The Photographer’s Family

As melancholy a piece of news the obituary posted yesterday must have been to the family of William C. Woodworth, removed nearly one hundred years from the event as we are, it presents a temptation for genealogy researchers to, well, follow that bunny trail!

Don’t expect me to go in any logical order, though. Pursuing bright shiny objects, squirrels and bunny trails is an activity which defies logic.

The “bright shiny” in yesterday’s post, for me, was the comment by regular reader “Iggy” (blogger Intense Guy) that William Woodworth's sister, Mrs. F. C. Hoskins, was most likely the wife of a photographer in Michigan.

Back to Michigan. I haven’t researched there since the last time I veered off on a rabbit trail, in search of the Flannigan link that turned out not to be family, after all.

On the other hand, with the advent of so many “orphan photograph” sites, my hope was that I could search through all of them and see if any of Fernando Cortez Hoskins’ handiwork might have been presented there.

I went first to the blog that, in my mind, represents the flagship of Orphan Photograph Rescue Missions: Forgotten Old Photos. Doing a Google™ search there for Hoskins, though, yielded nothing.

I thought perhaps visiting some blogs which organize their categories by name of photographer, I might have better results. However, a visit to Who Were They and Cabinet Card Gallery provided no further leads for this F. C. Hoskins.

I checked out some of my other favorite photography sites, using their internal search options where offered, without any further results. Julie Cahill Tarr’s Who Will Tell Their Story? and Teresa Wilson Rogers’ Forgotten Faces and Long Ago Places didn’t show any results for Hoskins. Neither did Family Photo Reunion. Or Find Family Photos. I even resorted to searching through Geneabloggers to see if anyone else had written about Fernando Hoskins. Nada.

Looking through census records and other documents online, though, Iggy came across further information, so I took his cue and turned the search back to all the usual places to see what I could find, myself. (And hopefully, anyone else researching this Woodworth line who stumbles upon this post can follow the same trail, too.)

Of course, my first hesitation in looking at the documents that can be found online is in assuming that the Lillie Woodworth of the 1870 and 1880 federal census for Wisconsin is the same person as the Lillian Hoskins of later records. There seems to be a missing link. At least, as far as I can see on FamilySearch.org, there is no marriage record.

However, there are correlating records that can be found. For instance, the Lillie Woodworth of the 1880 census—daughter, as we already know, of L. D. and Eliza Woodworth—shows a father who was born in Vermont and a mother who was born in New York. Lillie, herself, was born in Wisconsin. Strangely enough, so was Lillian.

Fast forward to married life. Lillian, the wife of Fernando Hoskins—sometimes transcribed as Haskins—also happens to have a father born in Vermont and a mother from New York. So far, so good.

The Lillian Hoskins we are tracing—by the time of the 1900 census, living in Detroit, Michigan—shows as mother of six children, all of whom were still living by the time of the 1910 census: Gertrude, Earl, Katie, Franklin, Laura and Eliza.

Further indications that Lillian Hoskins and Lillie Woodworth are one and the same include a California death certificate—yes, evidently more of the Woodworth family had headed west to the Los Angeles region—for Eliza Frances Flickinger. Born in Michigan at roughly the time as that estimated in the 1910 census, the document at this Eliza’s passing in 1990 included her mother’s maiden name: Woodworth.

One other birth record of interest was that filed originally in Cheboygan County, Michigan, in 1883. The original entries, crossed out and overwritten by an amendment dated May 17, 1948, showed the birth information for a child originally named Gertie Eliza Hoskins. The corrected version renamed the child Gertrude, but retained the original birth date of November 5, 1882.

Also corrected were this daughter’s parents’ names. While the record unfortunately does not include the mother’s maiden name, it once again strongly points to the possibility that this mother—Lillian May Hoskins—was one and the same with Lillie Woodworth. The correction also provides the father’s full name—that is where I found the middle name Cortez—and shows place of birth for each parent. Fernando, interestingly, was born in Kingston, Ontario, Canada. Lillian—as is no surprise at this point—was born in the same place as Lillie's brother William C. Woodworth: Bristol, Wisconsin.

