributed to John Hogue) and Manitoba (site of his previous arrest and home of the deportation officer he had just killed). Each of those locales obviously had their own agenda in following the reports of Hogue's trial and sentencing.

But what about Essex County, Ontario—the very place where all this drama unfolded in late January, 1917? The two subscription sites from which I had gleaned these other news reports unfortunately did not include editions from any location in Essex County, thus leaving a rather significant gap in our survey of unfolding events.

Fortunately, I recalled a way around this dilemma. Those of you who have been journeying along with A Family Tapestry for a few years might have had your memory jogged by mention of that location, too. Though not having anything to do with this family line, we had spent some time on Essex County news when one of my husband's distant Flannery cousins from Paris, Ontario, had shown up in the news in that county in Ontario.

It was thanks to reader Intense Guy that I had become acquainted with a newspaper scanning project initiated in Essex County a while back. He had mentioned it in a comment when we were discussing the fate of one Patrick Flannery. Though that site has now transferred its original scans to a different URL, the good news is that, in the process, the site has uploaded numerous other news publications from the county as well.

Taking a look at the current files, I've been able to get an earful of local editorial commentary on the case as it unfolded.

From The Essex Free Press of May 4, 1917, in an editorial collection of shorts dubbed "Twinklers," an unnamed staffer noted,

A petition has been signed by a large number of people in Windsor on behalf of John Hogue, alias Stewart, who shot the immigration officer some time ago. At the first thought, we would be pleased to append our names, but when we remember that, if he had had half a chance, he would have shot the officers that arrested him, we are compelled to shrug our shoulders and remark, that after all the kindness shown him, to commit a deliberate murder, the scaffold is the only humane punishment for him.

A level-headed analysis was provided in a column simply labeled "County News" in the same edition of The Essex Free Press, explaining the order of events leading up to Hogue's eleventh-hour reprieve. The request had been made to consider either a new trial or at least a commutation of sentence to life imprisonment.

"In the event that an error is found in the charge" of the presiding judge in his instructions to the jury, which apparently "did not fully understand the law as it was explained to them," it was hoped the powers that be would reverse course. To bolster that argument, the newspaper included a review of pertinent facts:

Three affidavits from jurors to that effect have been obtained by the condemned man's counsel.

In addition,

The crown is also charged with failure to produce...two material witnesses, members of the colored construction battalion, which was in Windsor at the time of the slaying. Their evidence, counsel maintains, would have proven that Hogue did not intend to kill Immigration Officer Marshall Jackson.

Unfortunately, there was no mention of just what evidence those witnesses might have provided.

Though it is understandable that those Hogue had wronged back in Michigan and Wisconsin were vocal in their demands for justice, and those in Manitoba were aggrieved at the loss of a local officer and family man, it seemed counter-intuitive to read that a good number of local residents at ground zero for this latest in Hogue's escapades would plead for clemency on his behalf. However, as we'll see tomorrow, there was a vocal chorus raised not only among those back in his hometown in West Virginia, but there in his most recent stop in Canada, as well.

 

A Yegg's Change of Fate

With the decision of the appellate court, Hogue's last chance to escape hanging on May 10 disappears.

A death watch had been set outside the door of the jail cell housing John Syme Hogue, the American accused of murdering the Canadian deportation officer charged with returning him from Winnipeg to stand trial in Michigan. The despondent criminal had given signs of suicidal tendencies—not surprising, considering he had just been sentenced to die on the gallows on May 10, 1917.

An appeal had been made by his attorney, Windsor barrister F. C. Kerby, immediately following the March 7 trial and sentencing. In the meantime, newspapers on both sides of the international border had been churning out sensational headlines—rhetoric more likely to distribute copies than confirmation of the actual events.

"Captured after a sensational struggle," trumpeted one report from one Michigan newspaper, the Jackson Citizen Patriot, even though it turned out that Hogue couldn't even get his gun to fire when police kicked in the door to his hotel room in Windsor, Ontario.

"Gunman, safe blower, dope fiend and nationally known American crook," gloated the Kalamazoo Gazette just after the verdict had been returned on Hogue's case.

"Death Penalty for Yegg Who Slew Officer" headlined yet another newspaper—the Muskegon Chronicle—following the fate of the convicted killer.

