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Seraphim: plural noun; an angelic being regarded as belonging to the highest order of the ninefold celestial hierarchy, associated with light, ardor, and purity...
Apologies for formatting and editing that never work out quite well...
PART I.
My mother was a Lee...
There is always a certain darkness when I consider The Lees. This is especially true when I consider the life of my great-grandfather Burton Arthur Lee. Maybe it's the sadness that seems to hide just under his Marlboro man style, or a certain reticence about him, or the Batman shadows of his eyes. Yes, the Lee family can sometimes be a dark bunch. They are often filled with the complexities of war heroes and tragic tales, of deaths, murderous poisonings, and suicide. Curiously too, their ancestry and that of my great grandfather's is also one of the most difficult to trace.
They also have the best sense of humor around.
Yet beyond any mention of Burton's father, John E. Lee, and John's untimely death in the newspapers of the 1880s, or the same for John's heroics at Gettysburg and Andersonville Prison, my line to them up and through Burton's grandfather Erastus Lee disappears into the depths of shore on Michigan's Lake Huron. From there, a great deal of genetic nomadism occurs as my Lee clan moves from Michigan to Colorado to Wyoming and back again.
Truly, they remain one of the most fascinating people to explore.
My great-grandfather Burton Lee's father died when he was eight years old.
It must have been very hard for "Bert" to lose his father at such an early age and also to live under such a hero's shadow.
Various Lee Cousins - no doubt auditioning for The Munsters.
My Lee family was originally or were rather most likely English loyalists. The family also shows strong traces of French ancestry with their Canadian 'inter-marriages' in and about Kingston, Ontario. They likely moved about via the lakes and waterways and moved from their only known point of origin in 18th century New York west to Michigan utilizing the Erie Canal.
No, they were not the "Southern Lees" of General Robert E. Lee's Virginia that my mother Yvonne often alleged a distant kinship to. (Sorry, Mom, if there is a connection it's a very remote one.) Rather our Lees who came before us and on down through Burton Lee's lines are from the cold waters of New England and Canada West.
Indeed, their French-Canadian connection is what gave birth to my great-grandfather's name. His grandmother was a woman called Eliza Berton, a lady whose family was also often referred to as "Barton." The name "Berton" was Anglicized, and decades later gave my great grandfather his first name of "Burton."
The name "Burton" survives even now in his descendants.
I don't want to go too much further into the Lee ancestry. It all becomes speculation and is too murky and too much of a monster to get very far with anyway. However, there is one old photograph I would like to share with you.
It's a picture that might be a further clue to our Lee family origins.
The man pictured above is William Lee, born in New York circa 1806. His descendants show a DNA match to the descendants of Erastus Lee and on through to Erastus's grandson, Burton Arthur Lee. This William and our Erastus lived in the same Michigan county in the 1870 census.
William is quite possibly Erastus's older brother, so understanding more about William may give us a better idea of just where our Lee family came from.
PART II.
But that's a tale for another day. For now, I want to talk just about Bert (or "Bert" related subjects). So I've decided to do what I have done in the posts for my other great-grandparents and go back to the old newspapers to see what I could find.
The first thing I found was an advertisement in the Saratoga Sun for a place I'd never heard of - a business run by my great-grandfather Burton Lee.
Now like most of you, my eyes were immediately drawn to the name of "Chas. M. Wilcox," in the second image above - it is the name of my great-great-grandfather and the father-in-law of Bert Lee. I almost missed the smaller advertisement just below for The Windsor Stables, whose proprietor is
"B. A. Lee."
Who or what was The Windsor Stables???
Why had we never heard about it before?
Above: A description of Windsor Stables in an early twentieth-century guide to the Wyoming outdoors.
I guess it's no surprise that Bert's advertisement should appear next to that of his father-in-law's. The year is 1918, and a recent widower with five children is probably doing everything he can to put food on the table. From the description of the Windsor Stables above, they are a business that seems to accommodate their customers in a variety of ways. However, as far as I can tell, Bert doesn't own The Windsor Stables for very long.
In fact, it's a business that has been bought and sold several times over before being purchased by Bert Lee. An interesting advertisement for the same business appeared almost twenty years earlier (1892). Check out who owns the business then:
At one point in time, The Windsor Stables was owned by Charles Merritt Wilcox's brother John - John Franklin Wilcox, television actor Larry Wilcox's great grandfather.
So our great grandfathers literally owned "the same business" - albeit at different times.
Crazy.
Or is it?
PART III.
Now there's so much tragedy in Bert and his wife Ono's lives I didn't really want to go down that road in the retelling of it. Some of it is better left for Ono's story anyway. Nah, what I thought I might like to do here is to posit or explain just why Bert (and Ono of course) came to call their son and my grandfather born in 1908 -
"Frank White Lee."
Now if I ever heard where Bert's son and my grandfather Frank got his middle name of "White" from I surely have forgotten. In recent years, I assumed that his middle name of "White" referred to "The Great White Six" a team of horses and stagecoach driven by Ono's father Charles M. Wilcox.
It felt like a logical homage and a logical conclusion. I no longer believe that to be the case.
However, now I think Bert and Ono had a different source for both the first and middle name of their son.
For just a second, I'm going to take you back to one tragedy. (Sorry I know I said I wasn't going to do that but...) The tragedy is the 1907 death of Bert and Ono's little two-year-old son John who drowned in the creek.
Keep in mind that my grandfather, Bert, and Ono's son Frank was born in May of 1908. Keep in mind too the shattering sense of guilt and grief that would have surrounded Bert and Ono over the death of their firstborn child. It is evident that they had to rely on the support of family and friends or go insane from the sorrow. Even with a new baby soon on the way grief must have still plagued them both.
They must have been so grateful for the folks who stuck by them as they worked through their grief.
As Ono's time drew near they must have talked about what to name the new baby if it was a boy or a girl. Now read the next passage and it all might make more sense:
Bert and Ono extended their thanks for help to their friends during their bereavement to:
"Mr. and Mrs. Frank White."
So my dear ones I posit that Bert and Ono Lee in their gratitude to their friends surely must have said,
"If the baby is a boy we want to name him after you, Frank. We want him to be called, "Frank White Lee."
And so he was.
So it was never about his middle name at all - but about his whole name.
Now why couldn't I see that before? Duh.
I was curious about Mr. Frank White and what became of him and his wife Mary. Frank White was an Englishman who immigrated in about 1880. (Lord, knows why he went to Wyoming...) Mr. and Mrs. White lived in Saratoga, Wyoming until 1919 when they sold everything and moved to, you guessed it, California.
Frank White died in 1922. His widow in 1938.
It's interesting to me that Bert Lee's father John Lee died when Bert was only eight years old and that Bert's son Frank lost his mother Ono when Frank was only eight years old. Frank lost Bert too when Frank was only seventeen.
Burton Arthur Lee died at age 48.
His father John Lee at age 42.
His mother Lucy Melinda Lee at age 38
His wife Ono at age 36
And his firstborn son, John, at age 2
See what I mean about too much early tragedy?
With all this sadness in Bert's life, I wanted to show you that not every day was toil and trouble so I will leave you with one last clipping about my great-grandfather Bert's life:
Even in the darkness, there is still a little light.
PEACE.
Footnote: The "Eli Lee" mentioned in the above article was not a relative of Burton's. It was actually "Mrs. Lee" mentioned above who was a relative of Mrs. Charles Wilcox. (They were both Hoyts.) Mrs. Lee's name was Fanny (Hoyt) Lee and she lived to be 101 years old - Aunt Jerri recalls meeting her as a girl.
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