Whistling Through the Graveyard
Chapter 6 - A Letter to Mrs. Zabriskie
Chapter 7 - The Ubiquitous Miss Brown (and family)
And no, I haven't given up writing that article on Ned Doheny and Hugh Plunkett, I just haven't gotten to it as of this writing and it may be a while yet. I was shocked to find out it's been almost two years since I wrote any of these. So I am hijacking this article to talk about some people in my family tree.
My maternal grandmother's maiden name was Brown and her family has been a thorn in my side since before I even started doing genealogy research. People complain about having to research names like Smith and Jones and Williams -- well, Brown is every bit as tough from a research standpoint.
Fortunately some people in my family were forward thinking enough to document some of the Brown family while some members of the previous generations were still alive, and that has been enormously helpful. My older sister Marcia talked to my grandmother Mildred and drew up a nice tree based on that information. I know my cousin Richard Berry has done some good work, and I filled in some of the gaps when I visited Eudora, Kansas, on a trip 11 years ago. My wife Michelle and I went back to Kansas City last year and found out some more interesting things about the Brown family, and also got some clippings, funeral announcements, and photographs from my cousin John Sayre, who has been a de facto family archivist for many years.
In any event, let's start with Samuel P. Brown. No one has really documented his parents (that pesky Brown surname again) but the 1850 census appears to show him in Clarkson, Monroe County, New York. The head of household is Allen Brown, born ca. 1794 in New York. There is no one listed who could be Samuel's mother, so she most likely died before the 1850 census.
I know for sure that Samuel was born about 1838 in New York. There is more specific information but I don't know the source, so I can't vouch for the veracity of it. Supposedly he was born 8 March 1837 in Oneida, Madison County, New York.
Samuel next appears to show up in the family of Harry and Sarah Drake in 1855 in Gaines, Orleans County, New York, where he is listed as a servant. The only people in the household are Harry, Sarah, and Samuel.
I can't find Samuel in the 1860 census, so either he wasn't enumerated or his information is so badly garbled that he can't be located. However, other information would lead us to believe he was probably living in Illinois at that time.
The other information is from the U.S. veteran's administration records. Samuel is recorded as having enlisted as a Private, Company B, 34th Illinois Infantry. Since most people enlisted in their home state, it is very likely he was living in Illinois by 1861. The 34th was mustered in northwestern Illinois, but there were enlistees who came from farther south, in central Illinois.
Not only is that interesting, but it fills in a huge gap in our knowledge of Samuel. He doesn't show up in any census between 1855 and 1870, at which point he was married to Ann Elizabeth Ellis (born 1843 in New York) and was living in Oxford, Johnson County, Iowa. There are two children in the household, Effie and George. Effie was born in 1867 and George in 1869, both in Iowa.
BTW, there is something useful in the 1860 census, although it's not connected directly with Samuel. His future wife Ann Ellis showed up in the census in Henry County, Illinois, which is adjacent to some of the counties the 34th Illinois was recruited from. So it's entirely possible that Samuel was in Henry County, but we just haven't found him in the census there.
There were three more children that I know of born in the next 10 years, all in Iowa: Adelia (or Addie) in 1872, Elbert (often garbled as Albert) in 1873, and Ernest in 1877.
The 1880 census found the family in Gove County, Kansas. They only show up here once, and thereafter moved to Lawrence in Douglas County. If I had to hazard a guess as to why this happened, it's that Gove County is just to the west of the 100th meridian and from the photos I see on Wikipedia, is in the very arid part of west Kansas generally west of the 100th meridian. Every other place that Samuel had lived had "normal" amounts of rainfall and you could probably grow crops without irrigation. He might have found some cheap land in Gove County and thought it was a good deal, but then realized it was too hard to farm with the aridity of the local climate.
In any event that's speculation on my part. We do know that the family ended up in Lawrence, because that's where Samuel died and was buried in 1892. For several years I wasn't sure the Samuel Brown buried in Lawrence was the right Samuel Brown, but when I finally tied out the VA records I realized it was in fact him (I found out something else when I went to that cemetery last year, but we'll get to that later).
One more daughter that I know of was born, Myrtle in 1883, somewhere in Kansas (Gove County or Lawrence, I don't know which). It's easy enough to track the boys, although Ernest was somewhat elusive and doesn't show up in the census a lot. Ditto for George, although he's not quite as elusive as Ernest. By 1920 George was living in Limon, Lincoln County, Colorado, where he died in 1934 and was buried. He was married and had at least four children. Elbert settled in Eudora in Douglas County, Kansas, married and had seven children. He died in 1940 and is buried in Eudora.
