Frank Elliot Glazier and the James/Younger Gang

The Rice County historic jail building, used for government offices, in Faribault, Minnesota.
from Wikipedia Commons, provided by "Jonathunder"

As I was attempting to locate the obituary of my great great grandmother, Sarah (a.k.a. Sally) Wright Merriam Hart, I stumbled upon a wonderful database of Minnesota records, including those of Rice county, where many of my Hart relatives lived in the later part of the nineteenth century. Exploring the Dalby Database, www.dalbydata.com created by John Dalby, I came across a reference to Frank Glazier, the nephew of my great grandfather Melvin J. Hart, having shot someone. Exploring this further, I discovered that he had been guarding the James-Younger gang at the jail in Faribault after their ill-fated attempt to rob the Northfield Bank. Although Jesse and Frank James eluded capture, this was the Waterloo for the gang. Several were killed, and the surviving Younger boys were incarcerated. Unfortunately, while guarding the jail, my first cousin twice removed, Frank Glazier, twenty years old, shot and killed another guard in error. The story, as told in the October 8, 1876 Faribault Democrat, was as follows:

The Democrat in this week called upon to chronicle the saddest and most unfortunate chapter in the chain of startling events that has made up the history of our usually quiet city for the past few months. The excitement over the bank robbers, which was gradually subsiding, was again brought to the highest pitch, on Tuesday morning, by the report that Henry Kapernick, policeman No.. 11, had been shot and killed by one of the guards at the jail. Learning that Frank Glazier, of Dundas, was the guard who did the shooting, we sought him out, finding him at the residence of Mr. Livingstone in the south part of the city, and obtained from him the following statement: THE GUARD’S STORY “I was on guard a the east side of the jail and had just been down to the corner of the building and was going back; heard footsteps beyond the engine house; as I heard them I stepped behind the bushes near the pump; as he came up I kept watch of him; just as he stepped from the sidewalk to the ground I ordered him to halt; he didn’t stop; said something that I cannot remember; think now, that he took me for another guard with whom he was acquainted; it was the first time I had been on guard; I spoke to him again and asked, ’Who are you?’ and as I did so I stepped back a couple of paces; he was coming right towards me; when I spoke he appeared to be trying to get between me and the jail; he said,’Don’t you know I’m a policeman?’ still kept coming towards me; thought he must be a robber; thought he intended to finish me with a knife and had accomplices hid near by; he then put his hand up to his breast and then brought it out, as a man would do if he was drawing a revolver or knife; I stepped back a step or two and he took a few steps forward; then I fired; when the smoke cleared away I saw him lying on the ground and called to the other guards, I had my mind made up when I told him to halt that when he stopped I should tell him to step out into the moonlight (he was in the shade of the jail) and then call the other guards; but he did not stop and I felt sure that he was a robber; the thought ran through my head when he wouldn’t stop, ‘Must I shoot a man?’ I hated to do it, even if he was a robber.” Mr. Glazier sat, most of the time, with his head upon his hand and seemed completely overcome by the suddenness and and sadness of the affair. THE INQUEST The dead man was taken to the Court House and an inquest was held on Tuesday afternoon, at which the facts developed were substantially the same as the foregoing, and in addition Chief of Police Dunham testified that he had instructed deceased, as well as the other policemen, not to go near the jail unless it was absolutely necessary, in case of an arrest, or they were called upon. the Coroner’s jury rendered the following verditct: ‘That the said Henry Kapernick came to his death at about 4 o’clock A. M., on the 3d day of October, 1876, at or near the east end of the Sheriff’s residence and jail, in the city of Faribault, in the county of Rice, and the State of Minnesota, by means of a gunshot wound received by the hands of Frank E. Glazier, who was acting as outside guard at the said jail. W. W. Waugh, Coroner, John R. Parshall, G. W. Towes, James Shonts, J. C. Schulte, Edward J. Moran, Louis C. Mueller, Jurors. An examination of the body at the inquest showed that the ball struck the left breast about four inches below the collar bone, and passed through the body, taking a piece out of the right shoulder blade in its passage, and making a large, ragged hole. PUBLIC SENTIMENT There are a few, of course, who censure the guard, but so far as we are informed, the great majority believe that the deceased was mainly in fault, inasmuch as he was disobeying the positive order of his superior, and it was well understood by the public generally that no approach to the jail in the night time could be permitted. The guard was armed with loaded rifes in order that they might enforce this regulation, and although had a person residing in the city been on guard he might, perhaps, have recognized the deceased and averted the catastrophe, it was not presumed to be the duty of the guard to assure himself of the identity of a person approaching until he had been brought to a halt. Through the unaccountable persistence of the deceased in disregarding this necessary regulation the event occurred.

