What about Claude?

OR "AUNT MARY LIED"

  

                                Above: Claude's wife, left.

(Author's note: What if you knew an ancestor had fibbed? Would you rat them out a hundred years later?)

As always, unapologetically, unedited. Oh, and my hyperlinks suck. Just sayin'.

Every great detective story needs a document that lies to your face and dares you to notice. This one even comes with an affidavit.

In September 1922, Mary (Hotchkiss) Trotter Leonard of Woodward County, Oklahoma sat down in front of a notary public and swore, under oath, to a version of her own family that was one sister short. Her sister Mattie had died the previous December in Detroit. Mattie had no husband and no children, so Wayne County needed a sworn list of heirs before it would release her estate. Mary supplied one- herself. Of the four children of Abner and Sarah Hotchkiss, she said: George, dead in infancy. Harriet, who “died about twenty years earlier and without issue.” Mattie, newly deceased. And further, that Mary herself was, “the only living relative and sole heir.”

 

   

            

Above: Did she start to tell the truth and change her mind?

Three of those four sentences hold up fine. The fourth one is the reason this post exists.

Harriet Hotchkiss did not die in 1902. Harriet Hotchkiss died in February 1921,¹ on Mackinac Island, roughly nineteen years after her sister’s paperwork supposedly buried her and about ten months before Mattie actually died. Harriet also did not die “without issue.” Harriet had a son. His name was Claude Hough, he lived a few doors down from her on the same small island, he built things for a living, and he is the person who walked into the registrar’s office and reported his own mother’s death.²

 

Somewhere, a Detroit probate clerk in 1922 processed an affidavit that a Mackinac Island carpenter could have corrected on the spot, if anyone had thought to ask him. Nobody asked him. Anyone who might have known chose not to. This post asks him (and the rest of them) to do so now, one hundred and five years late, by reading his mother’s paper trail instead.

Chapter One: Harriet Refuses to Stay Buried on Schedule

Every mystery needs a suspect who won’t cooperate with the official story, and Harriet Hotchkiss turns out to be a spectacularly uncooperative corpse for a woman who was supposedly two decades into being one.

Harriet was born to Abner Hotchkiss and Sarah Brown, the same parents named for all three sisters, and certainly in Mary’s own affidavit, so there is no ambiguity about which family we are in. About 1873, Harriet married a man named Robert Hough. The couple had a son, Claude, born around 1876, and by the 1880 census the three of them were living together in Bay County, Michigan, with Dad Robert working as a farm laborer and Harriet keeping house.³ 

So far, an ordinary nineteenth-century household.

Then the marriage to Robert Hough appears to have ended, because by 1898 our gal Harriet is using her maiden name again. That year, Harriet Hotchkiss married a soldier named Patrick Kerrigan on Mackinac Island, and on the marriage register she named her own parents: Abner Hotchkiss and Sarah Brown.⁴ This single line of ink is the hinge of the whole investigation. It ties the Bay County housewife directly back to the Lapeer County farm daughter, in Harriet’s own words, recorded by a county clerk who had no reason to make it up.

By 1910, Harriet Kerrigan had been married to Patrick for twelve years and was living on Mackinac Island with exactly one child born and one child living, according to the census taker who knocked on her door that April.⁵ Keep that number in your pocket. 

It comes back.

Patrick Kerrigan died sometime before 1920, because the 1920 census finds Harriet running her own household, sixty-five years old, listed as the “keeper” of a rooming house.⁶ A widow running a business on a tourist island is not the profile of a woman who quietly disappeared eighteen years earlier. Meanwhile, a few households over on the next census page, a "Claude Hough" - Harriet's son - turns up as a forty-three-year-old carpenter with a wife named Katherine.⁶ Mother and son, both alive, both accounted for, both a short walk from each other, in a year when Mary’s affidavit had already declared our gal Harriet as dead and childless for nearly two decades.

Say what???

Claude Hough was still on Mackinac Island in 1930, still a carpenter, by then running his own contracting business.⁷ This is not a man who vanished. This is a man who kept a steady address for over half a century while his aunt, four hundred miles away in Oklahoma, told a notary he did not exist.