While those few items do not produce the definitive proof that Lillie and Lillian are one and the same, they certainly do give me a tentative starting place. Not to mention, if I can confirm that these two women are one and the same, this discovery opens up a whole new branch of the family tree, loaded with tons of cousins—and family trees online, already bearing their records which, notably, lack the information I now can provide on William and Lillie/Lillian’s parents and grandparents.

Perhaps we can connect. I hear collaboration is the new buzz word in genealogy these days….

“Over the Great Divide”

Typical for wording in newspaper articles dating from the 1920s, but unusual to ears unaccustomed to hearing such descriptions in our times, William C. Woodworth’s obituary seems lengthy and ornate.

However, one such flowery statement in the article caught my eye for another reason. Apparently, not only had Maud Woodworth Bean lost her father on May 22, 1928. She had also, within that past year, lost both an uncle and an aunt.

            W. C. Woodworth, a pioneer of the Azusa valley, died at his residence on Vincent street on Tuesday. He is the third member of his family to pass over the great divide in the past year, L. D. Woodworth, a brother, having answered the call last November, and a sister, Mrs. A. L. Patterson, dying in Sioux City, Iowa, four weeks ago.

Travel challenges being what they were in the 1920s, it is doubtful that Maud and Sam Bean would have traveled to Iowa for the funeral of Maud’s aunt—whichever of William’s sisters that might have been, the frustrating custom of publicly referring to a married woman only by her husband’s name (or worse, by his initials) preventing discovery of further details so far. With Maud’s grandmother, Eliza, being the mother of eight—seven of whom were still living by the time of the 1900 census—that aunt could have been one of at least three sisters.

On the other hand, if Maud had returned alone from Texas only a couple years earlier, perhaps it wouldn’t be a stretch to imagine her returning back east for an aunt’s funeral.

Maud’s uncle, however, may have been another case. Named most likely for his grandfather, Lafayette D. Woodworth, the man had evidently made the move to southern California along with his brother William and their parents. Yet, even then, a trip from Maud’s residence in Alameda—that is, if she were actually there at the time—would have entailed a long day’s journey.

The obituary, flowery as it was, also included the kind of basic facts that genealogists have always prized in their research quest. Assuming that the newspaper hadn’t gotten any of the details wrong, William left three siblings behind:

a brother, H. D. Woodworth of Pomona, and two sisters, Mrs. Emma Larabee of Bristol, Wis., and Mrs. F. C. Hoskins of Pontiac, Michigan.

Of course, those stylish initials get in the way of straightforward research progress. I have a solid guess, though, that “H. D.” probably refers to William’s brother Harvey. Social protocol of the times hints that Emma Larabee was, by that time, already widowed, herself. Mrs. F. C. Hoskins, unfortunately, will have to be put on my “guess” list along with Mrs. A. L. Patterson until I find further hints—and no, I don’t just mean the “shaky leaf” type.

With such a large family of origin, I wonder how many were there to mourn William Woodworth’s passing. With a litany of deaths to regale us as we look back on the timeline of passings in Maud’s adult life up to this point, loss seemed to be a way of life. Babies, young people, the elderly—almost anyone, at any time, could have qualified for a trip “over the great divide.”

An unidentified man rides atop a cart, handling a team of farm horses in a scene not unlike that which might have been played out during William C. Woodworth's early years in southern California. Unmarked, undated photograph from the collection of Bill Bean.
 

A Vaguely Reminiscent Story

One detail that caught my eye, as I read the obituary for Maud Woodworth Bean’s father, was a strangely familiar story line—one that replicated her husband Sam’s own history of blindness.

Remember, Samuel W. Bean was one of a set of perfectly healthy, rambunctious twin boys born in 1896 to Redwood City, California, residents Leon and Ella Shields Bean. Somewhere between his thirteenth and sixteenth year—depending on whether you believe the “rock fight” or “baseball game” version of the story—Sam sustained an injury to his eye, which eventually also affected his hearing. Unable to see or hear from that point onward, he soon enrolled in the California School for the Deaf and Blind in Berkeley, where he met his future wife, Maud Woodworth.