Yegg?

I had to check this one out. Surely, I thought, that was some sort of Canadian slang of the era—until I realized this was a Michigan newspaper's editorial flourish.

Google to the rescue. Wherever the term originated, "yegg" quite handily described the man, according to an updated edition of a 1949 book, A Dictionary of the Underworld. According to author Eric Partridge, a "yegg" is a professional "safe-blower."

That, indeed, was the essence of Hogue's occupation—at least, that is, according to the newspaper reports littering his already-escaped path through mid-western United States and Canada. What makes the book seem a handy reference is the author's extensive listing of support for definitions provided—a bibliographical listing of resources upon which he developed his specialized lexicon.

Whether meant to be a slur or merely statement of fact, use of the term in the era's journalistic coverage of the event only seemed to add fire to the furor.

It seems incredible to think, in the midst of this local uproar, that the brother of the condemned could consider it plausible to step in and snatch the man from his destiny. And yet, despite the original denial of Barrister Kerby's appeal, that is what Andrew Hogue did—with the assistance of key personnel, of course. Andrew Hogue enlisted the help of the newly-elected governor of his home state, West Virginia's Governor John J. Cornwell.

Why this choice would seem to this concerned brother to be an effective tool in securing the release of a condemned criminal, I'm not sure. I thought of every link possible. Family member? Business associate? Political payback?

Though the Cornwell lineage includes a mother whose maiden name was Taylor—a name also figuring in my extended family tree—I could find no immediate familial connections between the Hogue family and that of the governor. Though formerly a newspaper publisher and editor, the new governor, having just assumed office that March, 1917, had yet to establish his political reputation. He was eventually to be known for his positive role in education, mining safety, public safety, and even in raising the highest percentage of volunteers per state to serve at the start of World War I. Still, the down side of his term of office—and likely an instigating factor in limiting his tenure to one term—became his botched handling of unfulfilled promises to labor interests in the state's coal mining industry.

That, however, all came after whatever kindness he showed to the pleading Andrew Hogue on behalf of his wayward brother. Though Andrew Hogue was, himself, a civil engineer and, coincidentally, owner of a coal mine, at the beginning of the governor's term it was too early to determine what political favors the governor might have been seeking in return for his help in extracting Andrew's brother from his fate.

Newspaper reports never revealed what, exactly, the new governor might have done on behalf of John Hogue. Of course, a serious research trip to trawl through the holdings at the West Virginia state archives might reveal correspondence concerning the matter. That will have to wait for another season.

One thing became quite clear, though. Only days before Hogue's sentence was to be carried out, in a small—and understated—entry datelined Detroit, May 5, an announcement reversing course was made. Buried discreetly on page fourteen of the Muskegon Chronicle, the article explained,

The sentence of death by hanging imposed at Windsor on John Hogue...was commuted late yesterday to life imprisonment. The commutation was granted by the Canadian minister of justice at Ottawa.

And that was it. No mention of how that change of fate came to be. No names dropped, of course—that would be impolitic at a time like this. But with whatever influence tipped the hand of the powers that be—though still sentenced to a life behind bars—in a last minute maneuver, John Hogue was spared his life.

If you think the story of John Hogue—alias James Stewart, Gordon, Andrews or Anderson—has reached its last chapter, though, think again. Those newspapers in Michigan weren't fomenting such a furor for nothing. There was yet another debt to repay to society, and those Michigan editors were keen to see it paid in full.      

Bolstering a Brother's Poor Alibi

Brothers have been known to be the best of friends—and sometimes the worst of enemies. The bond of brotherhood may run the gamut of human emotions, but no matter where it falls on the scale, it comes with the mark of a singular relationship.

Before the start of 1917, there were no clues to indicate the strength of the familial relationship between John Syme Hogue and his younger brother, Andrew. With John born in 1885 and his brother following almost exactly two years later in 1887, they were close enough in age to have shared many of the same experiences in their growing-up years. Whether those experiences brought the proverbial closeness of brotherhood, or the bitternesses of animosity or jealousy, it is hard to tell.

