Wandering California

          After little Elsa’s birth, Christian and Alma Hansen started having serious conversations with Alma's parents Christina and Zacharias Pohle about the difficulties of earning a living in the dreary East, while across the country a golden state beckoned. The thought of traversing thousands of hot, grueling miles overland with small children in tow appalled them, so the two families agreed to leave Buffalo by ship, just the way they had come in the first place.

          The village of Pasadena was a trendy health retreat for asthmatics, and in the 1880s experiencing a great land boom. Christian found employment as a carpenter with the Pasadena Manufacturing Company. Both his wife Alma and mother-in-law Christina worked as laundresses to supplement his income.              

A third child, Arthur Christian, was born in November 1887.

Soon after this son’s birth, Christian moved his family upstate to San Francisco, where he built staircases. Then he broadened his professional range by serving as a foreman in the construction of several churches. He admired the large Queen Anne Victorian homes (now fondly called “Painted Ladies”) springing up all over the Bay Area, and resolved to someday build one for his family. Here his son Arnold Albert was born in 1890.

Next the family went to Modesto in Stanislaus County, where the ambitious young man worked as a contractor and builder. By 1894, a little older and much more experienced, he was ready to return to Pasadena with his in-laws, and open his own contracting and architectural firm.

After the younger Hansens returned to Southern California, Dorothea Hansen died (1898). She was in her mid-sixties.

Migration to Buffalo, NY

               Prussia held Schleswig-Holstein and the City of Flensburg firmly in its iron grip. The Hansens were not Lutheran. The freedom of religion factor has always been cited as the sole reason for their immigration, but as Dorothea’s descendant, I think her qualms about her family’s remaining in Flensburg ran deeper than that.

There’s a school on the hill

Where the sons of dead fathers

Are led toward tempests and gales,

Where their God-given wings

Are clipped close to their bodies

And their eyes are bound ‘round with ships’ sails.

               These lyrics were composed by a Scottish folk singer, Andy M. Stewart, but they perfectly describe the situation in Flensburg. Dorothea didn’t want her sons to be forced into the seafaring life of their father.

               So in 1881 Dorothea put her sons Christian and Andrew Theodor on a ship and headed for Buffalo, N.Y. I’ve seen a photo of these boys leaning on the ship’s railing, gazing down at Mama. They tried to look nonchalant, but their eyes held both apprehension and excitement. They were 18 and 17, respectively.

Christian and Andrew Theodor were among the great wave of immigration that started around 1880. They probably passed through the newly opened Ellis Island. Source:  en.wikipedia.org.

               Evidently both boys worked very hard at the jobs they found on the East Coast; Christian made a specialty of creating interior hardwood finishings for the firm of Miller, Brown & Messmer. The young immigrants were able to send for Dorothea before too long. By the time he was 20, Christian felt he could afford a wife and family.

               Christian and Alma’s first child, Theodore Martin, was born in Buffalo, N.Y. ten months after his parents’ marriage. Their daughter Elsa Lydia followed two years later in 1885.

Rum City

               Back in Buffalo, N.Y. Alma Hildegard had married a young Schleswig-born carpenter in December 1883. They were both 20.

               Christian Martin Hansen in later years described himself as German, because that was a simple explanation of a complex situation. His birthplace, Flensburg, was located on a fjord along the coast of the contentious province of Schleswig-Holstein. When he was born in 1863, the area was still part of Denmark, but after the German-Danish War of 1864, it became Prussian territory.

               Flensburg was a “Rum City” and had a fleet of 300 trading ships involved in the rum industry.  More than 200 local distilleries processed sugar cane juice into grog, and a plethora of refineries, oil mills, and soap and tobacco factories handled other raw goods the traders brought home. It was a given that nearly every man in town would be somehow involved in the West Indies trade. Food, building materials and coke were transported from Flensburg to Christiansted on St. Croix, and bartered for sugar cane, color wood and spices.

  

Flensburg harbor

             Christian’s father Hans was born in Naestved on Denmark’s big island of Zieland, and his mother Dorothea came from Angeln in Schleswig-Holstein. Both his parents were ethnic Danes, which causes difficulties for anyone trying to trace their origins. Before 1828, Denmark practiced the use of patronyms and matronyms. For instance his father Hans Hansen, born around 1835, was probably Hans, the son of another Hans. Hans Senior might have been named something like Hans Gunnarsen or Hans Eriksen.