Frank Elliott Glazier was born in September of 1856 in Pinckney, Lewis county, New York, the son of my great great aunt Delilah Sarah Hart and her husband Daniel C. Glazier. The family moved to Rice county Minnesota in the 1860’s, with many other extended family members. The year after the shooting incident, in 1877, Frank married Angeline Chastina Livingston. In 1883, they had their one and only child, Fred Elliott Glazier. The Glaziers moved with Frank’s parents around 1885 to Parsons, Labette, Kansas, where they lived until at least 1895, and where Frank worked as a “lumberman”. By 1900, Frank and his family were living in Boise, Idaho, where Frank became a businessman and real estate developer, including at one time owning a grocery store, and then owning interests in land and mining companies. It appears that he did well for himself.  The family appears from time to time in the “Society” section of the Boise newspapers. Angeline involved herself in politics, and appears to have been a delegate to local Republican conventions. By 1907, the Glaziers moved to North Bend, Coos, Oregon, where Frank lived out his life. He died May 24, 1918 of a stroke. There is no mention of his connection to the Jesse James/Younger Brothers story in his obituary in the May 25, 1918 Portland Oregonian:

courtesy of www.genealogybank.com

For the story of Jesse James, including the Northfield bank robbery (but without a reference to Frank Glazier), see the full video of the PBS American Experience documentary of Jesse James at http://video.pbs.org/video/2191652091.

                                                                                                                

Women's History Month and My Family Tree

As it is Women’s History Month, I would just like to say a few words about the women on my family tree and my policy about writing about them. It is definitely more difficult to find information on female relatives. Most of the “brick walls” on my tree, i.e. places where I am unable to go back any further, are women. Sometimes there is no maiden name, or it is difficult to find anything about the woman’s family and parents, particularly before censuses where the whole family is listed. There is so much more written about the men in local histories and the newspapers, and genealogies are definitely male ancestry-focused. Therefore, whenever possible, and particularly when I have a good photograph, I like to tell the stories of my female ancestors and relatives. As you may have noticed, this has even included two posts on family recipes. As I have said before, some of my favourite ancestors are women, including Emma Green Cook, my maternal great great grandmother, whose picture graces this blog.

I invite you to check out my posts on some of my female relatives including:

• Elizabeth Crawford Simington, my great great grand aunt, who manufactured and sold “Mother Simington’s Blood Purifier” at the turn of the century in Iowa.
• Lena Sarah Marlow Smith Hart Weyman, my grandmother, who, in the 1930’s, was the first and only school board chairwoman in her district.
• Emma Green Cook, my great great grandmother, who homesteaded in Saskatchewan with nine children and an alcoholic husband. She was also a businesswoman, selling tractors, and later ran boarding houses. In 1912, she was the owner and proprietor of the “English Home Bakery” on West Broadway in Vancouver.
• Emma’s daughter, Lily Elizabeth Newton Cook Arnold, and my great aunt, who was a founding member of the Valley Women’s Institute near Salmon Arm, British Columbia, and who fought successfully with others to retain an old schoolhouse for the Institute.
• Maud Elizabeth Marlow Galloway, my great aunt, who made the trek from Illinois to Lougheed, Alberta with her parents and siblings one hundred years ago, and wrote an article for the newspaper back home about her journey.
• Phoebe Johnson Sanderson, my great great grandmother, who operated the Royal Oak Inn in Helpston, Northamptonshire, with her husband and after his death. Encouragingly for me, she lived until age ninety-nine.
• Susan Monk Hart, my great grandmother, who homesteaded with her family of origin in Iowa, and then with her husband in Iowa, Texas, and Alberta. It appears that she created a welcoming home on the prairie, with a garden and homemade bread, where people loved to visit.  She was the first of my ancestors to be born in Canada (August 1, 1851 in Ingersoll, Ontario).