Apparently, this scenario repeated one that Maud was already quite accustomed to: the story of her own father, William C. Woodworth. Take a look at this excerpt from the front page of the Covina Argus on May 25, 1928, where William Woodworth’s obituary was published, and see if this report sounds familiar to you:

            At the age of twelve the sight of Mr. Woodworth’s right eye was destroyed by a blow from a snowball thrown by a schoolmate, and when thirty-eight years of age he lost the vision of his left eye. Although living in total darkness for nearly twenty-five years, he looked after the affairs of his large ranch and retained his sunny, cheerful disposition which made for him a host of friends.

Photograph above: An unidentified man stands in a dirt driveway near an old truck in this unmarked, undated picture from the collection of Bill Bean. While this most likely is not William Woodworth, it could possibly be someone from that same time period and region.

Another Season of Sadnesses

The year of 1928 brought more difficult news for Samuel Bean’s young family. With Maud Woodworth Bean having recently lost one of her twin sons in 1927, following the earlier loss of her own sister Helen, it seems the decade of the ’20s was slated to be a sad one for her.

By 1928, Maud’s father—the blind man she reminisced about having walked with in their orange groves in southern California—was nearing sixty two years of age. A Wisconsin native immigrating first to Sioux City, Iowa, and from there to California, William C. Woodworth was considered a pioneer of the Azusa Valley. He had moved to the Los Angeles area—admittedly a more rural setting in those days—with his parents, Lafayette and Eliza Woodworth. The family had arrived from Sioux City in 1886, settling in Covina.

By the time Maud’s father was twenty four, he had returned to Sioux City to claim his bride, the former Effie Aurilla Williams—marrying, as it turned out, on her birthday in 1890. The newlyweds returned to the Woodworth family farm in California, where they raised six children—though, by this point in 1928, only three of those six were still living. The couple had remained in Covina ever since.

Maud’s father was not always blind, but the disability’s onset had struck him when he was well into his adulthood. Despite that difficulty, William Woodworth was able to attend to the business of running his large ranch.

Yet as the year of 1928 got underway, it became apparent that Sam and Maud were about to suffer another loss: William C. Woodworth passed away at his home on May 22, five months shy of his sixty second birthday. His obituary listed his daughter Maud’s residence as Alameda, California—no surprises as to her location this time—but there is no indication whether she was able to travel south to be present at his funeral.

As if added as a melancholy postscript, that same year ended with the somber note of Sam’s own father’s passing. Leon Bean, the divorced husband of the persistent Ella Shields Bean, added his own passing to the family’s season of sadness with his death on November 12, 1928—a year the likes of which Sam and Maud surely hoped would soon be past.

Photograph, above, from the collection of Bill Bean. Unidentified man and child on tractor. This unmarked photo most likely post-dates Maud Woodworth Bean's father, William Woodworth, and possibly is from an entirely different branch of the extended family.

Where’s Sammie?

In all these latest newspaper clues about the Samuel W. Bean family of Alameda, California, there is something missing that troubles me.

Have you noticed?

When Sam and Maud traveled south to visit Maud’s parents, Mr. and Mrs. William C. Woodworth, the Covina Argus newspaper announced the arriving couple’s names—but no mention of their newborn son.

When the Argus provided the surprising announcement that Maud was returning from Texas to spend an extended visit at her parents’ home—most likely during her pregnancy that resulted in the birth of her twin boys—it indicated Maud’s return as if she were traveling alone.

Where was her now-four-year-old son, Sammie?

I would normally have presumed that the answer to such a question would have been, “With his mother.”

In this case, though, I’m beginning to wonder. Perhaps it wasn’t a case of a newspaper refusing to make any acknowledgment of the very existence of children. Perhaps Sam and Maud were traveling the country—as some later newspaper articles explained—making public presentations and selling Sam’s books. With the challenge of arranging both business details and travel itinerary for a blind and deaf poet, perhaps Maud was not up for also being full time supermom.

