Posts Tagged ‘ancestry’
Methodical Research
Since our weather pattern yesterday offered just enough periods of rain to keep grass too wet to mow, Cyndie and I busied ourselves with indoor pursuits much of the day. While Cyndie unleashed her creative artistry on making spectacular custom cards for persons known and to be determined, I resumed an attempt to gather local news reports from the 1800s that mention the names of my ancestors.
I find myself easily distracted down rabbit holes of stories both trivial and dramatic on the pages of the old editions of The River Falls Journal, even though they don’t contain family names.
There are simple, yet creative mentions of babies born, comments of individual comings and goings, reports of illnesses and serious injuries, and brief mentions of crop successes and failures. Occasionally, there are official statements of “found” livestock on one’s property that will be kept for their own if not otherwise claimed.
There was a report of a horse that attempted to leap a picket fence but it was unsuccessful and did not survive. In another incident, a man allowed horses pulling his wagon to enter a lake for a drink of water. They began to sink up to their necks! In that case, somehow all were saved.
I decided to transcribe just the portions in which my ancestors were named and sort them by date to better organize the information I was uncovering. I regret that in this form it lacks some of the exciting drama of others in their community being mentioned simultaneously.
These should really be in an olde-timey font, but here is what I gathered yesterday afternoon:
River Falls Journal March 29, 1877
Esdaile
Mr. Betcher has the largest and best stock of hub and spoke timber on hand now that has ever been in this place. S. W. Hays is foreman here for Mr. Betcher at present, and evidently understands his business.
River Falls Journal November 15, 1877
Esdaile
The officers of Green Valley Lodge, I. O. G. T., installed last Wednesday evening are S. W. Hays, W. C. T.; Miss Alice Butterfield, W. V. T.; K. W. Lewis, S.; J. Sleeper, T.; Miss Effie Isham, I. G.; J. P. Johnson, O. G.
River Falls Journal May 5, 1881
Esdaile Echoes
S. W. Hays is at home again for a few days visit with his family
Joseph Sleeper has sold his house and lot in this village to C. Betcher, of Red Wing, for $450.
A little daughter of Mr. Sleeper received so severe a fall the other day as to render her senseless for some time, but she is now all right again.
River Falls Journal June 12, 1881
Esdaile Echoes
C. Betcher has recently been remodeling his horse barn.
E. Hoover has rented a part of S. W. Hays’ house and is now occupying the same.
Henry Bently has decided not to occupy the Sleeper house as was stated a short time ago.
Messers L.C. Rice, L. H. Rice, Joseph Sleeper, and L. Turner, are building a saw mill and bending machine at Brookville, St. Croix county.
River Falls Journal May 25, 1882
Brookville Brevities
S.W. Hays, of Esdaile, called on us last week. He talks of making St. Croix County his home.
Esdaile Echoes
Mrs. Church and mother, Mrs. Sleeper, of Minneapolis, are spending a few days in town.
For reference:
Joseph & Abigail Sleeper are 3rd-Great Grandparents
Charles & Sarah [Sleeper] Church are 2nd-Great Grandparents
Stephen W. Hays (wife Judith [Waite]) are 2nd-Great Grandparents
John W. & Minnie [Church] Hays are Great Grandparents
Charles Betcher (unrelated) was the lumber baron who Stephen W. Hays worked for
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Filling Gaps
Last night our internet connection was down so I did some reading in the most recent book I bought from the Pierce County Historical Association, “Log Buildings and Logging in Early Pierce County, Wisconsin.” In excerpts from journals and newspaper accounts dated in the early to mid-1800s, bits and pieces of what life was like in this specific locale materialize in my head where they mix with cinematic versions I’ve seen from movies depicting the same period.
A name, a date, and basic details of clearing several acres to build a log cabin leave a lot of gaps in my perception of what life was really like. One person’s father arrived some time later. How were they communicating prior to that? Another man is described rather superficially as having “opened a road from River Falls” through the wilderness to a mill and later, one to Prescott for a mail route.