By the time John turned thirty two, however, his life choices presented an opportunity for his brother to demonstrate what might generally be called brotherly love. Having been arrested on charges of murder, John Hogue stood trial near the scene of the alleged crime in Essex County, Ontario. The verdict of that March 7, 1917, jury trial demanded that he be sentenced to die on the gallows.

The trial process seemed to have its problems from the start, based on the various reports provided in newspapers throughout Michigan—keenly vested in the outcome for the suspect who was on his way to be returned stateside to stand trial there for other charges—and also in the province of Manitoba, starting point for Hogue's doomed extradition. In today's world of instantaneous news and in his home country, Hogue's trial likely would have seen a change of venue, due to the uproar caused by the search for the fugitive, but not so in 1917 at the scene of his crime near Windsor in Essex County, Ontario.

Even before the actual start of the trial, a Michigan paper, The Muskegon Chronicle, pointed out one clue for the faltering court case in its March 6 edition. Apparently, "Detroit friends of Hogue" had retained a Windsor barrister to represent John, who subsequently had entered a "plea that he had not been able to acquaint himself with the details at the preliminary hearing." Upon this request, the judge had allowed him just one additional day for his preparations.

Once at trial, the case took only one day to be heard. Small details gathered from different newspaper accounts give a glimpse at the case being stitched together by the rushed barrister. Hogue, himself, had insisted that the gun used had been unexpectedly hair trigger—a detail considered a "poor alibi" early on by the Jackson Citizen Patriot, also reporting from Michigan—and that, in his anxiety to escape, he had touched the trigger harder than he had meant.

Other details seeped out in reports. The Bay City Times mentioned an exchange with a witness to the murder, who during the trial insisted that "the prisoner was deliberate in his movements" when he killed the immigration officer escorting him back to Michigan. During cross examination, the witness was asked whether he thought "a lurch of the train caused Hogue to pull the trigger," and whether, at the scene of the crime, he had heard Hogue say, "I'm sorry, I didn't intend to do that." As incredibly Victorian as that latter question may have painted the suspect, both questions do introduce doubt as to what, exactly, happened during that precise moment in which Hogue initiated his getaway.

If the suspect had been tried back in his own country, the usual procedure employed might be to instruct the jury in the concept "beyond a reasonable doubt." Indeed, the very reason the barrister appealed the verdict immediately after the trial was for a similar statement: that the presiding justice "erred in failing to instruct the jury in detail on the meaning of the term, 'culpable homicide.'"

Now, I'm no attorney—nor do I play one on TV—but once I ran across that term, I had to look up its definition. A quick sketch can be gleaned from Wikipedia entries, which explain that, in Canada, the term is used to define criminal intent of a killing, and the jury must be satisfied the accused was a substantial cause of the victim's death.

While it may have been "Detroit friends of Hogue" who had initiated the move to obtain suitable legal defense for John Hogue, perhaps this is where the saga of brothers comes to center stage to pick up the tale. A March 25 report was circulating that, rather than request a retrial, Andrew Hogue, John's brother, was seeking to have "a new trial granted." For this, he had enlisted the support of his home state's newly-elected governor, Democrat John J. Cornwell, in the same month in which he took office for his one term. Why Andrew had chosen this approach—or how he had obtained such connections as to personally obtain the assistance of the chief executive of his state's government—I have yet to uncover. But by the end of March, John's brother was seeking a way to redirect the inevitable.

Regardless of whatever alternate scenario the barrister had been attempting to paint for his audience that March day in court and through his subsequent appeal to Toronto, it did not effectively sway them. The bad news soon returned. Various newspapers in Michigan in April reported that the appellate court of Toronto refused the appeal. The sentence was to be carried out on May 10.
 

   

Questions Genealogists Ask Themselves

If you've been busily engaged, looking up all the details on your ancestors, you may find yourself asking only the most basic of questions—sort of like the who, what, where, and when of the proverbial newspaperman. Just the facts, ma'am.

When the stories get messy, however, the questions move from the realm of the academic to a more gut level response:

• "They did what?!"
• "What were they thinking?"

With civil engineer John Syme Hogue's story, questions took that latter left turn for me. Yes, indeed, he was a civil engineer, according to an early Michigan marriage record I found for him, dated November 27, 1915—although from accounts of his early activities, his was an engineering application of a less-civil sort.