While I don’t know this for sure, I am guessing that maybe that near-unnoticed silence on young Sammie’s behalf was owing to the fact that Sammie might not have been with his father and mother.

Maybe Sammie was still at “home” in Alameda, at 1807 Santa Clara Avenue, with the woman who still lived at that address: his grandma.

Was Ella Shields Bean serving as surrogate mother? I think back, now, to the pictures I have of a very young Sammie—hanging out with Uncle Bob Grant while he fixed cars. Perhaps Ella’s daughter, Leona Grant, popped in often to help with her mother’s new responsibility as grandmother.

Missing those regular newspaper reports that kept me up on Sam Bean and the details of his life, I forgot that maybe someone else also might have gotten swallowed up in that silence: a little boy whose parents were busy covering the miles to earn the “living” that ended up keeping them away from home.

…But Not For Long

The counterpoint to yesterday’s unexpected discovery makes for both a lesson in paying attention to those little snippets of family oral history and a challenge to search through not-yet-indexed documentation.

So who were those twin sons of Samuel and Maud Woodworth Bean? One I know directly from family stories and photographs—there were people I knew who had actually spent lots of time with him. That son, with the matching 1926 birth date of July sixteenth, was Earle Raymond Bean. Earle was the father of Gregory, the one whose story started off this entire series of entries on the Bean family.

The other son, however, was one I never met—or, for the most part, had even heard about. I do vaguely remember Greg’s mother mentioning the possibility of twins running in the family, and joking about “Earle and Merle.” But I never thought much about it. I had no idea who Merle was, so I put that little hint out of mind.

Once I read the newspaper report in the Covina Argus announcing the twins’ birth, however, those memories came back. It wasn’t a cute joke, after all, this talk about Merle and Earle—even though that might have been a way to rib a poetic papa for his more corny attempts at verse. Earle and Merle were both real people.

And Merle wasn’t just a joking nickname for Earle’s brother Sammie. I knew about Sammie. Though I had never met him, I knew what he did, what he was like, what he looked like. At the time I heard that comment about Merle and Earle, not knowing whether Sammie or Earle was the older brother, I thought maybe Merle was just the family’s pet name for brother Sam.

So who was Merle? To start a search, I had to assume there was a real person with that name. The Argus article didn’t mention the twins by name, though I knew by birth date that it would be Earle, not Sam, and another brother. I decided to plug in the name from that joking reference and see if it produced any leads.

Result? Nothing.

That was from a look at Ancestry.com and also in FamilySearch.org.

I wasn’t ready to give up quite yet, though, so I hunkered down for a long night at the computer. Scrolling to the bottom of the landing page for FamilySearch, I checked to see what resources from the state of California were available in their collection.

As it turned out, there was a digitized collection which had not yet been indexed, but was available for browsing.

Browsing—oh, groan! The pages load so slowly. The images take forever to come into focus. Any success comes mostly from persistence and patience. And lots of time.

Since nothing surfaced in the various California files for birth records, the collection I zeroed in on was—logically—"California, Death Index,1905-1939." Logically, I say, because neither I nor any of the family members I knew had ever come in contact with this person. Unless he was a total renegade from family association—so alienated from the rest that his name wasn’t so much as mentioned in normal family discourse—he had to have been long gone.

Thankfully, the 5,692 item Index was divided into clickable sections, partially narrowing down the search. First, the options given were two: a date range from 1905 through 1929, and a second set from 1930 to 1939. I chose the former, guessing that maybe Merle had not made it out of his infancy.

The next hurdle was simple: choose from six alphabetized sets of surnames. That honed my search to a set of surnames from “A, Yi” to “Emerson, George.”

Then, let the hunting and pecking begin! It was sheer guesswork where in that alpha range the surname “Bean” would fall. As it turned out, I hit my target on image 190 of 853, under the column subheading numbered 672. (Don't ask me how many guesses that process took!)

