The Michigan Connection

There are some times when we think we have identified details about the right person in our family tree—but not enough to be sure beyond a doubt that we have figured out the right connection. So it was with George Edmund McClellan's frustrating widow Celestia, the one who nearly took the money and ran, after his passing in Wellborn, Florida, in 1866.

You'd think a name like Celestia R. Holman would be rare enough to not suffer the genealogist's plague of two possible candidates for the same identity. Yet, trying to discover just where George's widow originated, I ran into not one, but two Celestia Holmans of about the same age. One showed up in the 1850 census in Chautauqua County, New York. The other one was living in the household of someone named Rhodolphus Richards in Macomb County, Michigan.

If you think a name as unusual as Rhodolphus Richards would merit a fast pass to my answer, think again. Rhodolphus was about as difficult to find in other records as was Celestia.

There was one other detail that piqued my curiosity. Rhodolphus, it turned out, had a wife named Aurilla. And, as we had already observed from Celestia's 1904 death certificate, Celestia's mother happened to be named Orrilla.

What were the chances? Could Aurilla Richards be Orrilla Grover? Looking at that 1850 census, Aurilla Richards was forty six years of age, a quite reasonable twenty nine years older than Celestia.

There was another reason I thought this scenario might be possible—and no, it wasn't mere wishful thinking. In researching Celestia's stated parents, I discovered her father, Levi Sawyer Holman, had died young, in 1834. Certainly, his equally young widow would need to marry again.

Researching further, I discovered the origin of Celestia's middle name—Relief—which she no doubt received, thanks to her paternal grandmother, Relief Sawyer.

Finding an online source for marriage records of the time—and then hoping they contained the appropriate information on the bride's former name—was a nice thought, but an impractical task, considering not only the many possible spelling permutations involved in an Aurilla Holman/Rhodolphus Richards marriage, but also the lack of knowledge of which state in which to locate the marriage records. After all, if Aurilla Richards was really Orrilla Grover, she could have married her husband in any of the states leading to Michigan from their origin in New England.

Where there isn't a direct route to our answer, there are side roads leading to more clues. One, for instance, involved one of the Richards children also listed in that 1850 census, the Richards' six year old daughter, also named Aurilla. It turns out, the younger Aurilla married well, earning both her husband as well as herself a brief biography in one of those local history books. The biography chose to use the spelling of Orrilla, and listed her parents as Rodolphus and Orrilla, encasing the name Holman in parentheses as if to indicate it was the elder Orrilla's maiden name.

But if that left enough doubt in the air, thankfully another discovery helped quell concerns. When Orrilla Richards died in 1894 at the age of ninety, her headstone helpfully included this information:

Orrilla Grover Richards
Oct. 4, 1803—Mar. 5, 1894

Underneath her entry was that of her second husband, Rodolphus S. Richards, confirming for us the connection between Celestia's mother and this Orrilla Richards. 

While I am not sure how a fairly successful farmer in Michigan would have the means to send his step-daughter to the first college in the country to accept women as students—let alone have the connections to marry off said step-daughter to a well-to-do widower in Florida—at least now I know how Celestia connected to the place she called home as a girl. Whether we ever uncover the story of how she met George McClellan in Florida, I don't know, but at least we now have a clue what drew her back to the midwest from the disaster following her married years in Florida.

A Bit More About Celestia

Delving further into the story of the second wife of George McClellan—the one who almost made off with his property after he died—we learn that Celestia did, indeed, head to Indiana, just as her step-children had suspected.

I had to check out what became of Celestia after her stint as executrix of her husband's will, mainly because trying to figure out where she came from turned out to be a fruitless effort. Sometimes, the clues we find in an ancestor's future provide us a glimpse into what people knew about her past, and that, indeed, became the case in Celestia's story.

While she was untangling all the business arrangements in the McClellan properties during the early 1870s, she did remain in Wellborn, Florida, home of George's many children from his first marriage. We learned, of course, that we now had to trace her whereabouts using her new married name of Grant.

