One of my all time favorite stories of human nature is the one about Saint Francis of Assisi and The Wolf.
In summary: A vicious wolf terrorized a town that Francis visited. Francis talks to The Wolf, who reveals that he was hurt and abandoned by his pack, and has been eating what he can catch, thus terrorizing said village. The Wolf repents and becomes a champion to the town, protecting all its inhabitants.
People are infinitely complicated. It would be so much easier to write people off as "this" or "that". Good or bad. Actions as malicious or well-intended. Sad to say, like the wolf, people do what they can to survive- regardless of how that may look. I could go on and on- but the topic is fascinating and spans history, psychology and biology. It knows no species. When the individual or group is trying to merely get past another day, things can get ugly.
This must be remembered when researching family history (especially if, like me, you bring in the component of a genogram to further understand relationships). When you dig, sometimes you can find some pretty unpleasant subjects. I gave Aunt Marion as an example in a previous post, but I'd be lying if I said that was it- my history's only dirty secret. Before his death, my Uncle Don recounted his WWII experience. He lost most of his friends in Germany. Have had to pull weapons off dead bodies to continue to survive in battle. He took trophies of kills off of enemy troops. Don't came back from war with PTSD that changed him- made him a person my family didn't always like. I loved my uncle, and I now understand his unrelenting pain. In an era when "shell shock" was shrugged off, he suffered. He drowned that pain with alcohol and gambling. He tried every day to survive.
When you look through a family history, you could find many things. Illness, abuse, abortion, imprisonment, poverty, violence, and more. All I can try to do is understand, talk to the wolf, so to speak. Try to understand and do justice to the memory of that person and learn from it. Honor it. Educate myself.
Today, I'm actually going to be tackling an issue on my husband's maternal side of the family: I am much more familiar with my own, obviously, and much of the information from I have gathered from his side has been paperwork, so far. No huge oral history to go on.
But first, a quick primer on who is being discussed. Here are the players in today's post.
Georgia: Stephen's mother, my MIL.
Elsie: Georgia's mother. She passed away in 1971, when Georgia was about 11. Another sad story for another day.
Catherine W: Elsie's Mother
Richard W: Elsie's father. A Brakeman for the Pennsylvania Railroad. (Beav's train obsession is clearly genetic).
Together, Richard and Catherine has sixteen children. Sixteen. One-six. Four away from twenty. This is an overwhelming number to me. Granted, not all of these children lived past childhood or infancy- as was the way of the world then. Still and all, on the 1930 census, the house is jam packed at twelve. The maintained the same address between 1920-1930.
I looked up the info on the house. Three bedrooms, rented, at the time, fairly new. The house is in a neighborhood near a huge train yard, so the location makes a lot of sense (Richard worked for the railroad)
...
I grazed this side of the family once before, back in 2012-2013 when I was working my my original genogram for a class. I didn't really dig, I wasn't a part of this story yet. Before I clicked out of the screen, bearing the information on the Welker family, one thing DID raise my eyebrow.
Here is how the family is listed on the 1930 census:
Richard, 47
Catherine, 40
Marian, 21
Richard, 19
John, 16
Victor, 15
Woodrow, 13
Stanley, 12
Ernest, 8
Herman, 10
Robert, 5
Elsie 4
Matthew (I'm not sure who this belonged to...listed as a grandchild) 4
Delores (She is Marian's daughter) 1.
So thats that. Fast forward ten years, to the 1940 census. Now, you would expect some children to leave the house. Marian left with her child and had more. The others, well, show up. In a different household. With the same first and last names, but listed as the children of an older man in a neighboring town. John, Victor, Stanley, Herman, and Elsie are all listed as the man's children. Richard and Catherine are listed as living in the same township, but just with each other.
Something happened between 1930 and 1940. What gives me pause about this is what occurred and where in 1942. But first, let me back up, to the years between 1935 and 1938.
All of the players involved are listed as having lived in Lemoyne in 1935. Probably not a coincidence, Victor married Elizabeth, and in 1938, she died, in that very town.
Now for 1941-1942.
Richard died February 9th, 1942 of TB. I wasn't surprised by the cause, I have found a couple of my own relatives who had died of tuberculosis. The other cause of death I couldn’t really make out at first. It wasn't his cause that caught my eye. It was the place.
Harrisburg State Hospital was a state owned psychiatric hospital that operated from 1851 until 2006. It has quite a legacy, for better and for worse, especially locally. (Actually, go watch "Girl, Interrupted". The movie was filmed there.)
I didn't jump to conclusions. I looked up the hospital to see if they also housed patients suffering from TB. And yes, they did. You can see pictures of the building and find out information about its history here: http://hsh.thomas-industriesinc.com/Building_Tuberculosis.htm
Here is what didn’t really add up for me. See the red circle in the picture? And how long Richard was attended to? Six months. How long was the duration of the TB? One month. That little word that I had trouble with says two years. He was there for two years. But not for TB, in its entirety.
I decided to take a closer look at the secondary COD. “Paresis”. I googled it: that most commonly refereed to “General Paresis of the Insane.” I will save you the trouble of looking it up. The mystery was solved. It wasn’t pretty. That diagnosis was given to those who were at the end phases of syphilis- where the brain had been chewed to bits by the STI.
...
I made the decision to tell my mother in law. She is a relatively conservative woman, so I wasn’t sure how she would receive this news. Lucky for me, she found the report rather amusing. Georgia had NO idea that this is how he died- The family was told he fell off a train.
Nope/ Not unless “falling of a train” is a euphemism for dieing of TB after being admitted to a psychiatric facility for an STI.
