DOES ADVERTISING PAY OFF?

I don't respond much to advertising. At least I don't think I do....for the obvious reason that I'm not much of a shopper either. I'll look at ads if I intend to purchase something, but I don't feel that they lure me into being a customer.
But after last evening's "Gotcha'" moment while doing some genealogical research, I just may have to change my whole attitude.

This is about little Frank Whitters, whom I lost after age 14 on the 1900 Census. I admit that he is such a peripheral relative that I didn't really try all that hard, but from time to time I'd think about him again and make a cursory survey of what new had come online. This is NOT the way to do genealogy and I know it, but I'm getting old and tired and I admit, obviously somewhat sloppy in the way I handle things.

Frank's dad, Edward, was the first son of my great-great grandmother Ellen Madden (widow Whitters) Stevens. Ellen was from an Irish family who emigrated to the US in 1832 and settled in Taunton, Mass. just before Ellen was born. Ellen married Robert Whitters when she was of marriageable age and within a year after Edward was born she was widowed. Her folks and siblings had resettled to Mendota, Illinois, so Ellen took the baby and went there to be with them. It was there she met Chester Stevens, who would become her second husband. Because my own line came from a daughter of Chester and Ellen, I had not given much research time to Edward himself. I had learned that he had married and had two children, Jennie and Frank. I'd managed to track Jennie but Frank had remained an enigma.

Last night I was diddling around on the computer, more or less killing time until bedtime, and it occurred to me to do a general 'Find-a-Grave" search to see if someone had located a grave for "little" Frank Whitters, still figuring he must have died young.

I entered his name, pushed the magic button and got an immediate notification that there was no Frank Whitters in the Find-a-Grave database. What I saw directly under that, and what I've seen every single time I use Find-a-Grave,
To make a long story short, that one click made a believer of me. I found a WWI Draft Registration for Frank, as well as a passport application dated 1919 and a renewal application dated 1924. He was working for Empire Refining Company out of Ponca City, Oklahoma and was applying for a passport to enable him to represent the company at oil explorations in Tampico, Mexico. Along with the passports are all manners of descriptions of him, ranging from the photograph to a written description of his physical being, including distinguishing marks (he had none.)

It was hard for me to head off to the bedroom last night after such an exhilarating find. One should pick a much earlier hour to do such things! While flat on my back waiting for the sandman I mentally laid out the strategy for my pursuit of the now very-much-alive Frank, a cousin of my Grandma Jessie.

But overriding all those thoughts was the one that stood out in my mind about ignoring ads. Just as in department stores, ads feature new and exciting information. Ancestry, as well as the other major genealogy websites, add new material daily, and they advertise to get us to take a peek. I have to admit that although I'm still not much of a shopper, I'm sold on reading the adverts now.

But I think "Paying attention" is probably what it is all about!

POOR YOUNG ROLL

The picture above may be of Roll Humphrey Stevens. It is in the Stevens family album but does not have a name on it. A process of elimination, although very “iffy,” suggests it is he. Like everything else about Roll, however, it remains a loose end.

Genealogists hate loose ends. Roll is one of mine.

He was my grandma Jessie’s first cousin. Both were born in Sterling, Kansas, one in 1885 and the other in 1886. He died in 1903 while still a teenager, and I never heard any family stories about him. In fact, I didn’t even know he existed until 1984 when I received in the mail a copy of a short handwritten family history written by Frank Dana Stevens, forwarded to me from a very distant relative in Wichita. The first page said, “Roll Humphrey Stevens, born August 29, 1886, died October 29, 1903.” Nothing more was said. The fellow was only 17.

In 25 years of researching I had never turned anything else up on poor Roll. I admit that I hadn’t looked very hard, but I did know that he was buried in Maple Hill cemetery in Wichita but without a tombstone. I knew that Humphrey was his mother’s maiden name, and that there was a family friend or relative also named Roll Humphrey, which I’m sure is where Frank Stevens got the name. And in a printed bio of father Frank in a Kansas book it noted that Roll was killed in a train accident. I also learned that his first name was Rolland.

Recently I have been cleaning out out my genealogy files, tossing away extraneous stuff that I’ve kept for years. While one is never “finished” researching, there does come a time when one says, “OK. I’d better get this wrapped up.” So this was the reason I was sorting out old files and tossing things right and left.

Until I came to the Stevens file and confronted Roll again.

I needed to wrap Roll up too. I didn’t feel I needed to buy a tombstone for his unmarked grave, but I did feel I needed to give him a little attention and leave a better record of this young man’s life.

