Of Rabbits and Dragons

...or Flying Monkeys, or simply just another Game of Thrones 

(Author's note: Sometimes genealogy should come with a good roast.)

As always, royally unedited.

I.

Anyone subject to my genealogical storytelling and often rants will tell you that I blabber on about what (for me) are questionably important goals or benchmarks to achieve in ancestral research. NONE of these goals or benchmarks are important. They are just that, something to aim for, something to achieve. They're rather whimsical and pretty WASPY in terms of origin stories, but hey, call it like it is. I am an old white guy living dangerously on the edge of my golden years. It sorta makes sense that those would be my proverbial rabbits or dragons to chase.

For any of you who haven't been paying attention, and simply because nobody would blame you for not doing so, I thought I'd bring up the subject of Gateway Ancestors again. (Wake up. There will be a quiz.) Now, nobody really likes Gateways; they're kind of a pain, kind of rare, and ever so snooty in pretty much any context. Nevertheless, for me and my WASP-ish Anglo-Saxon ways, they're also one of those benchmarks or goals I aim for. What can I say? If you have no interest in a bona fide albeit distant connection to "Uropeanne Royalty" (lol), you should bail out of this blog post tout de suite.

This week, I thought I'd take another look at a possible Gateway Ancestor. Whatever...

I thought I'd take another look at a possible Gateway Ancestor for my cousin Dan Wells. In general, Dan's family tree reads modestly more like a Who's Who or  immodesty like Society's Blue Book Page, but as of late, there's one thing I haven't seen in his family pedigree to prove out, and that is a connection to European royals. Now I'm pretty sure that Old Dan probably couldn't care less about any lineal connection to Henry II's bastard or that he's a fifth cousin twelve times removed to Joan of Arc. Nevertheless, it's my avocation to subject poor Old Cousin Dan to his ancestry, and to dig out the rabbits or dragons wherever I might find them. All of this is my short way of saying that I wanted to look at Dan's lines again to see if we couldn't tie his ancestry beyond the Mayflower, beyond William Penn, and beyond his plethora of Revolutionary War patriots, to say, the Tudors and Lancasters.

Ah, come on, it'll be fun. Here goes...

II.

So I took a gander back through Dan's tree. Lots of (excuse me) boring ass stellar people with major accomplishments in their lives. (I am being unnecessarily glib at Cousin Dan's expense) And while I think you folks might believe I have memorized all the Gateway Ancestors there ever were, in a word, not. I look through the lines and pick and choose which ones might lead me somewhere. For example, I'm pretty good with Mayflower family names, so I sorta know which left or right turn to take in looking for one of those. Not so much with Gateway Ancestors. I have to pull the pin on multiple entries, and much of like aiming a slot machine, sometimes I get lucky.

This time, I came up with a name, Alice Freeman Thompson Parke. 

The name doesn't exactly sound like, "Hey, I'm Anne Boleyn's lost great granddaughter," or look at me if you want to know more about your kinship with Bonnie Prince Charles. Still, something about her name rang true for me. It was like I had heard it before, and seeing as it was in Dan's tree, I decided, WTF, that I would take a quick look.

And, as they say, before I knew it,

Winner, winner, chicken dinner.

I had found a bona fide Gateway Ancestor to European Royalty for Cousin Dan. Wake up, Dan! This is cool shit. And, in my opinion, it gets better. Again, whatever.

Now to prove it out.

I'm not going to waste a lot of time here showing the proofs. I had recently worked on Dan's Mayflower lines that would prove him (Old Dan) back to Wealthy Palmer Church. I just needed to get from Wealthy Palmer Church to Alice Freeman Thompson Parke and back again. You know, I would need to take a couple of "genealogical laps" around the track as it were. Well, I'm hoping it will be easy peasy - but, like they say, check back in a week to see if I have come up for air or not.

 Anyway, here goes with my best evidentiary support linking Wealthy Palmer Church to Alice Thompson Parke - and thus to a bona fide proven Gateway Royal ancestor, and this to Old Cousin Dan.

Dan Wells, you really are quite spoiled.

Okay, a pedigree chart to follow this little missive:        

And  now on down to Dan:

Okay, well, don't believe me about old Alice. How about now?

                 

Yes, I know there's some duplication here for emphasis. 
                   