One of the parts I so enjoy about genealogy is finding out the "hidden" details of family life. That can be pleasant or unpleasant, but always intriguing. I guess you could say finding out these things about immediate family could be pretty dangerous, like it or not, the perception we have of the people we love is rather fragile. But, lucky for me, my most interesting find (thus far) has been about my great-grandmother's aunt, Marion.
I will say, I did meet Marion, though I do not remember. She died in 1998, at the ripe old age of 88, though she seemed older. I remember more family stories, told around kitchen tables, about Marion than ever meeting her in person. According to multiple sources:
1) Deeply unattractive. My grandmother tried to correct this "No, she wasn't ugly, she just wasn't pretty.[...]There was nothing pretty about her". In a later conversation, Aunt Audrey had a more direct opinion. "She was as ugly as a mud post"
2) She was jealous. My aunt Audrey (my great-grandmother's sister) told me how Lillian, Marion's older sister, was beautiful, sweet and desirable. Marion scorned the attention her sister got. Lillian was engaged, and shortly before her wedding, passed away. She was buried in her wedding dress. Frank Miller, the man who Lillian was to marry, asked Marion to marry him a short time later. She immediately shot him down, telling him that she had been second choice her entire life, and he was crazy if he thought she would be with him.
3) She wasn't kind to most people. This is self explanatory. She barked orders and after the death of her husband, Lester, she lived alone. Marion did, however, have a soft spot for Aunt Audrey and my grandmother, Darlene. Oh yes, and she also had a soft spot for animals. "I wanted to run over her more than I wanted to run with her" was about what Audrey had to say on caring for Marion.
4) She was a crazy cat hoarder. According to my aunt, in her old age, Marion would rescue any animal in need of help- and thus she acquired a larger-than-normal number of cats. Her house was a wreck, she smelled like cat urine.
5) She was in a nursing home. This is the only image of have of her- a picture of my great grandmother, grandmother, mother, aunts, and cousins, all standing around Marion's wheelchair in her nursing home. She only ended up here after Aunt Audrey could no longer care for her alone, but Audrey continued to visit her regularly until Marion passed.
6) She smoked and drank like a sailor.
(Marion, left, Lillian, right)
I tell you these things to paint for you the picture I had of Marion. Bitter, unpleasant, crude, alone, angry, smelling of cat urine.
And this is the image of her I had, until about two years ago, when I was sent on my first genogram adventure for one of my social work classes. We were to pay special attention to relationships. Marion? Hostile. To everyone. Jealous of her sister. Reclusive.
Marion is seated front and center, in front of Lillian and between Laura and Ambrose.
Around this time, Aunt Audrey added one more bit of information to the story: Marion had a baby out of wedlock, and gave it up for adoption. She never had any more biological children.(Later, Audrey would admit that she had known about this child- he was born with an array of health issues)
So, as I trolled back on Ancestry.com, peering through Census data, Social Security indexes and graves, I discovered him.
Paul.
He was there, on the 1930 census, living with Laura ( my great-great-great grandmother and Marion's mother), Lillian, and Marion. All of the forms of this generation listed who the head of household was (Laura) and how each member of the household was related to the head. Marion: Daughter. Lillian: Daughter. Paul: Grandson.
The baby wasn't given up for adoption at all.
Through a series of links, I found Paul's grave. He died the year that census was taken, 1930. As did Lillian, which I knew about. Aunt Audrey had told me the story- how it devastated the family, how she was buried in the dress she was to be married in. Lillian was special. Her memory was special and her photo cherished. She was mourned in public.
And Paul, Marion's boy? Adopted, or so the family said.
As I stared at the screen that day, a sadness came over me. Suddenly, I understood some of Marion's bitterness.
I let it go after that. Life goes on, I don't live in my family records.
But today, I found his death certificate online. Filled in mostly by Marion herself. Her hand writing delicate and wispy. She filled in the child's details: when he was born, where they lived together. She wrote her name and the name of the his father, William. William had never been on my radar. (I will come back to him).
An official clearly filled in Paul's cause of death. Influenza, with bronchitis as a secondary cause.Only months after Lillian died.
I just cannot imagine a time when the flu could so easily take a person in a family, in the same year. I could not imagine Aunt Marion, at 19, signing the death certificate of a son that I am sure no one wanted her to raise. But that is the way of my family, we do what we want just to show we can. But, alas, she never got the opportunity to prove herself, and then, to add insult to injury, the family spreads the tail that she gave him up for adoption.
I recalled that this was 1930, pregnancies outside of marriage were a big deal. And even if that happened (as it did other times in the family tree), the couple married and pretended that the baby just came early, even though her or she was huge. So this made me wonder, where was this William? Who was he? The best answer I can give is this: He was either a middle aged, habitual bachelor who lived in the same town as Marion or a young man who lived far away- who ended up marrying a year or two later and having more children. Either way, they didn't end up together, and either of those occurrences would have been a pretty scandalous situation.
I leafed through some of my own documents of Marion's, given to me by Audrey. Marion married Lester five years later, evidenced by a floral guest book, a marriage license, and a short article in the local paper. She did not wear white, but deep purple. Her life moved forward eventually. But she never had any more children. And then Marion became the bitter woman the family talks about.
These discoveries sadden me. Poor Marion, called ugly and crass by her family. And after the death of her son, she thumbed her nose at her family as much as she could. She didn't keep a tidy house, she participated in "unladylike" and "non-Christian" activities. She through all of her trust into her furry children. I can understand why.
It's days like this I wish time-travel was actually a thing. Well, often, I wish this because I'd really like to be trapped in a Tardis with David Tennant, but this time, I want to go back and hug my the aunt I only ever knew as awful.
This, friends, is why I want to look deeper into my background, so that I may honor the stories of the Marions in my family and in my new Beaver family.