In 1900 most of the family was still in Lawrence, where they showed up in the census. All the kids are there except George and Addie. George may have already been in Colorado, and I just haven't found him in the census. We don't see Addie again until 1920, at which point she was living in Los Angeles, California. Effie had married William J Sanders in Colorado in 1890 and had two children with him, Ralph and Leroy (also styled LeRoy). Ralph shows up in the 1900 census with Effie and his grandmother but there is no trace of William or Leroy.
Things got more interesting from a research standpoint after this. I had mentioned earlier that I had not been sure whether the Samuel Brown buried in Lawrence was "our" Samuel Brown, but I finally got the documentation for that (the military markers issued to veterans after the Civil War were great for finding their units, but shit for much of anything else since they didn't even show a birth or death year on the marker -- a practice since changed).
By the way, I did get more indirect proof that the Samuel Brown in Lawrence was the right Samuel Brown, when my wife and I went to the cemetery in Lawrence in May of 2019 that he is buried in. The nearest marker to Samuel's marker is William Ellis. William is the father of Ann Ellis Brown. Dare I say it? The last nail in the coffin to prove this is the correct Samuel P. Brown.
In 1910 Ann Ellis Brown had pulled up stakes and was living in Denver, Colorado, with her youngest daughter Myrtle and with the two sons of Effie, Ralph and Leroy. No one else is in the household. Elbert was living in Eudora at this time, George and Addie were MIA but show up later in the 1920 census. Where was Effie?
I think I finally found her with a google search (I hate the politics of Google, but do use their search engine). There was an Effie Sanders who died in 1902 in Denver and is buried in an unmarked grave in Fairmount Cemetery. As with her father's grave, I wasn't actually sure it was her. I had to enlist my sister Marcia's help, who went to the main library in downtown Denver to look up some funeral records stored there. Those confirmed that Effie Sanders was Effie Brown, and that particular mystery was cleared up.
I never did find out what became of William J. Sanders. Ralph and Leroy both lived into their eighties. Ralph is buried in California and Leroy in New Mexico.
Ann Ellis Brown showed up in the 1920 census, still in Denver. But now she's all alone. Ralph and Leroy were on their own by now, Ralph was married with a wife and daughter in Nebraska, and I don't see Leroy in the 1920 census but his WWI draft registration showed him still in Denver. Ann must have had a serious case of empty nest syndrome at this point but since she was almost eighty maybe she was just enjoying the peace and quiet.
However, where was Myrtle? I tried pounding away on researching her for a while and got nowhere. She had been 27 years old in 1910 and still unmarried. Had she died in her late 20s or 30s, still unmarried, or had she gotten married and was now under a completely different surname?
I put Myrtle on the back burner but I made some good headway with other loose ends in the family. As I mentioned earlier, Addie was in Los Angeles in 1920. I didn't find Ernest in the census, but his WWI draft registration from 1917 or 1918 showed him also in Los Angeles. John Sayre told me that Ernest was a cop in Hollywood, California. I haven't found any evidence that he ever married or had children, and I did find some evidence later which may indicate that he either wasn't married, or if he was married it didn't last very long.
As I mentioned earlier, by now George actually showed up in the census in Limon, Colorado. Elbert (or Bert) was still in Eudora, Kansas. By now all of his children had been born, so it must have been a full house.
We fast forward to 1930 now. Surprise! Ann Ellis Brown has moved to Pasadena, California. She is living with Adelia and Adelia is listed as the head of household. I haven't noted it before but for some reason Adelia never married. I won't even begin to speculate why, it would just be pointless.
Ernest is not there, or at least he didn't show up in the census. The next record I have for him is a WWII draft registration from 1942 that placed him in San Francisco, California.
This was pretty exciting for me to find out, because it placed members of my grandmother's immediate family in Los Angeles County, where I have been living since 1985. Since I've gone all the way to Kansas and Missouri to do research on my mom's family, this looked like it was going to make some of my research a lot easier.
And yes, I know Addie was already there in 1920. It was just nice seeing Ann in 1930 since she is one of my direct ancestors.
Sadly, Ann's story came to an end on the 26th of April, 1933. She died at the age of 89 and was buried in Altadena, California. Why wasn't she buried in Pasadena? Well, Pasadena is another one of these cities (like San Francisco) that didn't want any cemeteries in their town. So they passed a law to that effect. That's why so many prominent Pasadenans are buried next door in Altadena.
Someone had created an entry for her on Find A Grave in Mountain View Cemetery in Altadena, but the entry had almost no information and no marker photo. However, Mountain View Cemetery has a website with a grave locator. The information they had on Ann tied out with what I had.
Also, the Mountain View database showed that they had Addie Brown and Ernest Brown buried there also, not in the same section as Ann, but not far away either. Addie died in 1948 and Ernest died in 1964.
My wife remembers how excited I was to find this out. It was in April 2017 when I discovered this information, almost 84 years after Ann Ellis Brown had died.
