I'm going through boxes in the back room of Dad's house while he plays peekaboo with my son. Dad stayed the winter with us to recuperate from some injuries sustained in a car accident. He lost some mobility in his shoulder. He also lost my mom.
I remember at the funeral, my aunt asked me, “Do you know how she died?”
And I said, “Well, yes, by being struck by a car.”
And she said, “I mean, do you know the cause of death? It was a ruptured aorta. That means she died instantly and didn't suffer.”
Well, that was a relief, but it never even occurred to me to ask. Cause of death? Death certificate? Planning funerals? Burial arrangements? And then, while Dad was in the hospital, I was trying to go through their mail and figure out what bills needed to be paid. Mom always took care of that. She'd also been sewing for other people, and they wanted to know if I could find what she'd been working on and return it to them.
Lots of loose ends. And now I'm looking at these boxes, and I'm feeling like she left me empty handed to deal with a big mess. I'm trying to figure out all this adult stuff. New baby, new career, loose ends, and now, what to do with Dad? He has experience with death. He's a bounce-back kind of guy. But it's the first time he's been 75 years old without his wife, and you can see the sadness underneath his brave face, and how he's trying to find his way forward.
We want to turn this room into his library, give him a space that's uniquely his. So we're going through these boxes. Some of them contain old papers and photos. Most are from Mom's side of the family. But there's one small photo in the bottom of one box, and when I pull it out, Dad's whole face lights up. It's a small girl in sepia tones with a pendant around her neck.
“I wondered where that photo was. I've been looking for that for years!”
“ Well, Dad, who is it?”
“That's my mother in Vermont when she's about four. I got that from Florence's son.”
Florence Octavia Sholes was Dad's oldest half sister. Dad explains that he was visiting his nephew, Florence's son, when that son pulled out a photo album and showed him this picture. Dad says he was young at the time and probably didn't have the best of manners.
Annis Loisa/Loiza Hubbard, about 1873
"I nearly begged him for this photo since I didn't have even one picture of my mother. That was back in the days when it was harder to make copies of photos, so he took this out of his album and gave it to me."
As he looks at this picture, Dad seems more lively than he has been since the accident. We pull out more boxes and bring them out for further review, and I ask Dad to tell me more about Florence. Did she go by Flo? What was she like? I've always wondered about her because it seems strange to have an aunt who was born almost 70 years before I was.
Florence was 20 years older than Dad. She was the child of their mother's first marriage. I have no idea what she looked like. I don't think Dad knew her very well.
Grandma was married first to a man named Charles Sholes. Here's his photo. Good looking man. I don't know what happened there. All Grandma ever told Dad was, “We went our separate ways.”
Charles Eugene Sholes. Est age 21. About 1883. Independence, Iowa.
Courtesy of Sandy Dempsey
At age 15 or 16*, Florence was married to Clarence Carey, Uncle Clarence. I don't know how they met, or whether the marriage was arranged. If you don't think that marriages were arranged back then, I have news for you. But we'll talk about that another day, and we'll talk more about Uncle Clarence another day.
In the first episode of this series, I mentioned that Dad's family had a fire at their homestead in 1912. My dad was two years old then. Florence was about 22, and she was living in Bristow, which is around 30 miles from where I think the homestead was. 22 years old and expecting her fourth child. Dad tells me that Florence had nine children in the span of about 13 years.
He goes on to say that their mother, Annis Hubbard, came from Vermont after their father died, and that's when I remember his stories. He started to write some family stories down for me after he retired. Maybe he could start writing those again to keep himself busy.
"Dad, where are your notebooks?"
"Well now, I'm not sure. I think your mother put them in with the important papers."
I remember that his stories started out talking about his mother as a child. I believe that her father died when she was about nine, and then Annis, Edmund and Arthur Hubbard came to Nebraska with their mother, her sister and a cousin. This was, as my dad would say, two widow ladies and their children, who followed two of their other sisters to homestead in Nebraska.
Here's a news article from the Rutland Herald, April 6, 1886.
"Mrs. Jane Hubbard disposed of her household goods at auction Saturday night. She and her three children together with her sister, Mrs. Frank Cook, and son leave Tuesday for Venus, Nebraska, where they intend to make their future home."
For some reason in this article, my great grandmother got to have her own first name, but her sister just got to be Mrs. Frank. For the record, Mrs. Frank had a name. It was Florence. I don't know where Mr. Frank was. But, I assume he passed away between 1880 and 1884, because I find him in the 1880 census. But by 1885, another newspaper article says that Mrs. Frank and son have come to live with C. Woodward.
That's actually another sister's family. That sister's first name was Eloisa, with a long I. The reason we think it's pronounced that way is because my grandmother's middle name was Loisa, sometimes spelled Loiza, but according to my father, always pronounced “Lo Eyes Uh”. (NOTE/CORRECTION: Eloisa passed away in 1878, so best guess, the "C Woodward" family may have been the family of Eloisa's son Charles.)
These articles come from more of the newspapers that have been scanned and put online for easy access in recent years. Dad would have loved to see these articles.
That night back in 1986, I fell asleep on his couch, surrounded by photos and papers. My dreams were filled with sepia-toned Victorian-looking people. They were talking to me, but I had no idea what they were saying. I couldn't hear them.
In the morning, Dad said, "How about if you take your mom's papers and photos home and go through them? You could call your aunts and figure out who all those people are."
And I said, "Okay. Why don't you get your notebooks out, call your brother and nieces and nephews, get the details you don't remember, and finish your stories."
And at that moment I realized a couple of things. All this time I thought I was helping Dad get a back room set up to be this new space where he could start figuring out how to move on without Mom, when really, he'd been helping me find things that were Mom's, so that I could learn more about who she was. He didn't say so out loud. He just did it in his quiet and kindly way, making me believe that I was helping him.
And Mom? She didn't leave me empty handed. She left all those boxes full of clues. She loved to turn everything into little games, and if she were here now, I knew she would say, "Nance, get your sleuthing tools out - your magnifying glass, your fingerprint kit. Go be Nancy Drew. Follow the clues."
So that's how I got interested in family history.
* Different records show different dates for her birth year: Marriage record suggests 1889 (if you do the math.) Death record says 1890 (as provided by Clarence.) Gravestone says 1889; uncertain who provided gravestone, which has incorrect death year. (Should be 1921 according to death certificate. Listed as 1920 on gravestone.) Multiple census records say 1889, including the census records that seem most accurate. 11/6/24: Based on my recent conversation with Sandy Dempsey, Charles Sholes' Great Granddaughter, she is correct that the divorce records appear to say he married her and left her on October 9. But, they also appear to say he has been gone the last two years. I originally misinterpreted the word "two" to be "five". So it is unclear if he left her the same day they were married or sometime after that. More documentation is needed. As for her birth year, more documentation would be helpful for that as well, although the evidence leans towards 1889.
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