Along with those clues to help us trace Celestia's whereabouts, we also had some other help. Not only had Celestia given birth to three of George's children—two of whom were still living—we now were able to add the name of her one child with Dr. Grant, her second husband: DeSoto Grant.

It was by the time of the 1880 census that we find Celestia has finally made it to Indiana. How soon after the final fees had been paid in the probate case back in Suwannee County, Florida, I can't say, but the 1880 census revealed that she arrived at her intended destination.

Reported as "Celestra" R. Grant by an enumerator with an abysmal hand, Celestia had settled in Warsaw, Indiana, where she was, by 1880, working as a teacher. With her were her sixteen year old son named after his by-then long-deceased father, George Edmund McClellan, and her daughter whose name we learn was also Celestia. In addition, their half-brother DeSoto was also in the household, though his surname was so mangled that if I hadn't already learned what it was, it would be a challenge to decipher.

The 1880 census also provided another clue: it confirmed that Celestia was born in Michigan, adding one more convincing argument to the idea that the Celestia R. Holman in the 1850 census in Macomb County, Michigan, was likely our Celestia.

Tracing Celestia through to the next census added one more twist: she apparently married one more time. This time, her husband was Ira A. Rice, and the date of their wedding was October 16, 1894.

This little detail came in handy for one other reason: not long after this, Celestia was laid to rest in her adopted home in Warsaw, Indiana. This, I would have had trouble finding, if I hadn't realized she had married one last time. Finding the death record, thanks to learning of that Rice surname, I could see that her son, George McClellan, had provided her parents' names and her place of birth. Her October 20, 1904, death led to her burial under the name Celestia Rice in the Oakwood Cemetery in Warsaw, Indiana.

Her death certificate told me her parents' names were Levi Holman of New Hampshire and Orrilla Grover of New York. While that doesn't exactly match the details given in the 1880 census—both parents born in Vermont—the aftermath of a loved one's passing is seldom the time for accurate reporting of such mundane details.

What those details did get me wondering was whether the "Orrilla" Grover Holman of Celestia's death certificate might have had anything to do with the Aurilla in the Richards family where we found Celestia residing in 1850.

Celestia's Story

While there certainly were several McClellan descendants, back in 1800s Suwannee County, Florida, who were upset with the settling of George McClellan's will, not much at all was said about his second wife, Celestia Relief Holman McClellan—other than that she almost skipped town without properly distributing the proceeds of his estate.

But who was Celestia, and how did she end up marrying the recently-widowed George McClellan? It was hard to find any detail on her, perhaps because their marriage was in 1861 and his passing was in 1867. With those dates falling in the cracks between two census years, not much was recorded about the couple that we can find now—other than that lengthy probate record.

Compounding the problem was the fact that, not long after George's passing, Celestia quickly married the town doctor, John Grant. We can, fortunately, find Celestia in the 1870 census, along with her two surviving McClellan children from her previous marriage, plus Celestia and John's newborn son DeSoto.

The census revealed that Celestia was born in Michigan, far from either Florida or the other southern states where the McClellans' residents typically originated. How she ended up meeting the widowed George becomes even more of a puzzle with that twist in the details. Could it have been a mistaken entry?

No, as it turns out. While I couldn't find any record of Celestia in the census preceding her marriage to George in 1861—barely half a year after the 1860 census was taken—it was pretty evident that hers was a name which got mangled in records on a regular basis.

Stepping back yet another decade, in hopes that hers was just one of those entries which disappeared from the 1860 enumeration, I was faced with the opposite problem. Incredibly, there was not only one Celestia Holman, but two: one in Chautauqua, New York, and one in Macomb County, Michigan.

A tie-breaker to resolve that dilemma might have been the discovery that someone named Celestia R. Holman was listed in the Oberlin College yearbook for both 1853 and 1854. Next to each student's name was an entry indicating city of residence. For Celestia, the location was listed as "Mt. Clemens, Mich."

