 |
Alva, George and Dell Hart
about 1905 |
Dell Hart, my great uncle, and brother of my grandfather,
George Leslie Hart, has been a bit of a mystery. His sister Lottie Hart does
not mention him in her accounts of the family in the Lougheed Alberta local
history books, Verdant Valleys In and
Around Lougheed or Cambridge School
District Memories. I originally found him on a U.S. census, and then in a
photo in my mother’s possession. Dell was the one child of Melvin J. Hart who
did not emigrate with the family to Alberta, Canada. In 1905, the year the rest
of the family moved to Canada, Dell is still living with them in Freeman, Clay,
Iowa.
Interestingly, they
are living next door to the family of John Monk, his uncle and the brother of
his mother, Susan Monk Hart. It appears that the Harts were quite close to many
of the Monks. There are several newspaper articles, especially from Spencer,
Iowa, documenting the visits of the Harts to various members of the Monk family
after they have moved to Canada. Both the Monks and the Harts tended to
emigrate in family groups, sometimes quite large, from place to place. The
Melvin Hart family is an exception to this rule in that they move as a single
family, it appears, to Rock Island, Texas and to Lougheed, Alberta. Prior to
that, Melvin always had followed or accompanied family members whenever he
changed residence, (i.e. New York to Minnesota, and Minnesota to Iowa). The
Monks had always emigrated in large groups, even “colonies”. It appears that
Dell’s grandfather, Jacob Monk, may have moved to Oxford Township in Ontario,
Canada from New York State with a whole community of people, who were possibly
a religious congregation. (I will be looking into this further). When the Monks
came to Iowa, they appear to have come with several families of Crawfords, the
relatives of Jacob Monk’s wife, Jane (a.k.a. “Jennie”) Crawford, who had
originally come from Northern Ireland to Canada.
What I am getting to is that Dell may have followed his
uncle Daniel “Dan” Monk to North Dakota, where he spent the rest of his life.
In the Spencer Herald on February 11,
1903 it is reported, “Dan Monk will move to North Dakota in the spring. George
and Dell Hart will work the farm on which Mr. Monk now lives”. The next we hear
of Dell after 1905, is that he has married Nellie Bernice Penfield on March 24,
1908 in Bismarck, North Dakota. Nellie is also from Iowa, likely a widow, and
is a single mother of two children, Ethel May Lane and Leo Merland Lane. She is
six years older than Dell. In 1910, they are found living as a family in
Pleasant Hill, Kidder, North Dakota on a farm owned by Dell. Land maps from
1912 show that Dell not only has land in Pleasant Hill, but also owns land in
Driscoll, Burleigh, North Dakota, where he is living and farming by 1918.
The one piece of evidence that I have yet found that Dell’s
father and my great grandfather Melvin J. Hart ever left Canada after settling
there is that he is listed on the North Dakota State Cenus for 1915 as probably
part of Dell’s household. “Melvin Hart” is at the end of the page and not
listed after Dell and Nellie, but this may have been an error on the part of
the census taker, as Dell’s household is listed as having three people in it,
and only two are listed together, and “Melvin Hart” follows a family of four,
when if he belonged in It he would have been the fifth member. Therefore, I am
going out on a very short limb and am going to say that this Melvin Hart, who is
the correct age, belongs to us. My guess is that he was visiting Dell at the
time of the Census. This may have been the last time they saw each other. This
may also be an indicator that there was no rift in the family when Dell chose
not to emigrate to Canada with the rest of the family.
On August 3, 1916, Dell’s only child, Vivian Lorraine Hart was born, known as “Lorraine” as a child. What I currently know about her was
that she was the first person listed in a newspaper article about a piano
recital in Bismarck at the age of eleven, and married a man called Sturdevant
William Kennedy, likely in California, and lived most of her life in the Los
Angeles area. So far, I haven’t found any evidence of her having had any
children. Sturdevant, who had been an accountant, died in 1979, and Vivian
Lorraine died in 2004 of the West Nile Virus. She had been in the hospital for
two weeks, and had been in a coma. Her neighbours stated that she liked to sit
out on the porch, where she may have been bitten by an infected mosquito.
Dell died on October 17, 1918 at the age of thirty-eight at
the height of the 1918 flu pandemic in North Dakota. I do not know that he died
of the flu, but it is a strong possibility as he fit the profile of the people
who typically died of it, that is, a fairly young adult. Nellie died on February 16, 1959 in Torrance, California. She and Dell are both buried at the Woodlawn Cemetery in Steele, Kidder, North Dakota.