How did one send mail to a pioneer living in the wilderness? How does one man build a road? I struggle to compare my activity managing our 20 acres in the present with the activities and accomplishments of people who were just arriving at this place 200 years ago.
For reference, we rely on what people chose to write about their experiences. If my chronicles survive for a couple of centuries, will readers think that all we did was mow grass and whine about the weather?
Will they get a clue about what life was like when the internet goes down for a few hours?
I am curious about the specific indigenous people who were living here when immigrants started claiming land and building cabins. Not the general story of being forced onto reservations, but the equivalence of a “journal” account describing the experiences of one individual that would depict what it was like.
I am also curious about my specific ancestors who intermingled in these valleys, cutting trees, building wagons, going to schools, and living lives at that particular period of history. It’s easy for me to fill the gaps with versions of pioneers depicted in movies I’ve seen throughout my life.
How accurate a portrayal was “Jeremiah Johnson?”
Life today can hardly compare but when I listen to the birdsongs echoing through our trees in moments when no modern-day traffic, lawnmowers, or airplane noise is occurring, the sound may easily be the very same chorus that played two centuries ago.
I wonder who was standing right here listening to it way back when.
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Mostly Rain
Amid a heavily broadcast series of warnings about the chances of severe weather, I dawdled indoors much of yesterday until time was dwindling in a break between bouts of precipitation. It felt like now or never to get anything productive accomplished outside.
I gassed up the power trimmer and went after as many easy targets as I could hit, with particular interest in two of the most needed places. I reached the strip of longest grass just beyond the culvert as the sky began to grow dark again. It wasn’t pretty, but as raindrops started falling, I finished what I had set out to do.
The area of that strip is now a sloppy mess of long, wet cuttings, but it is a cut sloppy mess. If I’d had time before more rain, I would have used a pitchfork to pick up the mass of wet chopped grass left behind.
Earlier in the day while it was raining, I spent a little time perusing old newspapers for ancestor names again. Focusing on the River Falls Journal in the latter half of the 1800s, I found a treasure in 1878 under “Local News” for Esdaile. It lists the names of “pupils who excelled in their respective classes in the first month of the winter half of the present term.”
My search term was, “Hays” so it was easy to spot my great-granduncles, George and Charles Hays. Those two are the younger brothers of my great-grandfather, John W. He would have been 17 years old at the time. Charles was 9 and George was 8.
What made this find such a treasure was the name of one other excellent student: Minnie Church.
Minnie is my great-grandmother. She was 10 years old that winter when the grades were published. I would imagine the younger three knew each other well, spending their school years together. Ten years later, in 1888, Minnie and John (seven years her senior) were married in Minneapolis.
I wonder how the younger brothers felt about John getting the girl in the end.
Discovering those records was a lot of fun for a mostly rainy day.
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Irish Maybe
Growing up, I had no clue about my family’s ethnic origins. I’m pretty sure my father responded with “American” when I brought up the question. Today, since it’s St. Patrick’s Day, everybody is a little bit Irish, aren’t they? I’ve never really identified with the occasion, but I probably should.
Even after my many sporadic plunges into my family ancestry, I’m still not convinced about the ultimate origin of the “Hays” name. When a second cousin enlisted the help of professionals, they pointed to a pretty focused area of the counties of southern Ireland, yet the result from my DNA hint at the surrounding region excluding Ireland.
At this point, I’m more inclined to cling to what I know and claim my obvious Canadian heritage.
Cyndie occasionally shares a wonderful recollection of her earliest query about her family ethnicity. The simplified version from so many kids where it gets described as half of one nationality and half of another led her to ask her father, by way of a written note slipped under the bathroom door, “What am I half of?”
She was shocked when the answer came back, “Half-wit.”
I am half my mom and half my dad; a quarter of each of my grandparents. Sometimes I feel a little like a half-wit.
On March 17th, I’m possibly a little Irish.
Don’t tell my DNA.
Happy St. Patrick’s Day!