Entry number thirty two listed a Merle J. Bean. At this point, I needed to look up the key for the age codes, for a closer look at the Index showed that Merle died on July 9, 1927, with an age unit listed as “eleven.” If that was our Merle, that date was not quite a year since his birth. Finding the key on page six (once again loading painfully slowly), I could see the “2” code next to this age entry was for age in the unit of months, not years. Eleven months would be just right.

A second double check was to verify the county of death. Of course, with Maud having recently returned from Texas, of all places, one could never be quite sure where the family might surface next. Primarily, though, Sam’s home had always been around the Bay Area in northern California, so that—rather than a southern California location—would be expected for Merle’s place of death.

That required yet another consultation with the information page for the Index, which included a chart detailing the code numbers for each of the California counties. The Index had given “90” as the code for Merle’s place of death. That was the code, according to the chart, for the county of San Francisco. Very possibly, from their nearby residence across the Bay, Sam and Maud may have had to rush their baby boy to one of the university hospitals in San Francisco equipped to handle unusual health emergencies. While the Index does not provide cause of death, the location given seems to indicate use of one of San Francisco’s specialized health centers, rather than a local general hospital.

There is no indication in any of the previously-chatty newspapers about this sudden sadness that befell Sam and Maud and their family. Only in a distant retrospect do the signs of a long-past tragedy realign themselves, piece by separated piece, through the help of the digitized records now at our fingertips.

Enter Two Surprises

Using archived newspaper collections to uncover family history details can sometimes lead to unexpected revelations. As I’ve moved from the big picture events—graduation from school, for instance—to those little snippets buried deep within local papers’ middle sections, the process has gone more slowly, but the pay-off may be greater.

In the case of Samuel Bean and his bride, for instance, while Sam’s Oakland Tribune had no longer carried on its breathless coverage of the blind and deaf marvel, Maud’s hometown paper took up the narrative with a wisp of trivia here, a trite blurb there.

Even so, I was surprised to come across two entries in the Covina Argus that reinforced the observation that there is so much more to the story of Sam and Maud during those silent years of the 1920s and 1930s.

Several years after their first son, Sammie junior, was born, I ran across an item dated March 5, 1926:

Mrs. Samuel Bean has arrived from Texas, where she has spent several months, and will spend the summer with her parents, Mr. and Mrs. W. C. Woodworth.

Excuse me? Texas?!

There was clearly something I had missed in this saga.

I can imagine Sam and Maud traveling back to Boston—as we had discovered upon locating Sam’s father’s obituary in a 1928 San Jose newspaper—since there were a number of nationally-recognized schools working with the blind and deaf in and near Massachusetts.

But Texas? What would have brought the Bean family to Texas?

While I am clueless how to track their whereabouts in a state the size of Texas, I can make an educated guess about why Maud, alone, might have returned to her parents’ home.

No, it wasn’t another unfortunate turn of events. Don’t despair over this now-five-year-old marriage.

I am guessing the return trip was owing to the fact that Sammie junior’s younger brother was about to make his appearance. I’ve already known from family records that baby Earle was born in July of that year. Perhaps his dad was still on a traveling sales and speaking circuit, and the pace was getting to Maud during this pregnancy. After all, I sense that Maud was possessed of a delicate constitution.

While patting myself on the back for my astute observation as to her condition, however, another blip in the Covina Argus pulled me up short and told me I didn’t, after all, know everything there was to know about this woman.

From the July 23, 1926, issue:

            Twin sons were born Friday, July 16, to Mr. and Mrs. Samuel W. Bean of Alameda at the Covina hospital. Mrs. Bean is a daughter of Mr. and Mrs. W. C. Woodworth.

Twins?

Photograph: Yet another unidentified subject from among the unlabeled pictures in Bill Bean's collection. A very faint stamp on the reverse indicates, "Hammond's Studio, Porterville, CA." Like the unnamed woman in this photo, Maud Woodworth Bean had dark hair and very thick glasses. Similar to this woman, Maud--and her sons and grandson--had eyes that slanted downward at the outside edges. While this subject's clothing seems to indicate a much more recent time period than Maud's lifetime (she died in 1933), and while Maud and Sam had no connections in Porterville that I am aware of (yet), the similarities are so tempting.