I hope to be writing in the near future about more of the women on my tree. When I get back to writing about the Wrights, which I hope will be soon, I plan to write about the very interesting Elizabeth Deming (1595-1683), my ninth Great Grandmother, who was the wife of the Connecticut Governor, Thomas Welles. I must say that my recent blogs have not been written according to a system, but have arisen more from the serendipity of my recent discoveries. I am keeping myself open to inspiration, especially from the interest shown by you, my gentle readers. Your responses and contributions feed this blog and my soul.

Melvin J. Hart's Civil War Photo

Melvin Hart, c. 1864
Courtesy of the Minnesota Historical Society
and Wayne Jorgenson

In a previous blogpost on my paternal great grandfather, Melvin J. Hart, I mentioned that finding a photo of him in a Civil War database on Ancestry had been the single most exciting experience of my family history research to that date. This is still the case. The second most exciting was discovering this week that the original of that small, blurry thumbnail photo, was in the possession of the Minnesota Historical Society, and that it was clear and had a paper frame. I ordered it, and got permission to use it for “personal” purposes, including a blogpost. I present it here, through the courtesy of the Minnesota Historical Society, and Wayne Jorgenson, the Civil War Historian and author, who originally provided the image to them. He has also given his permission to display the photo. Thanks, Wayne, beyond words.

The handwriting on the photo identifies Melvin as being in “Co. D” “11^th Min”, which refers to Melvin’s second enlistment in the Union Army during the Civil War.  I originally estimated that this photo was likely taken sometime after his enlistment on August 12, 1864, which would make Melvin twenty-one years old. By this time, he had already been discharged from Co. F, 94^th New York Voluntary Infantry, due to illness. He had already been in the battles of Cedar Mountain and the Second Battle of Bull Run, and had been at death’s door with “dyspepsia”. His brother-in-law, William Glazier, had written in a letter supporting his pension application that Melvin was “nothing but a skeleton” when he came to them to be nursed back to health. As I have written before, so much of his experience seems to be expressed in his eyes. They were blue, according to his Civil War Pension File.

Wayne has kindly also provided me with an image of the back of the photo:

Courtesy of Wayne Jorgenson

That it says, "Melvin Heart Dundas Rice Co. Min.", may indicate that Melvin was from Dundas, or that the photo was taken there. The other possibility that the photo was taken in Galatin, Tennessee, where at least one other of Company D's photos was taken, and then it was more likely taken in 1865, as they were mustered out from there at the end of the war.

Since my previous blogposts on Melvin, I have found some brief articles about him and his family in local Iowa newspapers, including an article in the Spencer Clay County News, dated  February 16, 1899, referring to their residence in Texas:  “Mrs. Melvin Hart and two daughters, for past few years residents of Texas, recently returned to the old home in Freeman township. Mr. H. will follow soon. We understand they have had all they want of southern life and are glad to get back to Iowa. Mr. and Mrs. Hart were among the early settlers of Freeman township”. I know from Melvin’s obituary that they had been living in Rock Island, Texas. It has been a bit of a challenge to isolate in which Rock Island, Texas they lived, as there were three. I am increasingly convinced that this was the Rock Island which was in Colorado County, which is near the Gulf Coast. This Rock Island was settled as part of a railroad land development scheme around 1896, which lured settlers from Iowa, Illinois, and Missouri to a so-called “tropical paradise”, which apparently it was far from. I suspect Melvin and his family were among them. I am amazed at how adventurous Melvin and his family must have been, despite his life-long post Civil War health challenges, to have been settlers in three such varied places as Clay County, Iowa, Rock Island, Texas, and Lougheed, Alberta, Canada. 

Mother Elizabeth Simington and her Blood Purifier

Elizabeth and James Simington
Courtesy of Dannielle Petrick

My current favourite mode of research is checking out databases of historical newspapers. This led me to discover more about my three times great aunt, Elizabeth Crawford Simington, who was a minor celebrity in her corner of Iowa for her production of “Mother Simington’s Blood Purifier”. I am grateful to Dannielle Petrick for her permission to use the above photo, and for providing me with further information about Elizabeth.