Going back over John Hogue's family history, there was absolutely no indication that a man such as this would have taken the path he chose. There had to be a back story, I kept telling myself. But the more I looked, the less likely I was to find any dirt. Other than vague newspaper references to the possibility of his use of drugs—nothing specified—there were no clues as to what compelled him along his downward spiral.

I've mentioned that his was a family that was said to be both prominent and well-respected in his hometown of Charleston, West Virginia, and that his roots led straight back to luminaries in this country's formative years, including Chief Justice John Marshall. Lest you doubt that connection would yield any personal meaning for him, given the separation of generations, think again. In a May 10, 1942, announcement in the Society page of The Charleston Gazette, this handy detail emerged about the wedding attire of one of John Hogue's nieces:

The wedding gown is that worn by Mary Willis Ambler of Yorktown, Va., for her wedding in 1783 to Chief Justice John Marshall, and is one of the heirlooms in the Marshall House in Richmond.

You can be sure the bride, wearing her third great grandmother's wedding gown, had her photograph featured prominently alongside the three-column-long report of the occasion. Not to mention, such phrases as "old and prominent families" handily laced the article as well.

I've spent hours poring over newspaper accounts linked to family names, in hopes of finding something to reveal The Big Answer as to how and why the younger John Syme Hogue turned to a life of crime. So far, there's been nothing in print. That isn't to say I've exhausted this search trail. Perhaps, embedded in some archive or collection of papers, there will be the telltale reason. If there is one.

In the meantime, lacking any discovery via searches on John's own name, the next step is to check out his brother's name, for it was Andrew O'Beirne Hogue who played the role of savior in his condemned convict brother's turn of fortune at the critical juncture lying between the provincial Supreme Court sentence condemning him to die and the appeal for a retrial initiated by his Canadian defense attorney that March of 1917.

Above: Entry for the November 27, 1915, marriage license to wed John S. Hogue of West Virginia and Mary Crider of Ohio in Detroit, Michigan. Image courtesy Ancestry.com. Somehow, I doubt this Detroit wedding received the same fanfare as the later Society page coverage for that of his niece, back in his hometown.  

Picking Up on a Hundred Year Old Story

Let's begin at the end: the moral of this story—at least on the process side of the analysis—is to never start telling a multi-post-long story right before a major holiday. Like I did. Every time the narrative got rolling, it would have to be set aside for posts of another sort. First it was Christmas. Then New Year. Then, too many roadblocks with the impending date of my flight to Salt Lake City—and then a week of training at SLIG.

But now? The coast is clear, I hope, to return to the story of the man who took to blowing up safes in a half dozen midwestern cities before finally being apprehended in Winnipeg.

If you thought the close of the fugitive's drama came at the moment of his sentencing, you would be missing the rest of the story. And I want to tell that story—well, at least as much of it as I've been able to find.

So, before we pick up that narrative, let's endure a brief recap for those who spent their holidays doing things other than reading genealogy blog posts. I'll include hyperlinks back to the original posts, so you can hopscotch your way through the littered trail betwixt the cheery holiday posts of last month.

We started in the middle of December with a discovery of an odd set of entries on a border crossing report for John Hogue of Charleston, West Virginia. Only, he wasn't coming from West Virginia at the time; he was arriving in Detroit from Windsor, Ontario, in February, 1926, escorted by a deputy sheriff of Calhoun County, Michigan. The reason for his re-entry into the country was to stand trial for crimes allegedly committed in that county.

As any genealogist would, I had this nagging doubt about the document, wondering if it really was referring to my John Syme Hogue, son of a civil engineer in Charleston, West Virginia. I had to take a closer look—which led me on this wild chase to figure out exactly who this convict John Hogue might have been.

First stop on my research plan was to search for that name in historic newspaper archives. I got more than I bargained for: apparently, the man was known by several aliases. More importantly, he was wanted in Battle Creek, Michigan, for blowing up a safe and getting away with its contents—over four hundred dollars in cash. That was in March, 1916.

By May, the fugitive—never having been caught by Battle Creek authorities—was plying his craft at another safe in Madison, Wisconsin. By this time, newspaper reports were glowering over the escaped suspect, whom they believed to be named James Stewart.