   

               

Yeah, I'm gonna stop about here. Nobody's gonna read this anyway, or check the refs or citations. Besides, this is SUCH a supported line it seems kind of redundant to keep going. I'm sure that Dan will recognize the name of his Church ancestors in the last image shown above, and that anyone should be able to see how the images all connect one on top of the other. Kinda easy-peasy right?

So Alice was quite the gal, huh?

         

Well, there's a monkey flying in every world, but still:

               

 Okay, okay - so Alice is still the real deal. I know, I know. Wake up. All this stuff is pretty boring - and Dan's pedigree is, well, let's face it, not all that challenging in the old royalty department. 

I know, shocker, right?

But since this was all kinda ho-hum, I thought I'd see who else Dan might be "royally related" via Alice Freeman Thompson Parke. That's when I discovered the man behind the curtain. Yep, Dan is related to the Scarecrow, Tin Man, the Cowardly Lion, and Toto, too.

All because he (Dan) and L. Frank Baum, the author of The Wizard of Oz, are both cousins of Alice. 

Well, I thought it was cool. I mean that's like having your own connection to Glinda the Good Witch of the North - who when I was ten I thought was kinda hot, and her evil sis? Awesome. It also means Dan would be able to have his own trove of genealogical flying monkeys too. Doesn't it just figure?

 

Okay, so it's not exactly a close relationship, but it's more than I've got. I can't even get an Airbnb in the Emerald City, and all Dan has to do is make a phone call.

  

And it's not the typical "I'm related to Joe Blow" kinda stuff. Ah, besides, the little winged monkey guy in the picture is kinda cute. Reminds me of Dan. OMG, I did not just say that. 

III.

So I guess I have found Old Dan his valid Gateway Ancestor. He can mark it along with the Mayor of Munchkin town off the list of genealogical benchmarks and to-dos. But I gotta tell you too, that as I was finishing all this up I saw another peculiar connection for Dan and the very royally inclined Alice Freeman Thompson Parke. 

It's a very ancient one, and frankly less close than The Wizard of Oz. Still, when I saw it I thought, Well of course he's (Dan's) related to that guy. 

And no, I'm not gonna bore you with a bunch of pedigree charts or more shit excerpts from books or citations you'll never look at.

But I am going to wager though, that Old Dan's never heard of Winterfell, or The Wall, or the Night's Watch, nor has he ever had a clue about anything Targaryen. I'm sure he's never seen a single episode of Game of Thrones. I'm not baggin' on Dan - only to say that he's probably not paying attention to all that drama in Westeros.

But really, knowing Dan as little as I do, is anyone surprised to find out that Dan is at least in this "faux genealogical hyperbole of a distant world" a cousin of this guy:

Yeah, that guy, Jon Snow. Legit. One of the heir claimants etc to the Iron Throne. (Or at least to actor Kit Harrington who portrays the royal one.)

Does it get any more "Gateway Ancestor" than that? Hell, does it get more royal than that?

Yeah, no.

I mean, who doesn't want to be able to rattle off that old adage, "I drink and I know things," and hang out with the Lannisters?

                          

Dude, count me in. 

So yes, while Dan isn't technically from the Narrow Sea, or technically one of Ned Stark's bastards, he definitely does have a way of drawing it all into his ephemeral pedigree chart. 

Doesn't it just figure that Dan would have a distant claim to the Iron Throne?

Yeah, that does it. I'm out.

    

What's an unexpected relation like me supposed to think? Lol.

Anyway, hope you all got a small chuckle. If not, well, take heed. I know a guy with a flying monkey and a couple of nasty dragons.

PEACE!

                  

   

 

Lex Luther                           

(Author's note: Take the time to meet one of my family's superheroes.)

As always, unapologetically unedited.

Most of the time, you don't even see them. They're just names, a seemingly endless scroll on a pedigree or descendants chart. Maybe a few stand out: an odd birth date, a death simply marked with a dash, or "unknown." It's not your fault you can't see "them." There are simply too many.

For the most part, it's a random kind of kismet. You might feel compelled to stop and look at one name in particular, but you don't really know why. After all, they're just people who lived and loved a long time ago. "What the heck does it really matter?" you might ask yourself. You've recorded their vitals as best you could and moved on.