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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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Missing Credit
In my giddy excitement over the discovery of pages and pages of informative details about my ancestors who made Pierce County their home in the 1860s last week, I neglected to credit the Pierce County Historical Association and more specifically, properly cite the copyright holder of the book!
Krogstadt, Roland J. 2010. Hartland Heritage: A History of Hartland Township, Pierce County, Wisconsin, edited by Donna M. O’Keefe. Madison, WI
That has since been remedied, with proper citations subsequently added to last week’s post.
On Sunday, I took Cyndie for a drive and showed her the beauty of the high-walled gorge of Isabelle Creek valley. She agreed with my impression that the majority of the steep slopes look no more modern than the images we’ve seen from the 1800s. It is easy to ignore the rare street sign or occasional dwelling and imagine we are back in time.
Immersing myself in so much historical research has me thinking about my trivial day-to-day activities like brushing my teeth in preparation for a night’s sleep or dressing for the day in the comfort of my modern bedroom and comparing it to what the equivalent daily tasks must have been like for my ancestors beside the creek.
The minutia of an individual’s daily little tasks doesn’t tend to be chronicled in much detail in historical journals written a hundred-plus years later.
I can’t help but share one more morsel from Roland Krogstadt’s book, “Hartland Heritage: A History of Hartland Township, Pierce County, Wisconsin” that mentions my 2nd-great-grandfather, Stephen W. Hays (S. W. Hays).
Chapter 10, page 311, under the heading, “Weather”
The Hartland correspondent reported to the Herald, “Last Wednesday night, this town was visited by the most terrific and destructive storm of wind and rain ever known in this locality.” The details followed:
About 11 o’clock the rain began to descend and in a few minutes increased to a perfect deluge, while almost continuous and vivid lightning lit up the blackened sky as bright as day, and the thunder rolled with an ominous, heavy, and deafening roar that added to the solemnity of the occasion and awed all who witnessed it by the grandeur and magnificence of this, the greatest of nature’s pyrotechnical displays it was ever our lot to behold. It secured as though the god of storm and flood had turned out the vials of his wrath upon this once beautiful valley, which at sunset of that evening in seeming security lay clothed in peace and verdure, and which but a few hours later was destined to present a scene of destruction and desolation that words cannot but fail to describe.
A list of over 30 properties and the estimated losses followed and included: “S. W. Hays, house flooded, $50.”
In addition to that, “Strickland & Knowlton’s flouring mill, entirely destroyed with contents, $6,500; …Betcher & McDougall, mill dam washed away, steam factory undermined, east wing of factory, 14 wagons, sleighs, cutter woods, hubs, spokes, wagon lumber, logs and lumber washed away, flume and race filled up with mud, fences gone, &c., $4,000.”
I believe that the Strickland mill was associated with my 3rd-great-grandfather Joseph Sleeper and the Betcher mill was the one Stephen W. Hays was managing.
It helps me to better understand how or why Stephen may have moved away after a few more years. It also has me wanting to be less whiny about the comparatively minor suffering we have endured from so many downpours here over the last seven years.
Nature’s wrath is nothing new.
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Better Perspective
With details gained from my research in the county courthouse office of Register Deeds over the last two weeks, I have added some stars to an old map of Pierce County, Wisconsin, to show the locations of properties my ancestors owned in the 1860s and 70s, along with the property where Cyndie and I now live, for reference.
From what I have been able to determine amid the never-ending swirl of names, dates, and places uncovered recently that just as easily confuse as they inform, Joseph Sleeper was still here at the time of his death. Based on that, when we finally get around to exploring these properties up close and in person, we will also be seeking out cemeteries for a survey of headstones.
In trying to trace the activity of ancestors here during that time in history, both the U.S.-Dakota War of 1862 just to the west in Minnesota, and the U.S. Civil War in the south looms large. This area was still very unsettled. In one of the multiple transactions recorded for acres purchased by Joseph Sleeper, there were immediate entries on adjacent lines revealing the Grantor (seller) was simultaneously getting the first official papers from the US government to legally define the land as his, in order to then sell.