Likewise, we know Christian’s mother as Dorothea Petersen (or Jensen; there’s some confusion here). But her father might have been baptized Peder Olesen or Jens Ottarsen…or? And her mother would have been identified as someone’s daughter, as in Elsa Einarsdatter. Later in this chronicle, I’ll be able to trace some of our family branches back over a thousand years. But as for anyone thinking they can march into Naestved or Angeln and trace our forebears to the Viking Age, I wish them luck.

Poppies Near Pasadena

               Zacharias and Christina Pohle toiled in Buffalo, N.Y. for sixteen years, but were intrigued by stories of a distant haven where promises of the good life hung on trees like big, succulent fruit. Finally they boarded another ship, sailed around the tip of South America, and relocated to California in 1887.

               If they disembarked near Los Angeles in springtime, they would have seen a heavenly sight. Forty miles north, vast swathes of California poppies shimmered orange in the sunlight on a gentle slope rising above the village of Pasadena, just below the mountains. Later this tract was paved with houses and called Altadena, but before that happened local artist Benjamin Brown immortalized the scene in his Poppies Near Pasadena.

I have been unable to unearth any information about the children John or Theodore Pohle, except that around 1893 one of them might have sired a son Lloyd by a Norwegian-born woman with the last name of Birg.  About their little sister Lydia, I know a bit more. Once I caught a glimpse of a picture of a pretty girl posing coyly in a skintight turn-of-the-century bathing costume. My Grandma Alma indignantly snatched the photo from me and tossed it back into a storage box.

               “That’s Lydia. We don’t talk about her,” was all she said, but from the expression on Grandma’s face, I knew THAT conversation had ended.

               Everything I understand about Lydia suggests lyrics penned by the late troubadour Sonny Bono: She was a scamp and a tramp and a bit of a camp, a v-a-m-p: VAMP.  

On November 21, 1891 this item appeared in the Los Angeles Herald under the heading “People Who Yesterday Secured Permission to Wed”: R.W. Alven, a native of Germany age 21, residing in this city, and Lydia Pohle, a native of New York, age 13, residing in Pasadena.

               I didn’t make a typo here, and neither did the newspaper. The girl was 13. In 1916, when she was around 39, she married one Webster Elmer Fike in Santa Monica. By 1930 they resided in San Diego. What happened during the gaps in Lydia’s documented history, I do not know.

               This sad notification appeared in the Herald on March 3, 1898: “Zacharias Pohle, aged 71 years, died of old age in his home on North Mentor Avenue yesterday. Mr. Pohle had been a resident of Pasadena for eleven years, and leaves here a son and a daughter. The funeral was held at 2 o’clock this afternoon from the home and interment was made in Mountain View Cemetery.”

               The widowed Christina and her little grandson Lloyd were not left alone and desolate. The Pohles’ married daughter Alma Hildegard Hansen and her family were residing with them at 634 N. Mentor.

               The strikingly handsome Lloyd Cyril Pohle, evidently without parents through death or disinterest, grew up as part of the Hansen household and served in World War I as a medic.  He later lived in San Gabriel, married a Mabel and had a son also named Lloyd. He died in 1954.

The Great War was Over!

The Great War was over! The Pasadena Star-News reported on November 7, 1918 that the Armistice had been signed, and the city reacted to the grand occasion as it always did: with a big parade. Everyone poured into the streets, banging on pots and pans in jubilation.  World War I veterans marched in rank and file with those from the Spanish-American War and even a fife and drum corps of grizzled Civil War vets.    

Pasadena hadn’t seen a crowd in months. Spanish flu was rampant, so the town had adopted prohibitions against gatherings indoors or out, even in churches.  The Star-News chirpily documented everybody’s scofflaw behavior: “Influenza regulations were forgotten and the ‘flu’ germs probably died in the noise and sunshine”.

               It was a glorious celebration. Unfortunately, the Star-News had made an error and the Armistice was actually signed on November 11. Unfazed, Pasadena threw another parade and giant block party a few days later.