Chapter Two: The Death Certificate Solves Its Own Case

Every good mystery has a moment where the detective stops guessing and finds the one document that ends the argument. Here it is.

Harriet Kerrigan died of pneumonia on February 15, 1921, at age sixty-five years, eleven months, and four days.⁸ The attending physician, a Dr. J. F. Darby of St. Ignace, noted on the certificate that he “did not see patient but "prescribed over the telephone,” which tells you a great deal about rural medicine in 1921 and nothing at all about whether Harriet was really dead, which she now unfortunately was. 

The certificate lists her father’s surname correctly as Hotchkiss.

And the informant, the person who stood at the counter and answered the clerk’s questions about Harriet’s life and death, was - you guessed it, her son: Claude Hough.

Harriet: Not without issue. "The issue" had signed the paperwork.

Chapter Three: Three Sisters and a Great Deal of Michigan Between Them

A weaker post would end there, wave the death certificate around, and call Mary a liar. This one is going to slow down, because the more interesting question is not whether Mary’s affidavit was wrong. It plainly was. 

The interesting question is how a sister could be that wrong about her own sister.

Start with the money, because money is always a good place to start. In September of that same year, most likely 1922 though the final digit of the year is trimmed off the surviving copy,⁹ the Public Administrator of Wayne County handed Mary a receipt for $279.45, marked “in full of the residue in the estate of Mattie Hotchkiss, deceased,” case number 91893.⁹ Probate math is not complicated. An estate residue splits by the number of heirs on record. One heir gets the whole amount. This does not prove Mary lied for the money. It does mean the affidavit was never just a family remembrance. It was a legal instrument, doing legal work, in a system built to trust a sworn sister rather than send an investigator to Mackinac Island to check.

Ah, that pesky Claude!

Now look at what these three sisters were actually doing with each other in the decades before that affidavit, because the answer is: not much. Between 1876 and roughly 1881, each of Abner Hotchkiss’s three surviving daughters sold off her own inherited slice of his Burlington Township farm, in three separate deeds, to three different buyers, from three different addresses.¹⁰ Harriet Hough signed hers from Lapeer County. Mary Trotter signed hers from Edwards County, Kansas. Martha “Mattie” Hotchkiss asssigned hers to a buyer from Onondaga County, New York. 

Three sisters, one farm, and not one shred of paper showing they coordinated any of it with each other.

That is not what a close family’s paperwork looks like. That is what three people look like when they are already becoming strangers, one land sale at a time, without ever needing to have a falling out about it.

Chapter Four: The Actual Twist

Here is the twist this genealogical mystery has been building toward, and it is not a twist about villainy. It is a twist about distance.

An affidavit like Mary’s does not legally require firsthand knowledge. Courts have always accepted “I always understood it to be so” as a stand-in for “I personally confirmed it yesterday.” A woman who last saw her sister as a young bride in the 1870s, who received no further word, and who eventually assumed that decades of silence meant the worst, is not necessarily lying. She may simply be wrong in the specific way people get wrong about relatives they have not spoken to in forty years. Estrangement does not announce itself with a slammed door and a witness list. It accumulates quietly, one unanswered decade at a time, until a sister can swear a solemn oath about a death that happened nineteen years and one entire marriage later than she thought, and mean every word of it.

Aside from Mary, nobody alive can tell you what Mary actually believed the day she signed that affidavit. This post cannot adjudicate her state of mind, and neither, charitably, could the Public Administrator of Wayne County. 

He had a sworn statement and a probate deadline. That is what the law asked for.

What the law did not ask for, and what a hundred and five years of dust and a lot of patient zooming into scanned documents can finally supply, is the correction: Harriet (Hotchkiss) (Hough) Kerrigan lived a full life. She raised a son. She buried at least one husband, remarried, and ran a business on Mackinac Island into her sixties. When she finally died, her son was the one who told the world about it, in writing, with his own name on the form.

 

Whatever Mary believed in Woodward County, Oklahoma, Harriet was somebody’s mother. Claude Hough made sure of that on paper in 1921, a full century before this post got around to the reading and or the retelling of it all.

