Posts Tagged ‘ancestors’
Time Travel
By simply driving south on the gravel road winding along Isabelle Creek, I felt transported to the time my ancestors lived there in the second half of the 19th century. We were on our way to the Pierce County Historical Association.
Our visit to their office in Bay City was a treasure. The old log cabin they have preserved is from near the community of Esdaile where the Sleeper mill was located. Standing in that structure made it even easier to imagine we were no longer in the year 2024.
Our conversations with volunteers covered multiple subjects, including how quickly things changed when the railroad arrived. I learned how to interpret the symbols for structures on old property maps: round = log; square = frame; triangle = brick.
Something I didn’t anticipate was a tip that old newspaper information is available from the Library of Congress online through their Chronicling America site where it is possible to search historic newspaper pages from 1756-1963.
I took a stab at “S. W. Hays” in Wisconsin between 1855-1895 and found this morsel in The River Falls Journal:
Now, this is particularly cool because, in addition to my ancestor Stephen Hays, it includes mention of my 2nd-great grandfather Charles Church and refers to “C. Betcher” who owned the lumber business Stephen (S.W. Hays) worked for. The only family missing is someone from the Sleeper clan. That’s okay though because when I searched for Joseph Sleeper there are a large number of pertinent results.
In fact, I discovered there was a summons published in the Prescott Journal about a complaint between Joseph and his wife, Abagail:
Spring is the wrong time of year for me to be discovering a new resource for losing hours on end searching old newspapers for the names of my ancestors. There are acres of grass that need mowing outside!
I hope today will be a little dryer out there than it was yesterday.
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History Open
Today is the first Sunday in May. I can’t count how many first Sundays of the month have passed without me taking advantage of the regularly scheduled open house at my county’s History Society. Today will be different.
On a day when the sun is shining bright in a clear blue sky, we are going to depart from our little sanctuary and drive past the little village of Esdaile (where my Great-Great-Great Grandfather Joseph Sleeper owned a sawmill) beside Isabelle Creek, on our way to the Pierce County Historical Association in Bay City.
It will be my second visit to the main office of the PCHA. When I first discovered that my Great-Great Grandfather Stephen Hays once owned land in Pierce County, I made my way to Bay City to learn more about him.
I discovered so much more than I bargained for that day. Suddenly, it was revealed that three of my ancestral families were living in the area in the 1860s.
Recently, the PCHA announced that local Historian, Mary Beeler had published (at the age of 92) a book about logging and log buildings in early Pierce County. I want to see if there might be more information about Joseph’s mill or Stephen’s wagon-making.
The rain has ended for a day, but the over-saturated ground remains too wet to do much work of substance. A small group of hearty souls stopped by yesterday to walk the labyrinth and enjoy Cyndie’s baked treats in the lingering mist following another half-inch of accumulation.
No other visitors are expected for a while, so I can let the grass grow crazy while waiting for the ground to dry up a little.
I suppose I could pull more weeds out of the gravel loop around the hay shed today, but that’s not as enticing as exploring more local history.
Maybe, in the end, I’ll do a little of both.
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Ancestor Cloud
I made a word cloud that includes 5 generations of surnames of our children’s ancestors. That is 64 names: 2 parents; 4 grandparents; 8 great-grandparents; 16 great-great-grandparents; and 32 great-great-great-grandparents.
The name Hays occurs 5 times but there are only 4 Friswolds because that name changed from Frisvold four generations back. Cyndie’s mother’s and my mother’s maiden names show up 4 times each.
Our kids are all those people. I’m only half of the people named and Cyndie is the other half.
The kids visited yesterday for our immediate family Christmas gathering and I was mentioning how different from each other Cyndie and I are. Julian then pointed out, “And I am both of you.”
We definitely contain multitudes.
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Free Weekend
Happy last day of 2022! Next year will be an odd year. No, literally, 2023 is an odd number. Duh.
To all you history buffs and genealogy fans out there, this weekend, the Star Tribune newspaper archives are free to view! What’s the first thing I checked? “John W. Hays,” of course.
What I found wasn’t new information for me, since that is also the name of my great-grandfather whom I have searched for many times before, but I had forgotten about this wonderful morsel.
Great-grandpa was a trailblazing cyclist.
08 Sep 1900, 10 – Minneapolis Daily Times at Star Tribune (Minneapolis – St. Paul)
The article was published in 1900 looking back at an event that occurred in 1886 when they road the giant 56-inch wheel.
I have cycling in my blood.
Speaking of wheels, the father of that 1880s John W. Hays was none other than my great-great-grandfather Stephen who lived in Pierce County, WI, and made wagon wheels.
I am such a product of my ancestors.
I hope you will click the link above and check out the article that was beneath that old photo. And, if you are interested in what was in the Minneapolis newspapers going back to 1867, it’s free this weekend at https://startribune.newspapers.com/.
Happy odd New Year tomorrow!
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Wagon Wheels
All these years, I’ve been walking past them. Mounted as handrails on either side of the steps to our front door are two wagon wheels.
They don’t actually make for great handrails, so I’ve never been all that enamored with them. In fact, I suspected they were simply replicas. I’m a little embarrassed to admit I’ve never really looked at these wheels closely, despite shoveling snow around them every winter.
Last week, when Matthew was here sealing the logs of our house, he pointed out that the wheels deserved some attention, too, and that they were simply screwed into the steps with three lag bolts each. He advised I remove them to sand each one down and put a couple coats of sealer on them myself.
So, I removed them.
It didn’t take long for me to discover these are REAL wagon wheels. Given the fantastic discoveries this past February that three families of my ancestors lived just about ten miles south of here in the 1860s-70s, and that my 2nd-great-grandfather, Stephen W. Hays was a wagon maker who managed a factory that manufactured wheels… having my hands on these beautiful relics is synchronous to an exponential degree for me.