In the interest of time, I hired a researcher in Wichita to find me a death certificate and do a newspaper search not only for an obituary but also for a newspaper article about the train wreck. With the results in, I can share the following, excerpted from the October 31, 1903 issue of the Wichita Eagle:

“Roll Sevens was a young man well and favorably known in Wichita, and has always borne an excellent reputation. He was born in Sterling, Kansas, August 27, 1885. His parents moved to Wichita a number of years ago and the young man has always lived with his parents until a few weeks ago, when he left for St. Louis to accept a position with a train news company. The boy had not been heard from since he left home, and consequently Mr. Stevens was horrified to learn of the sad accident. The boy attended the public schools of the city in his boyhood, was a student at the high school at Carbondale and graduated from the Wichita Business College.”

The newspaper article is very vague on the cause of the accident, calling it simply a “smash-up” and it isn’t clear about the injuries and deaths of passengers. It was probably too soon to have the details in print. What is left hanging is an understanding of the following paragraph: “THE ENGINEER AND FIREMAN JUMPED AND SAVED THEMSELVES, BUT THREE TRAMPS WHO WERE RIDING ON THE BLIND BAGGAGE GOT THE FULL FORCE OF THE COLLISION. ONE MAN NAMED STEVENS, WHO LIVED AT WICHITA, WAS KILLED AND ANOTHER WAS SERIOUSLY INJURED.”

So I’m left with some questions:
1) What was a “train news company” that supposedly he was employed by?
2) Was Roll Stevens a tramp?
3) Since his father was already well-to-do in Wichita, why didn’t he put a stone on the grave of his first son?

Now I ask you, how can I say I am finished with the Stevens family genealogy?

UNCOVERING THE PAST

I started researching my family ancestry in 1984. At that time my dad, at the age of 76, was a new widower, so I spent a great deal of time with him, much of which was in finding out about his early life, his parents and so on. He spent a lot of time telling me about his depression era jobs as a door-to-door salesman for Wearever Aluminum, selling tap dancing lessons, registering voters (for 5 cents a name) and representing American Alabaster Company of Colorado in Southern California and Arizona. By 1940 he was working for Montgomery Wards, from then on he was a salesman, a "promoter" and finally owner of a large appliance sales and repair shop. There came a time when I thought I pretty much knew everything about him.

I spent a lot of time researching in the Los Angeles Public Library. One day while I was waiting for my friend to wrap up her research, I had to kill a little time, so I decided to see if I could find a city directory for Long Beach and an entry in the late 1930s that might show my Dobbins family. I really was looking to see if I was in it, as I was born in 1935 and sometimes those directories list the children. The first city directory I grabbed was for 1936 and sure enough, I found a listing for Scott W. Dobbins on Dairy Avenue, where they lived when I was born. Here's the entry:



So you can imagine my surprise when in 1936, the year after my birth, my father was listed in this city directory as a musician. I was dumbfounded and had no way to account for this entry. Surely my dad would have told me if he had been a musician.

I photocopied the page and the next time I drove in for a visit to my dad I took it. Pointing at the word “musician,” I asked him what on earth that meant.

His face lit up. “I played the banjo!” he offered. And with my mouth hanging open in surprise, I listened to him tell about growing up on the dry lands of eastern Colorado, where Sunday fun in the winters was getting together with neighbors and making music. My dad was 8 when his father died, and a kind neighbor fellow sat my little dad down beside him at these music fests and over those tough first few months taught him to play the banjo.

Dad also said he played the banjo in a WPA “B” band during the Great Depression. These “B” bands were comprised of non-professional but talented musicians and played on weekends at local dances. Musicians were paid $5 each time the band played, and frankly that was about all the money that was coming in to our family during those depression years.

As he was talking, a memory came back to me of the Christmas that my mother gave my dad a banjo as a gift. It must have been after I had been married and out of the house, because I do not recall being there on the Christmas morning when he received it. I also have no recollection whether or not he played it, or what ever happened to it. You know, when you are young and involved with starting a new family you don't pay much attention to the details of things your folks do. As far as genealogy goes, who would ever have thought to look themselves up in a city directory and find such a piece of information that opened up a whole new vista of their parents' lives.

And it was in listening to his story that I finally realize the musical heritage that the Dobbinses left. Dad played the banjo, his father played the cornet, his one Dobbins uncle the trombone and other the clarinet. He had great-uncles who lead singing schools back on the Illinois farm land. My folks insisted that my sister and I had violin lessons, and I continued with piano, guitar and ukelele. My son and grandson are horn players and a granddaughter a flute player. So the musical heritage is still being made. I might not seen that connection if I hadn't stumbled across that little entry in the Long Beach City Directory of 1936.

I have to admit that surprises like this are what keep us researchers going. We never know when we are going to turn up something new, a real serendipitous find, like a banjo playing father.