I don’t know whether that land Joseph was buying had been originally squatted for a homestead and sawmill or how long it had been since indigenous people had been driven away by the encroaching migration of foreigners expanding west, but I imagine it must have been a pretty wild time around these river valleys near the mighty Mississippi.
The Wisconsin Territory was admitted to the Union in 1848 as the 30th state, and Minnesota was 10-years later as the 32nd, so there must have been some semblance of higher authorities in place to manage details and address conflicts by the time the families of my ancestors decided to spend some of their lives here.
I expect they never dreamed that one-hundred-fifty years in the future, one of their descendants would wander back from the big city to make this land his home again.
It certainly has been a surprise for me!
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Relative Proximity
I recently received new information on a detail of my family history that adds intrigue to the fact Cyndie and I ended up living in Beldenville, Wisconsin. The pertinent morsel is revealed near the bottom of the first column of my great-great-grandfather, Stephen W. Hays’s (b.1829-d.1910) obituary.
After my great-grandfather, John W. Hays was born in 1860, the family moved from Vankleek Hill, Ontario, to Red Wing, Minnesota. Six years later, they moved to Pierce County, Wisconsin, where they stayed for 13-years before moving again, this time to South Dakota.
Beldenville is located due north of Redwing and is positioned near the center of Pierce County.
I have a new inspiration to see if we can discover where in Pierce County my ancestors once lived.
I’ve also gained a new interest in exploring the possibilities of relocating to the land between Ottawa and Montreal where my most-likely-Irish ancestors owned a farm, in case I finally act on a mostly-idle threat to flee this country’s dreary governance.
In an interesting genealogy note, I’ll point out that the surname, Hays, is misspelled several times with an added “e” in my great-great-grandfather’s obituary, even though the correct spelling also appears farther down. This was a burden for me when I first began my genealogy research because my initial goal was to find out why our name didn’t include the “e” which so many people seem to want to insert.
I struggled to grow comfortable with accepting all varieties of spellings in the quest to identify actual blood relations on the tree. I have come to realize how much more the person matters than the versions of surname spelling.
Based on information gathered from my Y-DNA, the closest connections of Hays matches have a very common origination in the counties of southern Ireland. Although I have a high percentage of English ancestry (a more common origin of the surname Hayes with that “e”), the lineage of my surname points toward Irish, where there is a chance the original moniker may have been “Hay.”
All the more appropriate that we have been growing hay on our Beldenville property, ay?
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Familial Bonds
I align with the perception that simply being human puts us all in the same family, but it’s hard to deny a reality that some people are more family than others. It’s not all that surprising when people who share a bloodline experience a connection born of common ancestry, but I have experienced enough occasions when I am drawn toward kindred spirits with whom I have no blood relation that I know there are mystical bonds deeper than our brains can explain.
Last night we had a chance to brush up against this fascinating phenomenon when the Grinnell families who had gathered in St. Peter for the memorial service of their patriarch, Robin (who was Fred’s cousin), drove up for a spur of the moment gathering at Cyndie’s parent’s home in Edina.
As an in-law in the gathering of Norwegian Friswold and Grinnell clans, it was a treasure to witness the threads of connection and hear the sharing of family stories. I have enjoyed short visits with the Grinnell brothers less than a handful of times over a span of several decades, so my relationship to them could easily be described as acquaintances.
So why does it feel like so much more than that?
Likely, for the same reason that I feel like a brother to Ian Rowcliffe and like a member of Dunia and Marco’s family.
There is a magical aspect to the attraction toward kindred spirits that defies definition by words. It is an energy of the heart. It is a special form of love. It is a unique feeling that blossoms for a select few.
It is a brush with things sacred, which tends to make me feel more fully human.
At the same time, that begs a question of why I don’t feel more of a connection to all who make up the human family. Wouldn’t that be ideal?
A lofty goal for which to aim. For now, I will enjoy the special warmth of sharing time again with people who mean more to me than I can understand. It fits nicely within the mysteries that I don’t really feel a need to have explained.
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Relative Something 