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.

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.