Not being familiar with the geo-political divisions for the state of Michigan, I had to look that one up. You'll be glad, as I was, to realize Mount Clemens is located in Macomb County, thus identifying which of the two 1850 census records might have more likely been our Celestia.

Still, that really only assures us that the Oberlin student in Ohio and the Michigan resident were one and the same. It doesn't yet confirm that those two identities were our Celestia Relief Holman who married widower George Edmund McClellan in Florida. And actually, we'd need a lot of explaining to understand just how it came to be that a Celestia like this might have ended up so far from Ohio—to say nothing of Michigan—marrying a Florida man.

Besides, taking a good look at that 1850 census in Michigan, it doesn't even reveal to us Celestia's parents' names, for Celestia was living in the household of a couple named Rhodolphus and Aurilla Richards. If nothing else, it shows us that Celestia came with a story, even before the episode in which we met her in Florida after the death of her husband.

Above: Excerpt from the digitized image of the Oberlin College catalog for academic year 1852-1853, showing Celestia's entry and residence in "Mt. Clemmens, Mich." Image courtesy Ancestry.com.

Where There Isn't a Will

Now that I've been discovering long-forgotten details of my McClellan family in Wellborn, Florida, I've started making a habit of reading through all the wills I could find in Suwannee County. You'd be surprised at what I've been finding, just by being patient enough to read every page, not just of the wills, but of the probate records, as well. Especially when it comes to a small town peopled by extended family members, the names I'm seeking seem to pop up in the oddest places.

One thing I learned in the process, browsing through all the probate files in Suwannee County, was that the records of those who died intestate also made for productive reading. Don't let the absence of a will deter you in scouring those legal papers for your ancestors who died intestate. While there won't necessarily be one handy record listing the name of all your ancestor's descendants, there may be some gems tucked in the folder—as long as you are willing to take the time and look.

I'll discuss this more in the coming week, but for now—since this is the time for my bi-weekly progress report—let's just say that what I wasn't able to add in quantity of names I made up for in quality of depth of understanding.

Yes, reading through hundred-page probate files can cause research progress to come grinding to a halt—if all I'm doing is counting names in a database, that is. And while I certainly do more than just that, I generally try to keep tabs by those counts. It will be no surprise, then, that the rate of increase wasn't stellar, this time around.

In my mother's tree, the one I've been focusing on since signing up for the SLIG Southern research class next January, I added only 107 names to total 14,386 in her database. In the previous two-week sequence, I had added over three times as many names. But last time, I wasn't slogging through wills, trying to extract those minute but important details such as maiden names and deceased spouses' given names. It's the little things that count—at least, that's the way it's been this time.

I did, however, add a name to one other database. This was an exception to my research rule, simply owing to a special occasion: the birth of my cousin's grandbaby. How could I not take the time to enter that precious arrival into the record?! And then, in the process, I realized I was missing another one of her grandchildren, so I got to add a bonus name to the record. So, for now, my father's tree stands at 514, an increase of two names.

My other trees—the one for my mother-in-law and the one for my father-in-law's Irish roots—have stayed frozen in time with their counts at 15,667 and 1,490, respectively.

With my focus on the wills and probate records in Suwannee County in the past two weeks, I haven't even taken a peek at my DNA results. I had to take just one look this weekend, though, if for nothing else than to keep a record.

Having done that, though, makes me glad August is another DNA test sale month. I could use some fresh numbers here, as my match increases have slowed to a trickle. After the bump in numbers following the Father's Day sales, this past two weeks have brought only a few distant cousins into the picture.

One additional point to brighten that DNA picture: I'm hoping that finding new branches of the McClellan line, as my understanding of who belongs in the extended family crystallizes, will be an accelerating process with each new leaf pinned in its proper place on the tree.

That, however, will have to take second place to my current goal of reading through all the probate files I can find online for the McClellan home in 1800s Florida.

Back to the Hills

It's been high time we headed to the hills again in search of abandoned family photographs to rescue. My intrepid travel partner, Sheri Fenley, and I had planned to hit the road in the middle of July—a plan that would have at least allowed us to avoid the August smoke of numerous California forest fires—but unpreventable circumstances demanded a rescheduling of our trip.