               It was on one of these occasions that Harry met Alma. Or rather, 15-year-old Alma Hansen spied the head and shoulders of a tall, slim young man looming above his fellow soldiers. She turned to a bevy of her girl friends and announced “I’m going to get that guy”, and then promptly walked over and introduced herself.

               Harry Frederick Herman Heather was 28 years old and one of the most forlorn men on the planet. Years before, everyone he cared about had been torn from him by death, rejection, and disgrace. He must have been bewildered but touched that someone wanted to meet him.

               The girl smiling up at him was anything but alienated and bereaved. The youngest child of successful immigrants, she knew nothing but life swaddled in the protective cocoon of a loving family circle.

Venice Beach

Sometime before 1920, Emory Straker had had quite enough of the Northeast in general and Vermont in particular. He boarded a train to California, took an amazed look around, and sent word for his family to follow him out to the Coast.

Stories of blue skies and golden sunshine with nary a snowdrift in sight, thrilled his parents Daniel and Maloney Maria, so they pulled up stakes and went west themselves. Daniel died in Venice, CA 0n 16 December 1923, and Maloney breathed her last on 18 December 1927.

Perhaps because she was now living in a land of fresh starts, Edith, Emory's wife, resolved to have her umbilical hernia repaired. The surgery was unsuccessful, and she died on 23 February 1922. She was 52 years old.

When her daughter Frances went to the funeral home, she backed out of the viewing room in consternation. She was certain she was in the wrong place; the attractive, beautifully groomed woman displayed in the coffin couldn’t be her mother. But in fact it was Edith, and the funeral director had given her the care her husband, and her own innate simplicity, had always denied her.  

Emory seemed to enjoy life in Venice, California as a single man. Frances sniffed that her father lived near the beach so he could ogle all the floozies in bathing costumes. Hubba hubba!

Security Pacific National Bank Collection - LA Public Library

Before 1930 Emory married a slender, savvy businesswoman named Iola. She was either widowed or divorced, because she had four grown daughters in tow. On the 1930 census form, they claimed their last names were Woodley and Emory as their father, but he could not have been. When they were conceived in Indiana, he was shoveling snow in Mooers, NY. 

Edith - Used Like a Plow

          Emory and Edith Straker started their married life on a farm in Mooers, NY. 

The farmhouse and barn, which may still stand, although shakily.

          There is a touching but troubling story connected to this house. Edith’s first child was a little boy named George (1893) whom she simply adored. Evidently Emory didn’t share her infatuation with parenthood, and regarded his firstborn as an unanticipated burden. (This is puzzling, because surely Maloney Maria and Daniel gave him the Birds and Bees talk.) Anyway, Edith seemed to fear that her husband might harm her son. One day when she was down on her knees painting the farmhouse’s floor, little George trailed after her, leaving his tiny footprints in the wet paint. In later years, when she repainted the floor, she carefully skirted around the footprints so she could preserve some aspect of her child, no matter what happened to him.
          Emory was a hard-working one, as all farmers are, but he was careful to enforce his marital privileges. Every Sunday he would order his children to stay downstairs and leave him alone while he locked himself in his bedroom with Edith. I suppose he was indignant each time another baby mysteriously appeared, which happened in 1894, 1899, 1902, 1903, and 1907.

          This last birth in 1907 constituted my Grandmother Frances’ earliest memory.  The sight of Edith standing at the stove with two-hour-old Ernest balanced on her hip, cooking dinner for a gaggle of farmhands, haunted her to her final breath. The unspoken message “A woman’s first duty is to care for the menfolk” is one she vehemently rejected.

           By 1910 the family had relocated to a dairy farm in Woodstock, Vermont. Edith toiled on dutifully throughout these years, albeit in increasing discomfort. She had developed an umbilical hernia, which is usually caused by obesity, heavy lifting, or multiple pregnancies. In her case, all three factors converged.

          One of Edith’s great-granddaughters describes her in a short poem as: “Used like a plow/ Browbeaten, worn out/ Disposed of unmourned.” This is a little melodramatic, but contains more than one kernel of truth.

