The Susie Situation - Episode 5 - Stale Old Stories

You can watch this on YouTube (below). Copies of news articles are in the written version (below that.)

If you’re joining us for the first time, we are cousins investigating a 100 year old family mystery. We call it The Susie Situation. This is episode 5.

I want to show you a fantastic web page. Let’s search for Keith Leans on Things. Here it is. Photo after photo of news correspondent Keith Morrison from the true crime show Dateline, leaning against trees and lampposts and fences …

In my dreams, this story about Aunt Susie is a Dateline Special. Keith Morrison leans against a fence in front of rolling hills and a lone barn, making poetic pronouncements about Susie Carver and Frank Hamilton and the tragic homestead fire of 1912 in the sandhills of Nebraska. 

Imagine Keith looking thoughtfully into the camera and saying, “All these years, have we been blaming Orland Carver for something he didn’t do?” 

For years we thought my father’s sister Susie was sent to a school for girls due to some sort of government intervention, because Grandpa? Well. Don’t leave your young girls alone with Orland Carver.

When Dad first told me, I was dismayed, but not shocked. When we list the ancestors we’re most proud of, Orland Carver never makes the Top Ten.

If you search through news articles, you can see examples of the government taking kids from their parents for various reasons during this time period. Here’s one from The Frontier, July 1913. A 15-year-old girl arrives in O’Neill, stays the night at a hotel, then asks where Mr. Ellis works. She finds his place of business and tells his landlord that she is here to marry Mr. Ellis. The landlord is thinking that’s odd, because Mr. Ellis is about 60 years old, so he alerts the authorities, who take this case to court. A judge determines that the girl’s mother and step-father are neglecting her. His answer? Send the girl to Geneva Industrial School until she turns 18.

The Frontier, 10 Jul 1913, Thu ·Page 4

So government intervention is not uncommon, but after years of believing this story about my grandfather, I found a news article saying that a man named Frank Hamilton had been arrested, accused of harming Aunt Susie, and it made me question everything I had believed.

There was this nagging little voice in my head. It just wouldn’t leave me alone. Go find the truth.

But how do you find the truth from 100 years ago? Nobody from then is here now to give a first hand account. I already searched digital sources to the best of my ability.

I did find one article about a Frank Hamilton family in Catalpa. June 21, 1912. “Mr. and Mrs. Frank Hamilton, of Catalpa, are rejoicing over the arrival of a 11 ½ -pound boy who came to take his place among the ranchmen of that community a short time ago.”

This is 9 months after Frank was arrested in September of 1911, and just a couple of weeks before my grandparents’ house burned down. Everything sounds normal here. Did the trial already happen? Or were the charges dropped? 

Have you ever felt like you’re searching in circles? That’s what I did next. And then this other little nagging voice started up in my head. You don’t know what you’re doing. Why not just leave well enough alone?

On a show like Dateline, those investigators don’t find all their answers doing endless Google searches. They interview people. They visit courthouses and look through court records.  

Maybe I should I hire a genealogy expert to go find court documents and interview people. But I’m shy about doing that. 

I pull out the news article about the homestead fire and look at it one more time. The wording is strange. “Orlin Carver of Phoenix had the misfortune to lose his house … Mr. Carver lives on a Kinkaid homestead and the loss will be an especially heavy one for him."

Is this in Phoenix or Kinkaid? And how come I can’t find either place on a map? That’s another thing I could ask a genealogist. 

One day I get a call from my Cousin Bud. He’s checking on the progress of his DNA test. I needed male Carver DNA for a little project, and he wanted to do a DNA test, so it seemed like we were meant for each other. All I needed from him was a saliva donation, which he was happy to provide.

We weren’t well acquainted, but he would call me randomly. He liked to tell me about his conversations with our Great Grandmother, Mary Carver. He said he would go sit next to her gravesite, and then she would talk to him.

I confide to Bud that I want to call a genealogist, but so far I’m chickening out. He laughs. “Get on the phone! You weren’t too shy to ask me if I would donate my spit, were you?” 

Bud knew how to change stale stories. I would say what we always say, “Grandpa was no good.” He would counter with, “Well, maybe we just didn’t understand him.”

Perhaps this perspective helped him deal with the little voices in his head. We all have these voices. You reach towards a hot stove, a little voice says, “Stop!” That’s useful.

But in the Carver family there’s one nagging voice that delivers variations of a particular message: You’re no good. You should be ashamed. You need to know your place. This message has leaked through the cracks of time, and I have a sneaking suspicion it started as a whisper back in the Sandhills of Nebraska.

Other families pass down Bibles, quilts, paintings. The Carver family heirlooms consist of a handful of photos and that nagging voice, telling us a stale old story that we really don’t need anymore. And this is why I’m not willing to leave well enough alone, because one good way to quiet a nagging voice is to learn where it came from. 

Bud is no longer with us. He left to go be with Great Grandma Mary, but if they can hear us now, I would like to let them both know that I did hire a genealogist. She said court records would take time, so I should prepare to be patient. 

In the meanwhile, I decided to spy on Frank Hamilton. Findagrave is a big website with lots of gravesite information. I found a Frank Hamilton buried in Holt county with a wife named Ruth Kinney. They had a boy named Duffy Pete who was born in June of 1912. 

I noticed several family parallels. Frank and Orland were both born in Wisconsin. Frank’s parents moved to Knox county just a few miles from Mars. And then both families ended up in Holt county. Why did they move there? 

The genealogist called me back. She didn’t have my court records yet, but she did locate a hand drawn postal map that showed Phoenix. It’s a post office stop just a couple of miles north of Catalpa. And Kinkaid? That’s not a location at all. That’s an act of congress, passed in 1904, allowing 37 counties in Nebraska to give out homesteads as large as 640 acres. (The spelling seems fluid. Official spelling is probably Kincaid.)

When folks moved to Holt county to take Kincaid homesteads, they were participating in Nebraska’s version of the gold rush.

Can you imagine Annie Carver, happy in her little 40-acre homestead in Mars. She’s surrounded by family and friends. They don’t have much money, but they have a house, a barn, and a well. They’ve cultivated 25 acres of crops. They have some cows. Then the Kincaid act passes, and Orlie Carver gets land fever. 

“Mother, this is our chance. This is the deal of a lifetime! We’re going to be big cattle ranchers!” 

They leave their support system behind and move 60 miles away. When the house burns, family heirlooms burn, too. And do you think those buildings were insured? I seriously doubt it.

If Keith Morrison were telling this story on Dateline, he might say that a Kincaid homestead was a big homestead built on big dreams, and as the Carver house and barn were engulfed in flames, big Carver dreams were reduced to ashes.

Can Susie rebuild her life from the ashes and navigate the unfamiliar world of the girls' school? And then there's 4-year-old Sina, barely tall enough to peer over the crops, yet old enough to observe the frantic efforts of her mother and brothers as they battle the blaze that threatens to erase their legacy. And how does the aftermath impact Florence, who lives nearby? Does the family move in with her temporarily? Does that nagging voice turn up its volume in her head? You’re no good. You should be ashamed. You need to know your place. 

Thanks to Amy Johnson Crow for providing a framework for people who don't know what to say next when writing about genealogy. We're loosely following her 52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks framework. For more information about that, and to see copies of the news articles mentioned here, please go to LegacyCarvers.com. Look for the Susie Situation, Episode 5.