If you're joining us for the first time, we're some cousins trying to unravel an old family mystery. We call it The Susie Situation, and this is Episode Three. You can read here, or watch on YouTube (below.)
Last week we talked about Fires and Farts. This week? Seventh Grade and Scams. We're investigating a 100-year-old mystery that we're calling "The Susie Situation." This is episode 2.
This is available as a video (below) or in written format (below that.) At the very end are some news clippings and one transcribed news article.
Imagine 7th grade. I know, you don't want to. It's such an awkward year. You're 13, maybe 12. Your complexion is staging this full blown rebellion. The other kids are all edges and elbows.
But let's say you have a teacher with a flair for the creative. "Gather round, class! Your maternal grandmother, that's your mom's mom. Do you know her first name? I want you all to seat yourselves alphabetically by that. If it was Alice, you're in the front. If it was Zelda, you're in the back. Shuffle it up! Let's go!"
There's a buzz in the room. It's almost as exciting as Harry Potter's sorting hat. The kids begin to sort themselves into rows while they keep up a steady banter.
"My grandma's cookies are better than yours."
"So what?"
And as they jostle and joke, you burst into tears, because it feels like you're the only person in this classroom without living grandparents, and you realize that not only do you not know what kind of cookies your maternal grandmother used to make, you don't even know her name.
This is how my cousin Melody first became interested in family history, there in her seventh grade classroom, thinking about her grandmother and wondering where to sit. She had a million questions she wished she could ask this unknown lady with the unknown name. So Melody went home that day and just started asking her parents questions about their parents.
Melody's mother told her that her grandmother's name was Sina Belle Carver. Her mother remembered spending a lot of time playing outside as a child — running wild, as she called it. And she didn't recall any specific cookie memories, but she did remember that sometimes she would get in trouble, and then she would have to sit on the stairs — sort of an old fashioned time out — but then Sina would feel bad about it afterwards and give her ice cream.
Sina was my father's sister, and Dad said that she was named after his father's former girlfriend. Now, why did Grandma go for that? I mean, it's a pretty name, but his former girlfriend? Sina Belle's brothers used to kid her about her name.
"When Congress sends a bill to the president, what do they want him to do? Sign a bill! Ha ha ha!"
Future tellers of dad jokes, right there. But Dad claimed they were very loving about this, because you couldn't help but love sister Sina. She was little and sweet and gentle and kind.
Sina and her siblings were all born in Nebraska, where her ancestors moved in hopes of rich farmland and a fresh start. Back in 1877, her father's Carver family came from Wisconsin with a group of other settlers to form a small town called Mars. Her mother's Hubbard family came from Vermont to settle in a nearby village called Venus.
These towns are kind of hard to find now. If you pull up Google Maps, you can see Venus. It's part of Walnut Grove. And then, Mars Campground is a few miles southeast of that, and that's most of Mars, right there. Our shirttail relative, Dick Haskin, lives there, on the old Haskin Homestead. This is right near where the old Carver Homestead used to be. Dick hosts family reunions there, and many Carver and Hubbard family members have been back to visit.
I haven't been to one of these reunions yet, because I'm just not a very good traveler, but the last few years I've gotten better at traveling. At the Mars campground, Dick gives tours, and I'm kind of excited about this, because there are these dugouts that my great uncle stayed in while they built the house for the family to live in, and it seems like everybody's seen these except me.
So, to speed things up, a few months ago, I sign up for this special airline credit card from Bank of America. It claims to get me extra airline points so I can fly places for free. The card comes in the mail. And then, two days later, I get a letter from Bank of America. It says, "We're shutting down your account due to suspicious activity", and I'm like, What?
The letter says I have 25 days to sort this out or else, poof! And I'm thinking, goodbye airline points, no free trips to Nebraska, no tours with Dick to see the dugouts, unless I make this call.
I call the number on the letter and get a recording that says, if you're over 50 press 1, if you're under 50 press 2. That seems really weird, but I press 1. A woman answers. She doesn't say anything about suspicious activity or credit cards. Instead, she tries to sell me a Medic Alert Bracelet.
Help! I've fallen for a scam, and I just need to hang up. But I guess I shouldn't be surprised because my family's been falling for scams since at least 1877, when those Carver great grandparents migrated to Mars.
Here's an article from the Neligh Independent from January, 1878. (See below.) The editor recounts a trip to the area to visit a homestead. He says the grass rivals Kentucky bluegrass, perfect for fattening cattle, splendid groves of trees, fine meadowlands, four tons of hay per acre, "many others to be had in this immediate neighborhood."
I wonder what kind of commission this guy got for each homestead that was settled. I showed this to Dick Haskin. He laughed and said, "This soil is sand, gravel, and volcanic ash. Nothing grows well here. Nothing."
So, back in Wisconsin, some excitable farmer reads a glowing article like this, and then he goes around to his relatives and neighbors and gets them all worked up about Nebraska. Free land. Tons of hay per acre. Fat cattle. And they all get scammed into moving to Mars.
The article goes on to mention several homesteaders, including Wallace Haskin and Mr. Carver. The Mr. Carver in this article was Sina's grandpa. That's Melody's two times great grandpa. And despite the bad soil, he did figure out how to scrape a living out of his homestead. But, it appears that it was a constant scrape.
We know a few things about Cyrus Carver and his wife Mary from old newspapers. We know that in Mars they were called Grandma and Grandpa Carver, that sometimes they were called out in the middle of the night to help care for the sick, and that he donated part of his land to be the first cemetery.