Canadians and Americans

Samuel Woodley junior was born in Grand Isle, Vermont in 1801. He married an Irish-born colleen named Margaret Lamberton (1810). They raised nine children, and Samuel died in Sciota in 1884 of apoplexy at the age of 83. All his descendants I know of over the age of 40 pop high blood pressure pills like they were Tic-Tacs to avoid succumbing to the dreaded apoplexy. Margaret followed him to the grave ten days later.

Their son Daniel (1842) married Malony (her spelling; her descendants tend to spell it “Maloney”) Maria Stockwell, the child of Joseph and Anna Maria Stockwell. They started their life together in Mooers, NY, where their older son Emory Carol was born on 14 August 1869. By 1920 Daniel and Maloney were living in Clinton, NY, a nearby farming community.

Evidently Emory was a stern young man, and Edith Frances Straker, born just over the Canadian border in Hemmingford, was meek, hardworking, and eager to please; she was a good choice for him. Perhaps he wasn’t such a good choice for her, but I’m basing my hunches on conversations with her granddaughter Orella Colburn. Not to mention comments made by her daughter Frances, who considered Emory to be something of an ogre.

Edith’s grandfather Robert Straker was born about 1791 in the East Riding of Yorkshire, England. East Riding sounds like an area reserved for nobility in brocade riding habits to chase foxes around. Actually, it comes from the old Viking administrative term Threthingr. Robert was a farmer with Episcopal leanings, and he lived near the North Sea coast. I’ve looked at fully a hundred photos of the area, and although the landscape’s quite striking, the sky’s always stormy. It reminds me of Victoria Beckham.

Fighting Napoleon left England in a post-war depression. Because she was the victor (and in no mood to let France forget that fact) in 1820 she proclaimed Lower Canada “open for settlement”. Farmers from Yorkshire began pouring into East Hemmingford and LaColle; Robert Straker was one of the first. According to a Web site called The English Settlers of Lacolle, Quebec, “the English settlers…and their families broke into the wilderness…[they] established settlements throughout Lacolle with churches, schools, and stores. Along with their lifestyles, customs and religious beliefs, they brought with them new and better methods of farming and husbandry.”

In other words, they taught their ignorant French neighbors a thing or two.

LaColle Mills Blockhouse. Source: Wikipedia.com

Robert married an American woman, Rachael Palmer (1817) and they raised their six offspring in LaColle, Quebec. Their son Robert (1844) married Charlotte, the daughter of Godfrey Andrew and Mary Lett; among their six children was our Edith Francis/Francis Edith (the arrangement of her given names varies from source to source. She seemed to call herself Edith.)

This Robert gave me quite a start, because records show he died in the Somme, Picardie, France, in 1914. I pictured a 70-year-old doughboy dying in the trenches with the rest of the blighters. Then I recalled the Somme offensive happened in 1916. So I guess that after a lifetime of hearing his French neighbors boast about La Belle France, he decided to see for himself. It was his last hurrah.

From Being Homeless to an Ashery

The Woodleys had been in the Chazy, N.Y. area for three generations. Chazy is west of Lake Champlain in the Adirondack Mountains, just south of the Canadian border. Samuel Woodley had been born in Devonshire, England around 1770. After he immigrated about 1790, he married Phebe Lent, who belonged to an old New Amsterdam family.  They learned of land in New York State that the government was offering to settlers, so they attempted to establish a homestead in the wilderness about two miles east of a place called Flat Rock, a remote spot where the nearest neighbor was five miles away. But a plethora of bears, wolves, and an especially ornery colony of rattlesnakes, drove the family out.

Flat Rock State Forest

Samuel Woodley took refuge in Grand Isle, Vermont, but evidently did not prosper. On 26 February 1806 his family was issued an order “to depart town and find a place to settle” because “they had become destitute and without worldly goods.” They had to decamp within 20 days of being served notice, and were to be escorted to the next settlement or out of the state. In other words, the Woodleys were homeless “riffraff” and run out of town.

Because he had no choice, Samuel trudged back to the little cabin in the wilderness he had built five years before. It was far from any road, but at least it offered shelter. He finally realized it also offered a means of supporting his family.