Sometimes, though, one of them calls you in. It's not like a ghost or an apparition, but more like an echo within yourself. You wonder if a part of them isn't in you, somewhere, even still.

I guess that's how I "met" Luther.

  

Above: Birth record for Luther Harrison Lee

I've written about Luther Harrison Lee before, or as I like to call him for this post, "Lex Luther." Perhaps it's because I like the reverse alliteration to Superman's villain, and maybe because "LEX" is my own "Latin-esque" term for the law. You see, "my" Luther, much like Superman's Lex 'Luthor,' had issues with the law. The law considered Luther a villain of sorts, and, well, I'm not entirely convinced they (the law) were right. I think this Lex Luther was just a lost and sad soul among the branches of my family tree, a lost soul in a day and age when there wasn't much understanding or sympathy for people like him.

You see, Luther was an epileptic.

Born on November 3, 1887, in Saginaw County, Michigan, Luther Harrison Lee is my first cousin, three times removed. He was my great-grandfather, Burton Lee's first cousin — a fact I doubt my great-grandfather ever knew, or if he did, paid any attention to. (Burton's father, John, and Luther's father, Lyons, were brothers) Luther migrated with his branch of my Northern Lee kinfolk from Michigan to Washington State sometime before 1910.  As far as branches of my Northern Lee family coming out west, this branch can be considered somewhat of a late arrival. Once he got here, that is to Washington State, census records show Luther worked as a logger and at some form of self or family farming - the records are unclear.                             

Above: The family of Lyons and Catherine Lee

For the most part, you wouldn't know that there was anything unusual about Luther, or that there was any sort of a problem with his life. While family photos aren't always flattering, and while Luther's sister looks much like a child vampire and the babies in the picture a demons, very few of us will ever grace the pages of Harper's Bazaar or Vogue. No, the first glimpse you see that anything was going on with him or with his family is when he completed his World War I Draft Card. It's here that the nature of his disability is very much spelled out.       

                          

Above: WWI Draft card and a believed to be image of Luther Harrison Lee

I think something must have changed here, that is right about this time. (Say 1920ish)  I'm only guessing, but I think his seizures must have been getting worse. 

While Luther never seems to have left home, that is, he is shown as living with his parents in census records from 1880 through 1940, there is certainly mention of him in the local papers. I guess "Lex Luther" started having some minor run-ins with the law. This is a curious thing to me, though. For the most part, he is simply mentioned as "frightening" someone. Yeah, when you don't understand a disability, it is often "frightening." Sometimes he is referred to as having appeared insane or crazy. As I read these accounts of him in the older newspapers, I have to wonder what the truth behind all these allegations was.

I think the truth is that Luther was just severely disabled. 

        

                          

Sometime in the 1930s, things seemed to spiral a bit for Luther Lee. He begins to have more of these run-ins with the law. They aren't terrible, and law enforcement seems to treat him fairly well, given the climate of the day. Still, the labels are a bit rough.                       

 And then something really bad happened to Luther. His parents died.

Now, up until this time, Luther was shielded in a lot of ways. However, the march of time protects no one, and Lyons and Catherine Hege Lee simply grew old. By 1945, both of Luther's parents were deceased. I doubt Luther's brother and sisters were interested in caring for their disabled brother, who may have also had some erratic behavior not on par with post-WWII social mores.

I'm hopeful that he wasn't lobotomized. I just can't be sure.

Now I had always thought (likely because I didn't look far enough or close enough at the records) that Luther, realizing his disability, simply fled to the mountains. I thought this because his death certificate read that he died in a rural area of Washington State near a city called Sedro-Wooley." Well, stupid me, I didn't look any further. I saw only the words "rural" and a hyphenated city/town name in a rural area. It made more "sense to my sensibilities" that Luther would have fled to the mountains and died a quiet, lonely (yet somehow noble) death. It was only after I came back to revisit Luther this last time that I understood.

Yeah, that was not the case.

The big reveal was on Luther's death certificate - you know the one I hadn't paid very close attention to and made assumptions from, yeah, that one.     

But there it was - the "Northern State Hospital." Hmmmm....? So I think to myself, well, at least Luther didn't die alone via a seizure in a cabin in the woods. And then I looked up just what and where the Northern State Hospital was - or rather is.

