Frances and Earl

Let us return to 17-year-old Frances Woodley, who had vague dreams of becoming a doctor. But then her client’s son took one look at her, plunged his hands down her bodice to fondle her breasts, and she didn’t know what to do. I’m sure she turned pink and got flustered, as she did all her life whenever she fancied some male was interested in her. She had no way of knowing this man was morally unbalanced and took liberties with every female he ran into. She was young and naïve; he was the first man to drool over her.

Earl Beers’ psychic sister Lena had envisioned Frances at a clothesline hanging out diapers, and sure enough by the time her mother Edith died, there were two baby sons. By this time Frances realized she had married in haste; another man smelled her discontent and started sweet-talking her. Offended by her husband’s roving eye, she commenced a sporadic affair with her brother-in-law Verne (which was confirmed decades later by Verne’s wife Ruby). Then, to her horror, she became pregnant with a daughter her husband named Anna May.

Earl and Frances' family lived in various homes in Pasadena. Source: http://www.buncee.com/

In later years, Frances admitted she hadn’t wanted this female child of uncertain paternity, so she deliberately tried to starve the baby. Finally a doctor, upon examining the emaciated, rickets-ridden little waif, threatened to file a complaint with the police. It wasn’t the last time my grandmother was threatened with the law.

Three years later she had another daughter, Virginia Pearl. She liked this pretty girl better, but resentment and bitterness made her an abusive mother. She beat her first four children hard and often; children do try one’s patience and Frances had no patience at all.  Her life’s possibilities had somehow been stolen from her, and it was everyone’s fault but her own.

Earl was worse. The Depression made it hard for a gardener with little education to support his family, so he depended on charity baskets for help.  When his sons Bill and Roy defied him, he reacted savagely. Occasionally the boys had week-long vacations from school while the welts and bruises around their necks faded away. By the time Anna and Virginia were toddlers, their father often plopped them down on his lap and taught them to pleasure him sexually. His demands on them grew as their bodies developed, and he was impervious to their pleas and tears.

Frances didn’t even attempt to protect her children. She would merely pout until he let his sobbing daughters escape, and then turn his amorous attentions on her.

Actually, my grandmother didn’t do much of anything. She was determined not to be a drudge like her own mother, so she became something much worse. Her house was always filthy, and her children were too mortified to invite in their friends. In truth they were ashamed of themselves: their smelly bodies, greasy hair, dirty clothes and reeking underwear. Frances also disliked cooking, and her husband seldom found a hot meal awaiting him when he got home from work. She saw no reason to put herself out for his sake.

They snarled and yipped at each other like a pair of rabid curs. My grandparents poisoned their own lives, and the lives of everyone around them, because they were trapped together. In the 21^st century when people realize they made a mistake, they are able to get divorced almost as quickly as they got married. Only the wealthy had that option in the first part of the 20^th.

Frances finally called the police when her daughters were teenagers. Earl was carted off, but she was horrified when a prosecutor threatened to order her arrest as an accessory.  So, with the help of her brother-in-law Verne, she took her daughters and went into hiding. Because no one appeared in court to testify against Earl, charges against him were dropped.

It amazes me that four of their five offspring survived their childhoods. 

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!”

The Journey to California

The following narrative is based on conversations I once had with Frances and William Earl Beers. I was unsure on how much credence to give their tales, but I’ve found surprising substantiation in official documents available online.

Whether widowed or deserted, Sarah Beers had two children to raise. She married John P. Noel in 1866. He may have been a local man, but family legend claims he was from Ireland. Around 1867 she gave birth to their son, Patrick Henry Noel.

When the family transplanted itself to California is a mystery. Online records show that a John Noel died in 1885. Their son Patrick, a miner, evidently annoyed powerful union officials in Pennsylvania and was blacklisted. Sarah and her son changed their last names to “Murphy” so he could work as a “scab”: a man who went into the mines while union members were striking for better pay and conditions. Eventually mother and son journeyed to Sutter Creek, CA where no one knew them.

Sutter Creek United Methodist Church, built in 1862.

Sarah's son, George Beers headed westward too after hearing there was gold in Them Thar Hills, or at least a promise of employment. He used an old-fashioned covered wagon to transport his wife and daughter Lena; today descendants proudly display dishes and other artifacts that miraculously survived the odyssey. In 1890 his wife Annie gave birth in a place referred to as “No Man’s Land, Oklahoma”.  Her next child was born in Inyo County, CA in 1892; another son followed in Flintridge in 1895 as they traveled around California looking for opportunities. George was visiting his half-brother Patrick when his son William Earl was born in Sutter Creek on the Fourth of July 1897. Their last child was born in Pasadena in 1901, and there they finally settled.

Annie gave an interview to a 1900 census taker, and one of her statements haunts me. She gave her number of living children as five, while her total number of children was eight. Her peripatetic lifestyle had taken a heavy toll.
Sarah Taylor Beers Noel died in Sutter Creek on 17 April 1896. She’s buried in the Sutter Creek City Cemetery under the name “Sarah C. Murphy.” It was her last act of subterfuge.

The inscription says Sarah C. Murphy, Born Blair Co. Penn, June 3, 1833, Died Sutter Creek, April 17, 1896

Her son, the scab miner “Pat Murphy”, was still subterfuging his overalls off. On 16 October 1899 the 32-year-old married Mary King, who may have been a widow. Published notices of this union, a 1900 census record, and a photo of him with his brother George are the only proofs I’ve found that Patrick actually existed. On the census form, he claimed that both his Da and his Darlin’ Mither had been born in the Auld Sod.

A strong strain of blarney runs in this family, and it didn’t originate in the Auld Sod.

By the 1910 census, there was no trace of our elusive “Irish” miner. Did Patrick once again anger the wrong people? Family lore claims he was killed by dynamite in a mining “accident.” As William “Earl” Beers often gleefully explained to me, there wasn’t enough left of his Uncle Pat to fill a cigar box. Which is why Patrick isn’t buried in Sutter Creek next to his mother: his obliterated remains didn’t require a grave.

 

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.