Yes, indeed. What about Claude?

Zoom-zoom.

---

The Evidence Locker

1. Michigan, Certificate of Death, Harriett Kerrigan, registered no. 1, Mackinac County, city of Mackinac Island, date of death 15 Feb. 1921. Age 65 yrs., 11 mos., 4 days. Father’s surname given as Hotchkiss. Informant Claude Hough, Mackinac Island, Mich. (Repository/collection citation to be supplied from the original digital image source.) ↩
2. Death certificate of Harriett Kerrigan, cited above, field 14 (“Informant”). ↩
3. 1880 U.S. census, Hampton, Bay County, Michigan. Enumerated 26 June 1880 by Joseph Leighton. Dwelling 364, family 396. Robert A. Hough, 39, farm laborer. Harriet, 24, wife. Claude E., 5, son. (Repository/collection citation to be supplied.) ↩
4. Michigan, Return of Marriages, Mackinac County, quarter ending 30 June 1898, record no. 701. Patrick Kerrigan, of Mackinac Island, and Harriet Hotchkiss, of Bay City. Parents given as Abner Hotchkiss and Sarah Brown. License 16 May 1898, married 1 June 1898, Mackinac Island, Rev. J. Miller (Catholic Church) officiating. (Repository/collection citation to be supplied.) Note: the bride’s birthplace is given here as New York, which does not match other records placing her birth in Michigan. Unresolved. ↩
5. 1910 U.S. census, Mackinac Island city, Mackinac County, Michigan. Enumerated 30 April 1910 by Lew Chapman. Sheet 4B, dwelling 84, family 87. Patrick Kerrigan, head, 64, married 16 years. Harriet, wife, 60, married 16 years, second marriage, 1 child born, 1 living. (Repository/collection citation to be supplied.) ↩
6. 1920 U.S. census, Mackinac Island city, Mackinac County, Michigan. Enumerated 10 and 13 March 1920 by Ruth E. Bourisau. Sheet 1A, dwelling 5, family 14: Claude Hough, head, 43, carpenter, wife Katherine. Sheet 1B, dwelling 17, family 63: Harriett Kerrigan, head, widowed, 65, “keeper,” rooming house. (Repository/collection citation to be supplied.) ↩
7. 1930 U.S. census, Mackinac Island city, Mackinac County, Michigan. Enumerated 24 April 1930 by Glen E. Lyman. Sheet 1A, dwelling 80-81, family 39. Claude Hough, head, carpenter/contractor, wife Katherine. (Repository/collection citation to be supplied.) ↩
8. Death certificate of Harriett Kerrigan, cited above, fields 10 and 16-17. Father’s surname Hotchkiss. Cause of death pneumonia, attending physician J. F. Darby, St. Ignace, Michigan, “did not see patient but prescribed over the telephone.” ↩
9. Receipt, Mary (B.) Leonard to Henry S. Sweeny, Public Administrator, Woodward, Oklahoma, dated September 7, 192_ (final digit illegible or cropped in the surviving copy, most probably 1922 based on the probate timeline). $279.45, “in full of the residue in the estate of Mattie Hotchkiss, deceased, as per the final account of Administrator, duly filed in Probate Court of Wayne County, case #91893.” Image as supplied. Repository unknown. ↩
10. Lapeer County, Michigan, Register of Deeds, quitclaim deeds. Harriet M. Hough to Isburn Spencer, dated 10 Mar. 1871, recorded 1876 (image 119 of 655, “Lapeer, Michigan, United States records,” FamilySearch, Image Group Number 008310143). Mary Trotter (formerly Mary Hotchkiss) to Amos Jackson, dated 4 Jan. 1881, recorded 21 Jan. 1881 (image 495 of 593, FamilySearch, Image Group Number 008310247). Martha Hotchkiss to Amos Jackson, dated 26 June 1881 or 1882, recorded 13 Jan. 1881 or 1882 (image 490 of 593, FamilySearch, Image Group Number 008310247). All three convey undivided interests in the same sixty-acre parcel in Burlington Township, Section 25, Town 10 North, Range 11 East, inherited from Abner Hotchkiss. ↩