Wikipedia explains it succinctly: “In the late 18^th and early 19^th centuries, potash production provided settlers in North America a way to obtain badly needed cash and credit as they cleared wooded land for crops. To make full use of their land, settlers needed to dispose of excess wood. The easiest way to accomplish this was to burn any wood not needed for fuel and construction. Ashes from hardwood trees could then be used to make lye, which could either be used to make soap or boiled down to make valuable potash…The American potash industry followed the woodsman’s axe across the country. After about 1820, New York replaced New England as the most important source…” The Champlain canal connected the area with Montreal, the major potash exporting port. 

Samuel had established an ashery in nearby Sciota by 1828, and in 1843 had sufficient means to will his sons 10 acres each, while his daughters received two acres each.

Noble Scots

To quote the immortal Bette Davis, “Fasten your seatbelts. It’s going to be a bumpy ride.” It turns out some of my grandmother’s forebears didn’t merely react to history.

They made it.

Her first recorded family members are no more than vague shapes in a thick Scottish mist. During the Dark Ages, they were petty kings and lairds holding sway over portions of a divided land we wouldn’t recognize today. They were baptized by their relation St. Columba, “The Apostle to the Picts” and in a great hall’s flickering firelight listened to tales of Queen Medb, Niall of the Nine Hostages, and the warrior Pendragon .

Early in the 13^th century, a personality emerges. Sir David Graham of Dundaff was born in his father’s Ayrshire castle in 1210. He served as the sheriff of Berwickshire, obtained a charter for vast tracts of land from King Alexander III and acquired the property of Kincardine in Perthshire.

His heirs were similarly involved in their country’s politics. His son Sir John de Graham was killed in 1298, fighting alongside his close friend William Wallace in the Battle of Falkirk.

Sir John de Graham. Source: clan-graham-society.org 

Another son, Sir Patrick Graham of Kincardine, was more diplomatic. Back in 1281 he had been sent to negotiate the marriage of Prince Alexander of Scotland and Margaret of Flanders. He acknowledged Margaret, Maid of Norway, as heiress to the Scottish throne. In 1292 he swore fealty to England’s Edward I and agreed to the betrothal of the Maid to Edward’s heir, the future Edward II.

This situation seems very genteel, but it wasn’t. Seven-year-old Margaret died of “seasickness” on her bridal voyage and was buried at sea. The only certainty about the child’s fate was her being tossed overboard.

Sir Patrick was summoned to attend Edward I into France in 1294, and while engaged in this “honor”, became disenchanted with the English.

In 1296, he died in the Battle of Dunbar, defending King John Balliol against English invaders. He was considered one of the noblest and wisest of the Scottish barons, and even impressed Edward’s soldiers with his bravery and gallantry. 

Battle of Dunbar. Source: Pinterest

A Marriage Made in Two Weeks?

Time, work, and constant worry had worn down the widowed Annie Beers and confined her to a wheel chair. Her children decided they needed a practical nurse to care for her, so they hired 17-year-old Frances Woodley, fresh from the Woodstock, Vermont countryside.

Frances Woodley at 17

I think of this as the Hire from Hell. Two people who never should have met collided, sparked, and married two weeks later were Earl Beers and Frances Woodley.

Up to now, I’ve felt competent in researching and explaining what I could about our ancestors’ lives. They proved to be precisely what I expected: humble working folks from alpine Europe and depressed crannies of the British Isles, dealing with History’s outrageous slings and arrows as best they could.

There was nothing about Frances Edith Woodley to indicate her background was any different. She often spoke of disliking her dowdy, “ugly” name and saw no reason to discuss her prosaic “Pennsylvania Dutch” antecedents. She wasn’t trying to mislead me or anyone else; she simply didn’t know.

A Horse Thief and a Flapper

The aforementioned Earl Beers was my legal grandfather and also loved to assert (often within earshot of his exasperated older sister Lena) that his father George had been hanged as a horse thief. This is one story I always doubted: Pasadena/lynching/1905 seemed unlikely. So I Googled “George Beers horse thief” and found nothing to make me (or my great-aunt Lena) faint in horror.

I hereby maintain and attest that George Washington Beers died on 2 February 1905 in Pasadena, with nary a rope in sight. I suspect his cause of death was pneumonia.