At long last, this week was the right time to head to Sonora, up in the foothills of northern California once known as Gold Rush country. Learning from past experience, I contacted the most promising antique shops ahead of time to insure they would be open and have old photographs in stock. There is something so laid back about people living in those foothill towns that one can never be sure a business establishment will actually be open during business hours. At least, that was our experience during our last expedition, when we drove up to Sutter Creek and Jackson.

This time, we were headed south—to a place known as the "Queen of the Southern Mines." Sonora, county seat of a jurisdiction whose name is nearly unpronounceable to non-Californians—Tuolumne—is a city of barely five thousand people. Its main street, South Washington Street, is predictably filled with the type of shops tourists find delightful. It's a snap antique stores would thrive there.

It comes as no surprise, then, to see I had my choice of shopping targets. With several stores to choose from, I still couldn't let that sway my intention to only go to those places which would be open when we got there. After all, it's a ninety minute drive, one way, from my home to Sonora.

I did my homework and contacted the antique shops in the area that I found through online searches. Two stores promised me they had antique photographs for sale. One, temptingly, had not only antiques—including photos—but an old fashioned ice cream parlor. Ice cream being my non-genealogical weakness, I decided to make that my first stop for lunch and first pick on shopping.

The store was scheduled to open at eleven. We arrived about ten minutes after that, managed to find parking close by so we wouldn't have to walk far in the all-pervasive smoke and haze, and marched right up to the front door.

It was closed.

Yes, it was after eleven o'clock, but this is the northern California foothills. But this was also us, two hungry travelers looking for a place to eat. We crossed the street and wandered in the direction of the second antique shop on our itinerary.

Good thing we did. That shop—Antiques Et Cetera—proved to be just the place for my project. I was delighted to discover proprietor Sheryl Breaux and her assistant Terri had numerous specimens of old photographs on hand. Seeing the beautifully framed wedding photos from bygone eras, mounted on the walls of the shop, nearly made me cry over the thought that where they really belonged was on a wall in a descendant's home.

But that's why we were there, isn't it? Not that I could afford to spring for those elaborately framed pictures, but the cabinet cards and post cards certainly filled the bill. (I didn't see any carte de visite specimens on this trip.)

What was key to the purchase was whether the photo included any details about the subject of the picture. I need enough clues to return a photo to the family of its now-departed subject. And in the case of this Sonora antique shop, there were several such photographs to be had.

Looking ahead at A Family Tapestry, I'll wrap up the story of my McClellan clan during the next week. And then, we'll start unfolding the stories hidden within the photographs I've found in Sonora. Hopefully, we'll run across a few interesting stories along the way.

Post-Celestial Suwannee

It may have been sheer curiosity which coerced me into reading every single one of the hundred-plus pages of George Edmund McClellan's probate records, but it was curiosity driven by a reason: George was my third great grandfather. That, granted, should have been a relationship so removed that I'd expect to know nothing of the man. On the contrary, what happened after his passing in 1866 is still remarked upon by McClellan relatives in Florida to this day. I owed it to myself to uncover the reasons for such family resentment.

Of course, I'm a long way from piecing together the complete story of how George's second wife and executrix, Celestia Relief Holman McClellan Grant, wrapped up her business in settling the McClellan estate. But I'm beginning to get an idea of what happened.

If nothing else, I have—through the pages and pages of records, receipts and miscellaneous scraps of paper—gotten the picture that not only did Celestia make property decisions which rankled George's orphaned children, but she evidently wore out the officials in the Suwannee County courts, as well.

Since the case had dragged on for so long, I thumbed through the folder to see the most recent date I could find on any of the records. George had died on October 19, 1866, which precipitated the probate process. The most recent dates I could locate were in the early 1870s. One would presume Celestia had wrapped up her business as executrix by that point and moved on—likely to Indiana, as she had stated, although given her proclivities, one could never be too sure.