In October, a case with many of the same details occurred, but this time the suspect was apprehended, and spent nearly three months in jail. Toward the end of his sentence, local law enforcement officials were informed that their prisoner, whom they had assumed was named William Anderson, was wanted in Battle Creek for a similar crime committed there back in March. The process to extradite the prisoner was initiated, and by the end of January, 1917, he was sent east on a train bound for Windsor in the custody of an immigration official. The plan to hand over the convict to U.S. authorities at the international border at Windsor was never completed. Just three miles before his arrival in Windsor, the prisoner grabbed the officer's gun, shot him, and leaped from the still-moving train.

The midnight getaway in the rural outskirts of Windsor prompted a widespread manhunt. For two days, the fugitive eluded both law enforcement officers and citizen posses assembled from several surrounding towns. In an almost anti-climactic way, an unassuming stranger stopping by a local hotel for a meal and a night's stay turned out—despite yet another alias—to be the very man who was the focus of what was billed "the biggest manhunt of a year or more."

Immediately booked into the Windsor jail, starting up the process of scheduling his trial in Ontario's Supreme Court, the suspect made his own protests about the crime just committed. He insisted his captor's gun was "hair-trigger" and that he never meant to kill the man, just keep him at bay to effect his getaway. Newspaper reporters from the several American cities in which he—under a number of aliases—had committed crimes hounded the now-found fugitive for a scoop on this emergent story.

Regardless of intent, James Stewart—a.k.a. numerous other monikers but in reality one and the same as the John Hogue whose genealogy led me to this story—appeared before the Ontario Supreme Court on the morning of March 7, 1917, and saw the conclusion of arguments, jury deliberations and the announcement of their verdict, and the sentencing all unfold before the day was over. He was pronounced guilty as charged. He was sentenced to die on the gallows that May 17.

The defense began immediately to prepare an appeal. While newspapers back in Winnipeg and throughout those midwestern American locales where the suspect had likely also plied his craft churned through all the details of the murder and trial, it seemed they couldn't quite agree on the correct name for the suspect for nearly another month. In the end, it became clear that the man sought by so many cities was indeed John Hogue. And though he had seemed to forget his family, they had not forgotten him. John Hogue's brother began his own campaign to defend his brother, going so far as to enlist the support of his state's then-current governor, John J. Cornwall.

Granted, it might be a far-fetched scenario to think the governor of an American state would be likely to agree to plead on behalf of a criminal detained in an entirely different country. But in the case of this criminal, the chances were somewhat better. Both John Hogue's father and younger brother were prominent civil engineers in the city of Charleston—capital, incidentally, of West Virginia. To say the family was "prominent," however, does not reveal the full line of connections in that family's heritage. Surprisingly, this man condemned in a Canadian court for murder was actually a descendant of one of the United States' own most revered Chief Justices, John Marshall.

Tracing that genealogical connection was where I left off with this story. While it may have seemed as if the story just fell off the table, having been pre-empted by holiday and post-holiday activities, I assure you there is more to be told. And we can pick up the trail again—this time, safe from further interruptions—with tomorrow's post.

Above: The document that started me asking all those questions, Manifest of the United States Department of Labor Immigration Service card for John Hogue; courtesy of Ancestry.com.

Time to Meet the Family

If we were to wind the clock backwards on fugitive John Hogue, at this critical juncture in his criminal career, and step far beyond the "prominent Kanawha Valley family" the Winnipeg newspaper insisted was his heritage, would it have been a surprise to discover that this convicted murderer could claim as his second great grandfather the fourth—and even now the longest-serving—Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court?

The man holding those honors was, of course, John Marshall, whose name and significance is recognized in this country today, even though he held that esteemed position from 1801 until his death in 1835. The line of descent connecting him to that unfortunate relative awaiting his appeal in a 1917 jail cell in Windsor, Ontario, also wound its way through the Harvie family, of which I have several relationships, myself.

John Marshall's only daughter, Mary Marshall, married Major General Jacquelin Burwell Harvie. Among their children was a daughter, Virginia, who married a doctor, Spicer Patrick, who eventually settled with his family in Charleston, West Virginia. One of those children was their daughter, Susan Harvie Patrick, born in Virginia in 1854, but married in Kanawha County, West Virginia, in October of 1872.