George Washington Beer's family was used to subsisting on slender means, but surely his death caused them great duress. There was no one to help them because by this time their feisty Uncle Patrick had been issued a one-way ticket to Smithereens. The older children must have earned money any way they could; there were few child labor laws in the early 1900’s.

In 1910 Annie was the head of her own household, living with her young sons Lu Verne, Earl, and Glenn. In 1918 she resided at 1810 North Summit Avenue, Pasadena, CA with Earl and Glenn, who were classified as “gardeners”; son Verne had married Ruby Riggs and now lived several blocks away on Summit. He called himself a “rancher”. The 1920 census shows the widow Annie living with 18-year-old Glenn and his 16-year-old bride Olive. Now Glenn was termed “head of household.”

Current home at 1810 North Summit Ave., Pasadena. Source: Google

By young manhood Earl Beers had accrued enough money to buy himself a motorcycle. He zipped around Pasadena in his spare time, and one day he spied a very young, chubby girl with a “rich old father” riding behind a suitor on another motorcycle. For the rest of his life, he claimed the girl was a wild, loose “flapper” for doing such a thing.

That girl who lived across town was my grandmother Alma Hansen on my father's side, and Earl was chagrinned when my only reaction to his tale was laughter and “Good for her!”

A Desertion?

George Beers' line can be traced to 1700, when Benjamin Taylor was born in Scotland. He had relocated to Cecil County, MD by the late 1720’s, where he married and fathered a number of children. His youngest son, born in 1744, was also named Benjamin and fought in a Maryland regiment during the Revolution.

The Patriot Benjamin’s son Edward (circa 1770) married Mary Ann Brown in Baltimore in 1792. There was a family tradition that Mary Ann’s father had been a Loyalist, but too cowardly to fight.

Edward and Mary Ann’s son Eleazer Taylor (1795) fought in a Maryland regiment during the War of 1812, and then moved to Huntingdon Co. Pa where he worked as a stonemason. He married a Pennsylvania woman named Nancy Rogers. The 1850 census recorded that she “cannot read or write”.

Their eldest daughter was Sarah, born in 1833. She married Reuben Beers in Franklin Township in August 1858, with moonlight glinting romantically off her father Eleazer’s musket.

This is where I should insert info concerning Reuben’s family, but no one knows anything about them. Likely-seeming Beers families lived in the area, but none of them claimed a “Reuben”. And he certainly didn’t claim any of them.

On 20 August 1862, Reuben Beer's (as he said he was) signed up as a Union soldier in Milesburg, PA. What happened next is a matter of considerable contention. His granddaughter Lena Beers Knox, a Mormon genealogist, claimed he died bravely in the assault on Petersburg, VA on 17 June 1864. No one else has found any record of this casualty.

All I’ve been able to find is a record of his desertion. There might have been a health emergency, or Reuben could have been a “bounty jumper” who took the enlistment bonus the government was offering and headed for the hills.

Sarah was about five months pregnant at the time of her marriage, and gave birth to little Martha on Christmas Day, 1858 in Riddlesburg, PA. Her son George Washington Beers followed on 22 May 1861. Less than a year and a half later, Reuben had vanished from her life. Or did he disappear even earlier? On a genealogical form prepared for me by Lena Beers Knox’s daughter Mary, there is a notation that “Reuben never saw his son”, implying he was off soldiering. But check the dates; he hadn’t yet enlisted. It looks like the couple was estranged before George was born.

Did Reuben gallantly die for his country in the 148^th Regiment, Pennsylvania Infantry, or did he merely flee everything he viewed as entrapment?

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.

A Visit to George Washington's Army

Loretto was a small place.

Michael and Catherine’s son John Gibbons married Maria Anna Magdalen Conrad (1839) the daughter of John Conrad III and Mary Ellen Schmal. Yes, we’re back to the Conrads; John G. married his mother’s step-granddaughter.

Mary Ellen Schmal-Small had an interesting background: Her father Johannes Schmal, certainly sounds like a German immigrant. Her mother (brace yourself) was named Mary Margaret Storm and her father was the potter Joseph Storm, the brother of Maria Storm who married Jacob Adams of the Shropshire family.