Tucked among those receipts in the McClellan file was an odd note, dated September 29, 1873. On one side, it read, reasonably enough,

Received 1872 of Celestia R. Grant, Executrix of the Estate of George E. McClellan deceased, twenty dollars ($20) costs and fees in said estate in probate office at Live Oak Fla.
     This Sept. 29th 1873     John W. Rice
     Ex. County Judge Suwannee County Fla.

The case had gone on and on so long that it overran the judge's own term of office. While I'm sure a collective sigh of relief was heaved when the final fees were paid and Mrs. Grant had swept out of town—in haste, no doubt—I find the note scrawled on the reverse of this receipt to be an amusing footnote to the episode.

The within is given in lieu of the original filed or mislaid or lost = not known which.
Sworn to + subscribed before me Sept. 29 1873

The note was countersigned by the then-current county judge, John W. Rice's successor, George R. Thralls, who seemed quite willing to play this small part in enabling the last bit to be swept into place—in whatever way possible—following the whirlwind of the personal drama that was Celestia.

Of course, I can't be satisfied with leaving the story sit pat in Florida. If Celestia was headed for Indiana, I'd have to follow her there, as well. After all, she did have three children by my third great grandfather—two of whom were still living at the time of her Florida exodus. I need to follow the trail, not only to see what became of Celestia Relief Holman and "her children"—as George had put it in his will—but to see if I can discover anything more about the woman. After all, I have no idea where she came from before her 1861 marriage to George McClellan in Florida. She wasn't a Florida native. What brought her to town?


Images above from Suwannee County, Florida, Probate records, courtesy Ancestry.com.

Celestia, In Haste

A probate file can be full of all sorts of unexpected details. Mostly, in the case of the deceased George Edmund McClellan, details on the value and sales of his various northern Florida properties were the items most disputed, along with complaints by his various heirs about how George's executrix—his now-remarried widow, Celestia R. Grant—was going about the business of settling his debts.

Besides the rumor that the executrix was planning to skip town with the estate's proceeds undistributed, the letters in the McClellan file revealed insinuations that Celestia was indulging in pleasure trips to various Florida cities, for instance, and billing the cost to the estate.

All told, the entire situation of having someone's unfinished business dumped in her lap must have been a trying experience. The constant complaining by family members surely did not help.

Celestia seemed always to be in a rush, breezing in and out of the picture, leaving whirlwinds of complaints in her wake. In one undated letter, for instance, she began with,

Hon. Judge Rice, I am in great haste and cannot wait your return. Mrs.[?] told me I would find the list of articles desired to be sold at your office and...

Somewhere in the timeline between George's passing in 1866 and the settling of his case years later, Celestia's husband, Dr. John Grant, must also have died. I can find no record of that, nor location of his burial, but letters from George McClellan's probate file lead me to make that conclusion.

Among many other receipts in the McClellan file was one from W. M. Ives, attorney for the plaintiff, acknowledging receipt of "payment in part" in a suit against Celestia. The plaintiff, incidentally, was Mary A. McLeran—the Mary of the Red Scarf—who, as a widow in her own right, had had George McClellan provide appraisal services in the settling of her own husband's estate, back in 1860. This, once again, cements the concept of the intertwined relationships evident in the small community of Wellborn, Florida.

Attached with that receipt from attorney Ives was a note from Celestia. Once again, it was written in a hurry, undated, and opening with a curt salutation,

Judge J. W. Rice,
Sir. I arranged the Mrs. McLeran debt with Col. Ives. I enclose you the receipt...

After adding several mundane details, the letter, seeming to have been written on a mere scrap of paper, continued on the reverse:

I will leave this in Live Oak as I pass through en route to Indiana, Please send me a copy of all this year's returns as soon as you get them fixed up. Also make out your fees when you know what they are,
     In haste,
          Celestia R. Grant.

Images from the Suwannee County, Florida, probate file of George Edmund McClellan, courtesy Ancestry.com.