Now I'm not gonna go on about "medical treatments of the day" or mention that Luther's brother and sister probably did the best they could for Luther, or even mention that the Northern State Hospital is considered one of Washington State's most haunted places. (I mean, what state hospital isn't haunted???) Nah, I'm not gonna go there.    

https://usghostadventures.com/haunted-places/americas-most-haunted-hospitals-and-asylums/northern-state-mental-hospital/

You see, my point in all of this was to get to know Luther. I wanted to see what his life was, good, or bad, sick, or well. I have wanted to put flesh on the bones, as they say. If I happen to draw a parallel between mental illness, epilepsy, and the uncomfortable truths behind them in the past, then If Luther's ghost walks the abandoned hospital hallways I say more power to you, cousin. 

I guess I like to think that cousin"Lex Luther" is somewhere cheering me on with a big, "You go, Cousin Jeff! You tell them who I was - that I was more than just what they read in the papers or the man who lived the last years of his life in a mental hospital."   

              

Yes, Luther Lee, who lived in a mental hospital all likely because he was simply epileptic.

Now I don't know that for sure. Maybe Luther was easily angered and one scary f*ck that nobody except maybe his mama could control. But for some reason, I don't think so. Mom and Dad always brought Luther home until they couldn't anymore. No doubt it wasn't easy. No doubt it was damn hard. Yet they did it. They took care of their son. I have to say, too, that someone came to "collect Luther" after he passed away. He is buried in the family plot in Oak Harbor alongside his parents and siblings.

Yeah, that's just what we do.

There isn't a lot more to say about Luther. I will check back in on him again from time to time to see if the Great Algorithms will shed any new light on just who he was. I feel like I owe it to him. I don't like the idea of Luther or his life getting swept under the rug just because he was disabled, or just because he was maybe a wee bit crazy.

After all, aren't we all?

RIP - "Lex Luther," you will always be a superhero in my family.

       ☮                   

 The Woman in the Portrait...

...Or Grandma GoGo and the Case of Mistaken 🫆 Identity 

My great-grandmother, Mary Kraus Ogle (1886-1970) - Or is it?

As always, rather liberally unedited.

THERE ARE TIMES in family history when everything you believed to be true is turned on its head in an instant. A previously unknown vital record will drop like manna from heaven to reveal the truth behind someone's long-sought-after identity. A misremembered headstone is found, or a lost will or land record shows up out of nowhere. It happens. Then there's the day that arrives when the woman in the portrait may not be who you thought she was.

Say what?

Yeah, that happened to me today. What's worse is I have the darn portrait. My information doesn't appear to be second-hand. I didn't copy and paste the picture off the Great Interweb. I didn't take the information about who the picture was of from some old hand-me-down rumor or a Cousin Sam says "maybe it's so and so" memo. However, is who she was—or what I thought to be true about the woman—not so? 

Is she not my great-grandmother??

This all started about mid-last week when, for some crazy-ass reason, I decided to revisit the family of my great-grandmother, Mary Kraus Ogle, otherwise known of in family circles as, "Grandma GoGo." Beats me as to why I went here. Maybe it's because she is one of the first family lines I researched (now about forty years ago) or because I have always felt comfortable in remembering her. I think the truth is that since it had been decades since I'd really looked at her ancestry, I sort of wondered what it was that I might have forgotten. Gogo is, after all, my very original Mayflower line, and for me, that means something. (Not to mention her being an incredible character in my family's more immediate past.)

So I dug in and looked at her uncles and cousins. I re-read about her parents' divorce and her father's terrible accident (suicide?) with two oncoming trains. I looked at probate records and land sales, and newspaper articles. In the midst of all this, though, I decided to look at Mary's sisters, the aunts Gertrude, Anna, and Ethel. I never knew them very well. I met Gertrude once when I was a little boy, and my recollection of her is a scene of an old woman in a house on a hill in central Kansas. She seemed terribly old to me then, as no doubt she was. I knew Anna; Anna was a sweet woman, a gentle soul who, if there is a heaven, Aunt Anna is surely there. I corresponded with her for a few years after the death of my great-grandmother. I still have a few of her finely penned letters around here somewhere. I hope I haven't lost those letters to that malevolent crusader known as time.               

                      Above: Is that you, Gertrude?