Mercifully, Joseph Storm had the good sense to marry a non-relative, Margret Eck. Her father Johannes “Hannes” Eck was born in Switzerland in 1720, and immigrated with his father Jacob Eck, an Alsatian gunsmith, to establish a homestead on a heavily-wooded site west of Tylersport, PA. Once there, he constructed a stone barn that stood until the 1960’s.

Hannes, now officially known as John, in 1767 was appointed constable of Salford Township (in southeast Pennsylvania) by the Court of Quarter Sessions in Philadelphia. He objected strenuously to this time-consuming honor, but grudgingly fulfilled the duties of the office.

The Landis Homestead, built in Salford Township and dating to 1839.
Source: Wikipedia

Hannes/John was likely picked for appointment because he was a fairly prosperous man; when he died (1809) his estate was worth 1,601 pounds, 19 shillings and 8 pence ($8,000.00).

One of Margaret Eck’s sisters recalled the abundance of their childhood: woods alive with a plentitude of deer. Grapes, red plums, hazelnuts, shellbarks, huckleberries and crab apples all growing wild. Hannes raised hemp and flax for making cloth. Rye was grown for bread, as in Europe, and beans were ground into it to increase the yield. Sickles were used to harvest rye, corn and buckwheat, and the womenfolk helped with this and all the other farm chores.

At one point in the Revolutionary War, Hannes learned that George Washington and his army were encamped by the Skippack River, about seven miles from the farm. So he loaded some of his children into a wagon and they went to see the novel sight.

We know all this because sometime in the 1850’s the Eck sister, now an old woman, started reminiscing about the Good Old Days. Her granddaughter grabbed pen and paper and scribbled it all down. I recall a similar experience with my Beers grandparents, who were  puzzled as to why a young person would be interested in the past.

By the way, the Eck family was known in Switzerland and Alsace as Egg, only it was pronounced “Eck”; when they arrived in the colonies they changed the spelling to Eck.

So boggle your brains trying to figure the precise degree of consanguinity here. And just imagine what the appallingly inbred British royal family’s genealogists go through.

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.

Magdalena Struck by Lightening at 104

Thomas Adams's widow, Magdalena had just given birth to her last child (at 54!) but was hardly incapacitated by grief.  She inherited many responsibilities, and lived up to every darned one of them. She continued to produce fabric for the family’s clothes on her two spinning wheels. She raised all her children alone and successfully managed their farm and several other properties her husband had accumulated.

Inscription says, "who died at the age of 104 loaded with years and virtuous deeds." Source: Albert Ledoux

Magdalena survived her husband by a good 50 years, and lived to be 104. Family tradition grants her no ordinary death; she was struck down by a lightening bolt. If I lived in the area I’d bring her flowers.

"Adams Choice," Conewago Township, Pennsylvania

Maria Storm married Jacob Adams, the son of an Englishman. His family had lived for generations in a lovely portion of the Midlands called Shropshire, but you can’t eat even the prettiest landscape. Today Shropshire is officially touted as having “hills of outstanding beauty,” but that’s just Chamber of Commerce-type poppycock. It’s still a rural, sparsely populated backwater. Its official flower is the round-leafed sundew, which grows in bogs and eats bugs.

Bogs. Carnivorous plants. Abysmal poverty. Whee.

Photo by Jan Raes

Jacob’s grandfather William had been born in 1700, and his grandmother Jane first saw light in a soggy bit of Shropshire called Waters Upton in 1708. His father Thomas (born 1735) crossed over to the colonies looking for a more prosperous life. He found it, and a German-born bride named Magdalena, in Pennsylvania. He was only nineteen, and she about thirteen years older when they wed. But Magdalena proved to be one tough cookie, and I’m proud to be her offshoot.

Thomas Ignatius Adams was no slouch himself. In 1756, when he was 21, he purchased 118 acres of prime Conewago Township land that became known as “Adams Choice.” First he built his family a log cabin, and eventually replaced it with a brick farmhouse. He and Magdalena provided their nine children with at least eight beds, cooked their meals on two five-plate iron stoves, and had a “Walnut Dyning Table” to sit their pewter dinnerware on. For special occasions, food was served in “Delf Bowls” (from the Netherlands); when not in use, the crockery was stored in a corner “cubart.” They also had a clock, a looking glass, and a few books.

