One Marshmallow Each

John and Maria Anna's second child, Anna Gibbons (born in Glen White PA, 1860) was affectionately known throughout her life as Annie. She grew up in her parents’ hard-working Spartan lifestyle, which was just as well considering what the future held for her. She became the mother of my grandfather. There is no absolute certainty of who my grandfather was, but she definitely was his mother.

This photo was taken around 1917 or 1918. Annie is in her wheelchair, and her son William Earl is standing on the left, blabbing malarkey as usual. Her son Lu Verne is on the right, looking wry. The girl with the fabulous braids is Mary, child of the eldest Beers daughter Lena.

Annie Gibbons may have had a strong German background, but she inherited a lot of appearance-determinant DNA from her grandfather Michael Fitzgibbons. In photos of her both as a young and an older woman, she had the aquiline nose and swarthy coloring common among an early type of Irish people who even today inhabit isolated spots like County Donegal. The writer James Joyce would have glanced at her photos and quipped, “A Fir Bolg if ever I saw one”. In youth, she was a tiny, thin, spry girl. The passage of years condemned her to a wheelchair, and gave her the shapeless form of a chronic invalid.

Her grandchildren remembered her kindly. She would ask them to fetch a special tin container, and then remove the lid and ceremoniously offer them one marshmallow each. She was a spot of sunshine in otherwise gloomy childhoods.

She went to her well-earned rest in Pasadena on 6 January 1928, when my mother, her namesake, was just five years old.

Many years before, back in Pennsylvania, she had married a sweet-faced, hapless young miner named George Washington Beers.

His was altogether another story. Unlike his wife his origins are largely mysterious, and probably will remain that way.

Chest Springs, originally Iroquois land

Chest Springs area farmhouse. Source: landandfarm.com

John Gibbons was born in Ashville in 1838, married in St. Augustine in 1857, and died in Chest Springs in 1914. He never left Pennsylvania. Evidently he lived his married life in Chest Springs, because most of his children were born there.

Chest Springs is one of the oldest boroughs in Cambria County, and one of the smallest. Iroquois Indians sold the entire territory to William Penn in 1760. The word “Chest” comes from huge stands of chestnut trees that once stood in the area, and the rest from the many local springs.

The area farmers, and I reckon John was one of them, produced most of their own food. The “downtown” sidewalks were made of wooden planks, about two inches thick and 10 inches wide. Large flat stones were laid at the street crossings, but they were covered by foot-deep mud in the spring and fall. A paved state road was finally constructed through the town in 1925, to widespread jubilation.

Young people, once their chores were completed, made their own entertainment. They had dances, hay rides, ice skating and sledding in winter. But this frozen water had more important uses than frivolity: Pond ice was cut in squares, placed in a wooden frame and covered with sawdust to preserve food in summer months.

 The only thing certain about John and his wife Maria Anna is that they were outstandingly fertile. Between 1858 and 1881 they produced 16 children.

Valley of the Pines

Jacob (1761), the son of Thomas and Magdalena Adams, caught the eye of Maria, the daughter of John and Mary Elizabeth Storm. They married in the chapel at Conewago, PA. Perhaps inspired by his father’s copious grain crops, Jacob became a distiller.  His parents must have given Jacob a firm moral grounding; in later life he disinherited a son for failing “to fulfill an obligation”.

Together Jacob and Maria raised 11 children.

Their daughter Maria (born 1785) married one John Conrad, whom I always assumed was another Englishman. Boy, was I wrong. His father John Kunrat claimed direct descent from a German king and had been born in the contentious region of Alsace-Lorraine, then located in the north-east of France. Germany on its northern boarder, Switzerland to the south, with the Rhine River meandering along its eastern boundary, its rich alluvial plains boast vineyards while its up slopes are sprinkled with monasteries and castles. Its natives are neither French nor German, but something in between: Alsatian.

Mr. Kunrat immigrated to good old Frederick, Maryland, where his son John was born in 1778. The family joined in the northwestern drift to Pennsylvania and some of them are still there.

John Conrad seems to have struggled financially. He was primarily a farmer, but occasionally worked as a cabinetmaker, and even did a stint in a relative’s cobbler’s shop. His brother Baltzer was well-known in the area as a master carpenter. His family appears in obscure publications: Conewago Chapel Founding Families, Catholic Trails West (vol.II) and a little tome called Valley of the Pines by D.J. Byrne. Obviously this branch of the family had re-espoused Catholicism.

Maria died a few days after giving birth to her eleventh child, in Conewago, PA at the ripe old age of 38. So John piled his surviving family and household goods into a heavy Conestoga wagon and plodded up the Old Kittanning Indian Trail west to Loretto, PA. He mourned Maria for a few years, but had a quiver full of motherless children to worry about. In 1827, when he was 49, he married 27-year old Catherine Adelsburger. She bravely assumed responsibility for John’s 10 children (little Polly, referred to as “an invalid,” had died at the age of 12) and dutifully churned out three babies of her own in five years.

The marriage proved to be brief.  This notice appeared in a local newspaper on 5 April 1832. Died: on Friday last, John Conrad, a respectable citizen of the vicinity of Loretto, aged about 60 years. Mr. Conrad’s death was occasioned by an injury received in rolling logs a few days before.

There is a family tradition that John grew impatient waiting for his grandsons to stack the logs, and decided to do it himself. The “young whippersnappers” involved doubtlessly felt guilty for the rest of their lives.  It’s always something. Anyway, the younger children of John and Maria were now technically orphans, and there were all sorts of legal hearings about appointing guardians for them.

Now our family story gets a little, well, peculiar. Loretto was a very small frontier town, and everyone knew everyone. And our penniless, bereft Catherine certainly knew a widower with five young children named Michael Fitzgibbons, a Limerick-born immigrant who had made his way to Loretto. She married him as quickly as decency allowed (1833) and popped out her first little Fitzgibbons nine months later. This was a daughter named Eleanor Ellen after Michael’s dead first wife. Two more children followed, and one of them, John (named after her dead first husband) chose to ditch the “Fitz” and just be “Gibbons”. Having shown due respect to the Dearly Departeds, Catherine named her last child Michael after his (then living) father.

Catherine and Michael had a long life together, and when he died she erected a fine big cross over him, inscribed In Memorium [sic] of/Michael Fitzgibbons/died/Jan.25,1862/in the 77^th year of/his life. She followed him to the grave a few years later.