These old newspapers weren't available for Melody to search back in 7th grade. They've been scanned in recent years and put online, some of them just in the last couple of years. And when Melody was in seventh grade, we also didn't know each other. I was aware of her mom, but really only as a name on a piece of paper.
And sometimes with family history, that's really all you have to start out with, a name on a page. And for some people, it seems like that's the whole goal, a collection of as many connected names as possible, going back as far as possible, and maybe highlighting as many connections to famous people as possible.
But we're still trying to understand just a few people a couple of generations back. And honestly, we want to know a lot more than just a name on a page.
My family left us many things - a predisposition to cancer, diminutive stature, a distinct lack of generational wealth. They neglected to leave photos. We don't know what Grandpa looked like, or two of our three aunts. Those three aunts died way too soon and really needed to meet more men. That's what we've decided from where we sit -- three nieces and grand nieces, learning about Dad's three sisters, while we unravel a 100 year old mystery that we're calling "The Susie Situation." Our story starts with a fire.
This is available as a video (below) or as a written work (below that.)
I wake up most mornings thinking that I'm getting old. Why is this at the forefront of my thoughts at dawn? Who knows.
Last year I had surgery to remove various body parts before they had a chance to acquire cancer. My father's family gave me the gift of being genetically hospitable to certain types of cancer, and I don't need those parts anymore, so it seemed like the thing to do, but ...
Something happens when they re-arrange all those parts inside of you. It must create free space for trapped air? After years of gas-free living (except for the summer of '69 - and we don't know what was going on there) I found myself waking up at 3am with copious amounts of excess flatulence.
My morning routine the first few weeks after surgery involved waking up, thinking about getting old, noticing which body part hurt most, remembering that I'm not going to be around forever, and then telling myself to stop whining, because I've outlived many women in my family. This series of thoughts might take anywhere from 3 minutes to 3 hours, after which, resolving to go about my day with dignity and grace, I would roll over, sit up, and fart.
Do I recommend this surgery? Well, it might have prolonged the lives of some of those women I've outlived. Even a little bit of standard medical care might have helped. I mean, I'm not a doctor, but I'm pretty sure aspirin is not the best and only painkiller for breast cancer. Uncle Clarence, I'm talking to you.
My father's three sisters all died before I was born. I don't even know what two of them looked like. Sometimes I hear rumors of photos. "My sister might have some, but she isn't speaking to me and won't share" or "My uncle had all the photos, and then his house burned down."
Things that burn. There's actually an old family story about a house and a barn burning down on the same day, back when my father was two years old. He wrote about this in a manuscript he left me.
He says, “We were living on this homestead near Spencer, Nebraska. And Dad was away from home."
I guess the rest of the family was out getting the cows. Except for his sister Susie. For some reason she wasn't there. On their way home, a thunderstorm came up on the prairie.
"There was one really bright flash and then a hard clap of thunder. Then we saw smoke coming from our new barn. It was on fire, and we couldn't save it. Before we got to the barnyard, there was another really bright flash and another deafening roar, and smoke came pouring out of our house -- our new house!"
Now, when I was a kid, I noticed that if I asked the wrong question during a family story, I would often get an illusive answer.
"Dad, what are the odds of lightning striking two structures on the same land on the same day, catching them both on fire?"
"Well ... I couldn't say."
"Dad, where was Grandpa during this time?"
"Well ... sometimes he was away."
"Dad, where was Susie?"
"Well ... you know, I was only two years old."
As I got older I discovered that this lightning story was the official story, but there was an underlying suspicion. Subtext. Family lore. A suggestion that this fire was set on purpose. Why? Nobody explained. They hemmed and hawed and said, "Well ...."
So I set out to find other sources of information. For years I searched through newspaper listings and other resources in Boyd county, near Spencer. I got negative results. That's what the professional genealogists tell you when you hire them to look for things, and they don't find them. "I searched. I got negative results. That will be four hundred and fifty dollars, please. I prefer a check."
Then one day I broadened my search to Holt county, a few miles south of Spencer, and that's when I discovered a tiny little news article in the Atkinson Graphic, dated July 12, 1912: "Orlin Carver of Phoenix had the misfortune to lose his house and household goods last Friday night by fire. Mr. Carver lives on a Kinkaid homestead and the loss will be an especially heavy one for him."
It didn't mention a barn. And Grandpa's first name was spelled wrong - Orlin instead of Orland - but I've often seen it misspelled in this fashion. My dad was born in 1910, so he would have been 2 in 1912. I had no idea where Phoenix or Kinkaid were, but a quick look at a map showed that Atkinson is 41 miles south of Spencer. The dates are right. The place seems right. There were not many Carvers in the area. This looked like my family. Now what?
I reached out to my cousins, Kate and Melody. "HELP!" They were patient, letting me bury them in research, listening to my dramatic overshares and sighs of confusion. They passed information back and forth between me and their aging parents, adding information of their own, and suggesting new avenues for research. Over the last year we've pieced together large parts of this story while our own stories unfolded in parallel..
If we were writing the script for a movie, we would have to admit that the script is not complete. We're hoping that if we release some updates, a bit at a time, we'll figure it out as we go. Perhaps more of our cousins will provide feedback and help us add depth and clarity. Perhaps the final family narrative will be crowdsourced.
And perhaps I can change my morning routine. Wake up and think, yes, darn it, I'm getting old, but at least I've shared what I know. And also, finally, thank heavens, that farting has subsided.