The farm itself flourished: Fields waving with wheat, barley and rye, and pastures supporting 11 horses, 25 cows, two steers, three bulls, 28 sheep, four lambs and 10 shoats.

The new land was good to Thomas, and he loved it enough to fight for it. Old records credit him with both “Provincial and Revolutionary Service”. According to the National Archives, Captain Adams served in one of the ”Three Independent Companies and First Regiment of Maryland Regulars in the Service of the United Colonies commanded by Colonel Smallwood in September and October 1776.”

Alas, Thomas’s career as a Patriot was short. He died on 5 December 1776. Was he wounded in action? Did he die from a farm accident, or merely catch a bad cold? I can’t find his cause of death anywhere.

This Shropshire-born man’s slate tombstone was, oddly, inscribed in German. I suppose Magdalena wanted to remind her Germanic neighbors of her late husband’s piety. This is an English translation of his epitaph: Now my struggle has come to an end. My run is complete. I go to my Jesus and say to you all good night.

The Sturms, Members of the Reformed Church

My mother's first known ancestors are Sebastian Sturm and his wife, whose maiden name was Closs but given name has been lost in the sands of time. Sebastian was born about 1610 in the town of Schifferstadt, located in the area now called Rhineland-Palatinate. Photos show a charming place full of old half-timbered buildings, so quaint that one suspects its inhabitants still bustle about in dirndls and lederhosen. The entire state is one of West Germany’s jewels: “An authentic treasure-trove of romantic castles, friendly locals, and exquisite wines”. Rieslings, to be precise. In short, it’s postcard-worthy.

Eltz Castle in Rhineland-Palatinate
Source: erdekesvilog.hu

The Sturms initially enjoyed living there, and must have easily supported the many children each generation produced. Believe me, we are only a few among their thousands of descendants. It is unclear how many generations of Sturms lived in Schifferstadt before Sebastian, but I’ve mused they may have wandered in as the last ice sheet receded.

Sebastian’s son Johann Peter (1630) and his frau Anna Barbara remained in their pretty little burg, as did their grandson Christian and his bride Anna Barbara, daughter of Paulus Gah. Christian’s son Johann Jacob was born in Schifferstadt in 1722, but by that time religious strife was in the air and ended the German idyll for our branch of the Sturms.

The Reformed Church had started in Switzerland and spread into every corner of Europe, although opposed by Inquisition fiends and rabid Jesuits committing “awful atrocities” (according to an old Reformed document I stumbled across). Although the new sect appealed to the previously Catholic Sturms, for many years their peaceful existence in the Palatinate was spared because its Elector Frederick III was Reformed himself. But after his death, really nasty religious wars ravaged the land and finally a series of Catholic princes gained power in the area. Naturally they persecuted members of the Reformed Church in every possible way: forbade them to practice their faith, undermined them economically, and threatened them with imprisonment with a tad of torture thrown in for good measure. Schifferstadt was no longer the Garden of Eden.

A young German Reformed schoolmaster from the Rhineland Palatinate realized his homeland was a lost cause and journeyed to the Maryland colony, where in 1745 he founded “Frederick Town” as a haven for his beleaguered countrymen. Our several times great-grandfather Johann Jacob Sturm followed him in 1749 on a ship from Rotterdam via Cowes, changing his name to “John Storm” in the process. The ship’s log waspishly identifies him as illiterate.
Frederick, Maryland must have been an exciting place to live. Its primary language remained German until 1846, when a flood of starving Irish immigrants changed the town’s demographics. Numerous refugees from Deutschland’s various kingdoms and principalities paused there before they migrated westward and became “Pennsylvania Dutch”. It was also a stopping place along a route that led down into the “Great Valley”, which we now poetically call the Shenandoah.

Johann and his German-born wife Mary Elizabeth Tanner/Donner (this is uncertain) eventually joined many other ethnic Germans in following an old Indian trail into Pennsylvania. They settled around Conewago (an Indian word meaning (“place of the rapids”) township where they had a daughter Maria in 1765.