This is where the family story encounters a slight complication. Though married in 1872, by the time of the 1880 census, Susan was back in her parents' home—along with two of her three children. The oldest of the children, it turns out, was enumerated at his uncle's residence. Susan's husband had apparently died within that same year.

Not long after—September 3, 1884, to be exact—Susan married John Syme Hogue, a Charleston civil engineer held in high esteem in his community. With her second husband, she had four children, naming her eldest after his father.

This child, born in 1885, became that same John Hogue who, by 1916, had been wanted in a half dozen cities for engineering feats of a very different sort. Why he didn't follow in the occupational footsteps of his father—or, for that matter, his next-younger brother Andrew—I'm not entirely sure.

What I can be fairly certain of, though, is that his brother Andrew maintained just the right sort of networking connections to insure one was still seen as a respectable member of the community. Enough, that is, to be able to enlist the support of the state's governor in his quest to disentangle his brother from the mess into which he had ensnared himself in that escapade up in Canada.

Above: Genealogical Chart of the Marshall Family, produced circa 1900, which is displayed on a downstairs wall of the family's Richmond, Virginia, home. Showing descendants of John Marshall and his siblings, out to the level of their great-grandchildren, it can be better viewed here, courtesy of Wikipedia, by clicking on the image in the media viewer, then enlarging it to better read the details.

Teetering on Technicalities

Remember that saying, "Have his day in court?" Perhaps no one today takes that as a serious measurement of a legal timeline. Back in March, 1917, though, the provincial courts of Ontario may have taken that concept more literally.

While the trial of the suspected murderer of Canadian immigration officer William Jackson may have seemed like an open-and-shut case, a mere one day's hearing in court may have been a bit too brief for propriety's sake.

By the time the verdict was announced—guilty—followed all on the same day by the sentencing, the various newspapers covering the process across both Canada and the United States all had their take on what was to follow next. Ontario law in 1917 provided two sentencing options in such a case: death on the gallows or life imprisonment. Ontario Supreme Court presiding justice Sutherland opted for the more swift and final penalty, and scheduled its implementation for May 17—barely two months after the case was tried in his court.

For one thing, The Wisconsin State Journal—still miffed about the robbery committed by this same man at the Orpheum in Madison the previous May—had continued to insist on identifying the murderer as James Stewart. Only with their March 8 coverage of the verdict did they finally admit that James Stewart was only an alias.

The Evening Chronicle in Marshall, Michigan—county seat and site for the court case to which "James Stewart" was being extradited for his safe-cracking crime in nearby Battle Creek—was a little faster on the uptake, publicly admitting that James Stewart was merely an alias with their coverage on February 27. They still got the real name wrong in that article, though, fingering him to be James Hogue.

The Manitoba Free Press, back in Winnipeg where this whole extradition process began that January, finally got it right when, in their March 25 report, they announced the murderer's correct name—although altering the date for his execution, moving it up to May 10.

It had been as early as March 8—barely the day after the trial—when the convicted murderer's attorney began preparations to appeal his client's case. He felt there were grounds to do so: his contention that the presiding judge had failed to properly instruct the jury "in detail" on the concept of "culpable homicide."

Perhaps he had a point. Likely inherent in the case was the suspect's contention that the gun used in committing the crime was unpredictable—a hair-trigger response when first handled, but, as was readily evident when used the second time in the face of his impending arrest, unable to be fired at all.

No matter what the grounds for that original decision to appeal the verdict, it was through what unfolded in the process to secure that retrial that confirmed the suspect's real identity. For by the end of that same month, back in his hometown of Charleston, West Virginia, the suspect's brother had begun the process to intercede on behalf of his wayward sibling. It was Andrew Hogue who, enlisting the influence of his state's chief executive, Governor John J. Cornwall, hoped to have a new trial granted for his brother—whose name was not James at all, but actually John Hogue.

As the Winnipeg newspaper explained how things really were, back home in West Virginia, "John Hogue is a member of a prominent Kanawha Valley family."

Above: "Jeune homme à la fenêtre" (Young Man at the Window), 1875 oil on canvas by French Impressionist, Gustave Caillebotte; courtesy Wikipedia; in the public domain.