I doubt it would be possible to verify the provenance of these wagon wheels, but I’m happy to just marvel over the weird coincidence of my working on these genuine wheels, given all I’ve learned about what was happening here 150-years ago that my ancestors’ hands were involved in creating.
I’ve got a second coat of sealer to apply and then I will remount these two to the front steps, and I will never walk past them again with the same cavalier regard as I had before.
Of all the features to find mounted on the front steps of a house we bought while entirely clueless about the history of the region and my ancestors’ contributions to it… It just boggles my mind.
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Property Search
I vaporized a few hours in the Pierce County courthouse again yesterday. It took a couple tries to get past the clerk keeping the “gate” because she couldn’t find my application to research genealogy. When I figured out what she was looking for, we were able to establish I hadn’t filled out an application the week before because it wasn’t needed to search land records.
I already have the vital information they were being cautious to guard. I was simply seeking to locate land descriptions for property my ancestors might possibly have owned. In the days that have passed since last posting about finding a second family of past relations living nearby in Pierce County, I discovered that there was a third family here at the same time.
It probably shouldn’t be all that surprising that proximity contributed to marital relationships. The 1875 census for the township of Hartland tallied a mere 1,170 people. There likely were limited numbers of qualified partners from which to choose. Evidence reveals more than one of the ladies in these nuptials were still in their teens, so the definition of “qualified” was a bit different back then.
In addition to 2nd-great-grandfather, Stephen W. Hays, and the Church family of my great-grandmother, Minnie, there was the family of Joseph Sleeper, a mechanic, sawmill operator, and civil war era soldier sharpshooter. Joseph is a 3rd-great-grandfather, the father of Minnie’s mother, Sarah who married Charles F. Church.
So, there was Stephen Hays (b.1829) the wagon maker, Joseph Sleeper (b.1824) the sawmill operator, whose daughter married Charles Church (b.1845) one-time teacher, mechanic, and factory worker, whose daughter married Stephen’s oldest son, John W. Hays (b.1860). Given the nature of their occupations, it is easy to imagine the possibilities of their coming to know each other within the few miles where records show them all living.
How about an exercise in locating a plat of land?
In the book of Grantees for the time span of my interest, I found three records of Grantee Joseph Sleeper purchasing a warranty deed in 1861 and 1862 for land in Hartland Township. The cropped image from the platbook for Hartland in Pierce County in 1877-78 shown above includes sections 14-15-16 (counting right-to-left) and 21-22-23 (left-to-right).
Joseph’s property is in section 15. Those sections are first divided into quarters of 160 acres each, and then each quarter is repeatedly divided into quarters again for plots of land that go down to 40. Half-divisions will render plots of 80 acres and 20 acres, respectively. Cyndie and I purchased a 20-acre subsection up in the Martell Township about 12-miles north of what is shown here.
See if you can spot a 40-acre parcel that Joseph bought from Selah Strickland in the SW1/4(40acres) of the SE1/4(160acres) of Section 15.
Find section 15. Visualize the SouthEast quarter of that section. Finally, focus on the SouthWest quarter of that space.
Hint: It says, “GRIST MILL SAW MILL”
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Surprisingly Close
It didn’t take me long to find the 1880 US census record for my 2nd-great-grandfather, Stephen W. Hays in Pierce County. In an almost comical confirmation of the unreliability of name spellings when doing research, the record I found was listed for “Stiven” Hays. I’m not clear whether that was attributable to an initial misspelling, the handwriting of the actual census recorder, or the loose interpretation by the subsequent person(s) scanning and labeling the originals into digital form.
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The Hays family of Stephen and Judith and two of their sons are counted on the pages for Esdaile, Wisconsin. I was stunned to find this previously-unknown-to-me community is on the equivalence of 650th Street just about 13 miles south of our current home. Our driveway is also on 650th Street, which is an amazing bit of synchronicity and surprisingly close, in my opinion.
This opens up the next level of investigation, as I strive to discover just exactly what address they resided at during the thirteen years from 1871 to 1884 that they were in Pierce county, as reported in Stephen’s obituary article.
I don’t have deep knowledge of this period of history, but my intuition senses that relocating as often as the article indicates they did probably wasn’t an insignificant feat. It’s possible that it wasn’t as big a deal for them as I imagine, but I doubt I would be up to that frequency of big moves. At the same time, if it was actually a huge task for them, it begs the question to me of why they moved as often and as far away as they did.
The 1880 Census lists Stephen’s occupation as “Wagon Maker.” A quick review of wagons and wainwrights reveals that the 1880s were a boom time for that mode of horse-drawn transporting of both humans and goods so maybe Stephen was simply following opportunities in his field.
The accompanying portrait of the man evokes more of a Lincoln-esque stature than the shorter, rounder impressions of male Hays faces going back from me to my dad, to his dad, all the way to Stephen’s son, my great-grandfather John W. Hays. Maybe it’s the beard. I couldn’t grow something like that if my life depended on it.
Maybe there was more influence on appearance from the maternal sides of those generations after Stephen.
Cyndie and I hope to take a drive to explore the properties around Esdaile this weekend to see if we stumble on anything that looks over a hundred years old. If I see any antique-looking wagon wheels propped up somewhere, you can bet I’ll start asking questions.
I’ve ordered a historic map from the Pierce County historical society and plan to do some research on land records. As long as we’ve discovered they lived this close, it would mean a lot to me to also learn if they owned property that I could now visit knowing my forefather had once walked that same land, too.
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Relative Something 