My wife Michelle and I took a trip to Altadena. It's only about a half hour from where we live if there isn't much traffic. Armed with the plot locations for Ann, Addie and Ernest, we found all three of them without too much trouble and got some photographs. Ann is not buried near any family that I know of, but Addie and Ernest are buried next to each other.
As I mentioned earlier George died in 1934 and Bert died in 1940.
That still left me with one loose end. What had happened to Myrtle? Had she died in Denver between 1910 and 1920 and was buried somewhere under her maiden name? Or had something else happened?
I was on the phone with John Sayre last week and we were ruminating on the Brown family. After we got off the phone I got a bee in my bonnet and I looked at Myrtle again.
One of the research tools in my toolbox is a subscription I have to a site called GenealogyBank. It's not terribly expensive (about $3.50 a month as I recall) and gives me access to lots of newspaper articles and obituaries. It also has a social security death index search and it has census records as well. Some of those searches I have for free on other sites, but the newspaper searches can be absolutely invaluable at times.
I did a drill down on the name Myrtle Brown from 1 January 1910 to 31 December 1920 and then constrained the search to only include results from Colorado. Once that narrowed the list down to something I could deal with, I just concentrated on the matches I got from the Denver newspapers.
I found a marriage announcement from the 14th of December, 1911. It said that Albert Wiseman of South Logan was married to Myrtle Brown.
I mentioned South Logan here. Why is that significant? Because in the 1910 census Ann and Myrtle were living on South Logan (In 1920 Ann was still there, I'm guessing she hadn't moved). Albert Wiseman may not have been a next door neighbor of Myrtle's, but he lived on the same street.
I didn't immediately go berserk, but I started following down the path with the Wiseman surname. And very soon afterwards I hit pay dirt.
I found a California Death Index entry from 1966 for a Myrtle Wiseman. Now, I know something about the California Death Index that most people don't know (I actually scraped an entire copy of it and have it as a SQL database on one of my computers, but that's a different story). The CADI entries from the 1960s for the most part don't have the father's surname listed, but they did list the mother's surname. The Myrtle Wiseman who died in Los Angeles County in 1966 had a mother's surname of Ellis. Better yet, she was born in Kansas in March 1883, which absolutely tied out with the other information I had for Myrtle.
At this point I went back to Find A Grave. As flawed as it is, it's still a good resource, you just have to know which information you can take at face value and which things are likely to get garbled.
I was absolutely flabbergasted. Myrtle was in my favorite cemetery in the whole world, Forest Lawn Glendale. What was more, she was already in my database of about 700,000 people I am keeping, in fact she was in there twice, once under her married name and again under her maiden name.
She was hiding in plain sight, the entire time I was looking for her.
I had scraped the entire Forest Lawn database on their website, nine years ago (this was around 650,000 people at that time, no mean feat). Myrtle was on that list, and they had her maiden name as a middle name. However, they had her death date off by one day, and because of that when I compared the Forest Lawn entries to the California Death index, I didn't get a match on her because the death date was off by one day. Because I didn't get a match I didn't get her birthplace or her mother's maiden name, all things that would have been helpful in finding her.
So the person who put her into Find A Grave is someone I know, he's an idiot I used to work with but finally consigned to the dustbin of history since he was so sloppy and disrespectful. The marker photo he has posted for Myrtle is pretty godawful. I don't usually post stuff on Find A Grave any more but I guess I will get a marker photo and post it the next time I go to Forest Lawn.
I was able to find some more information on Myrtle since I now had her married name. She had a son and a daughter with Albert. The son died very young (less than a year) and is buried on Lopez Island in Washington state. Their daughter Anna apparently never married and died in 2001 at age 81, she is entombed with Albert and Myrtle at Forest Lawn (Albert died in 1967, the year after Myrtle).
In 1920 Albert and Myrtle were living on Lopez Island in Washington. By 1930 they had moved to Topeka, Shawnee County, Kansas. Shawnee County is next to Douglas County so they weren't far from Bert and his family. They were still in Topeka in 1940. I don't know when they moved to California but it must have been after 1940. Perhaps before 1948 when Addie died? I don't know.
It's too bad I didn't know Anna Wiseman existed. It would have been interesting talking to her about the Brown family and finding out what she knew. According to her social security information, she lived in Whittier, California, which is in Los Angeles County not that far from the city of Los Angeles.
In any event, dogged persistence has paid off yet again, and another one of my genealogy brick walls has finally crumbled.
Here's to Samuel Brown and Ann Ellis Brown and all of their descendants ...
Sources:
Samuel P. Brown in the Genealogy Locator System
Samuel P. Brown on Family Search Dot Org
Samuel P. Brown on Find A Grave.
Ann and all the children are linked on the GLS system and on Family Search. They're not linked on Find A Grave because of some personal beefs I have with Find A Grave.
Chapter 8
Chapter 8 - The Unmasking of Factory Reject
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