             Above: The sweet face of Aunt Anna

I did not know Mary's youngest sister, Ethel. She passed when I was a very little boy, though I did meet her daughters once, all three of them named after her sisters; they were: Gertrude Faith, Mary Louise, and Jo Ann. Ethel, whose life was so hard after her husband ran out on her, pregnant with two children, and was never heard from again—at least not until his daughters tracked him down sixty years later, buried under an assumed name in Sacramento. 

Yeah, poor Ethel. She didn't have it so great.                       

           Above: The somewhat tragic Aunt Ethel

It was about then, that is after looking at all these lives, that I pulled out my copy of John Kraus: His Ancestors and Descendants. It is a beautiful, hard-bound genealogy of my great-grandmother's family put together by one of Ethel's daughters, Jo Ann. In it I found a picture of the girls gathered around their mother, Electa (Newcomb) Kraus. Now I have looked at this book and indeed this picture for many years. However, this time, though, I believe I actually saw it for the first time. The caption below the picture reads:

"Electa Newcomb Kraus and her four daughters. From lower left clockwise: Anna, Mary, Gertude, and Ethel, date unknown."               

Clockwise? Did you say lower left clockwise?

How have I not seen this before? (Gee, I don't know Jeff, you've only had the book for twenty-five years or so and the portrait for over thirty...)

If that's true, then the woman in the photograph portrait at the top of this blog post above, that the woman I believe to be my great-grandmother Mary Kraus Ogle, isn't. According to this statement in John Kraus: His Ancestors and Descendants, this means that the young woman standing on the left side as you look at the picture is not my great-grandmother Mary. I can easily identify the pictures of the other girls, those of Anna and Ethel, out of the mix, but the two girls standing at the back are very similar in appearance. 

So, which one is which?

Which one is Grandma GoGo?

Is the portrait that has followed my family around for the last one hundred years actually a picture of her sister, Gertrude?

Why has my genealogical record and reality been turned on its head all in one morning's time?        

I have always been told (or was under the assumption) that the woman in the portrait was Mary. On the back of the portrait are even notes, written in pencil describing her hair, dress, complexion, and "D.S. Ogle." Now, D.S. Ogle was my great-grandfather and (obviously) Mary's husband. So if it isn't a picture of Mary, why would it have her husband's name written on the back of it?

(Gotta say too that the notes on the back of the picture are vaguely creepy. Nah, they're really creepy.)

But I recognize my grandmother's handwriting too... identifying the woman as her mother.

So...

Why would I have instead inherited a portrait-style photograph of fricking Aunt Gertrude? (No offense to Gertie.)

 The image above, "going back in time," does little to help answer the question.   

It is curious.

 The information contained in John Kraus: His Ancestors and Descendants was prepared by Ethel's daughter. It seems more credible that she, a second-generation descendant who prepared the genealogy, would have done a thorough job in documenting who was who in the picture. Indeed, she would have had a better firsthand knowledge of just who her mother's sisters were than I would. 

 

It's also evident that the young woman in the singular portrait is certainly the same young woman who is standing far right as you look at the group photo taken with their mother, Electa. Still, is it not possible that the author of the book misremembered the order or the order in which the girls were standing around their mother? 

That's a tough call.          

The only thing I can do is look at GoGo's (Mary's) and Gertrude's photographs as older women. Will this reveal any clues as to the identity of the woman in the portrait?               

Possible Gertrudes above? Left or right?

            

Gogo, where are you? Left or right?

Surely, my grandmother's knew her own mother, but then again, Grandma was adopted. So did she? Did Grandma just assume?

The interesting thing here is that there really is a correct answer. Since we can identify sisters Anna and Ethel, this is just a matter of "cutting the correct jib," so to speak.

I guess for now, I am going to go with what I was told and take what is written on the back of the old portrait-style photograph as true. I may be wrong in doing so, but unraveling the myth that was Mary Ogle or her sister Gertrude Day out of all of this may prove simply impossible. It seems improbable that Mary would have maintained such a glamor shot of her sister Gertrude for nearly seventy years, or that my grandmother Katheryn wouldn't have known that it was her mother in the portrait that she inherited from her. (My grandmother had an amazing acumen for all things family) And while it's not nice to bag on Aunt Ethel's daughters' identification of Mary or Gertrude in the pictures, sadly, as with most family histories, genealogies, or portraits... There comes a time when...

There's no one left to say.

RIP.