Elizabeth Simington, born Eiizabeth Crawford, was the sister of my great great grandmother Jane Crawford Monk, also known as Jennie. Elizabeth and Jane were both born in Ireland, likely in the Belfast area, and came to Canada with their siblings, parents and at least two uncles and their families, in the 1840’s. Both Elizabeth and Jennie referred to themselves interchangeably as “Scotch” and “Irish”, which likely indicates that they were born in Ireland of Scottish descent. Elizabeth was born to John Crawford and Margaret Diamond Crawford, both Protestants, on September 9, 1831, and married James Simington, also Irish, in 1855 in Ontario, Canada. They had eleven children, at least the first six of which were born in Canada. Most, if not all, of the whole Crawford extended family moved on the United States in the mid 1850’s, the majority going to Iowa, and mostly to Winneshiek county, including Elizabeth’s sister Jennie and my great grandmother Susan Monk. Elizabeth and James were late to make the Iowa move, which occurred around 1869. They moved directly to the town of Dickens in Clay County, where Jennie and her husband Jacob Monk, a.k.a. “Jake”, also resided. It is not clear which of the two families moved there first, but it seems that the sisters must have been close, as it appears that there were no other Crawford relations living in the area. With their families, they are both considered to be early settlers of the area.

In about 1896, at the age of sixty-five, Elizabeth patented and started manufacturing her “blood purifier” out of her home. It was sold in drugstores, by agents in Iowa, and by Elizabeth herself. A family story related to me by her great great granddaughter, Dannielle Petrick, is that Elizabeth and her granddaughter Mabel used to travel the countryside in a covered wagon selling the elixir. She apparently knew all the old settlers in the district. It was also sold nationwide, and Elizabeth received testimonials from all over the country about its efficacy for many ailments. According to a newspaper advertisement I found in the October 4, 1899 Emmetsburg Democrat, it was apparently a panacea for every disease known to man, from liver ailments to cancer. I have not been able to ascertain the ingredients, but “blood purifiers” of the age were often potions of herbal ingredients such as sarsaparilla and echinacea.

From the Emmetsburg Democrat, October 4, 1899

Her husband James Simington passed away in 1899, the same year as the advertisement above. Elizabeth manufactured the blood purifier until about 1918, when at the age of about eighty-seven she was too old to continue. As a side note, as part of my research for this article, I discovered that Elizabeth must have visited her daughter Margaret Ann Chapman in Medicine Hat, Alberta, Canada in 1911,  at the age of eighty, as she appears on the 1911 Census of Canada with Margaret and her family. It was also interesting to discover that the Melvin Hart family was not the only family on my tree to migrate to Alberta from Iowa. So far, I have found no direct connection between the families, except that they were related and they would have known each other, both having lived in the same town in Iowa for many years.

Elizabeth Simington passed away on February 22, 1926 of old age and a heart ailment at the age of ninety-four, (the same age at which her sister Jennie died), at the home of her daughter, Della Marquette in Dickens. She is buried with her husband in the Dickens Cemetery. Only three of her eleven children had survived her.  Her funeral, held on February 23^rd, was at the Methodist Church, as she, like Jennie, and many in the extended family, was a Methodist from an early age. According to one of her obituaries, she liked to read the Bible, and had a good portion of it memorized.

Dell M. Hart 1880-1918

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.

William Cook 1849-1908, Saskatchewan Pioneer

William Cook about 1906

I blogged early on about William’s wife, Emma Green Cook, my great great grandmother, and one of my favourite ancestors, but I had yet to give William Cook his own blogpost. This was partly because I felt that I needed a couple of more records about him. I was somewhat doubtful about what I had for his mother’s maiden name, and I also wanted to see if I could track down homestead records for him. I have now received his birth record from the General Register Office in England, and his homestead file from Saskatchewan.

William Cook (sometimes written “Cooke”), my maternal great great grandfather, was born on August 4, 1849 in Timberland, Lincolnshire, England. His parents were William Cook and Ann Squires. As it turned out, Ann’s family was already on my family tree--follow me now--as she was the half-sister of William senior’s brother Thomas’s wife, Elizabeth Squires. Discovering Ann’s maiden name this week has been wonderful, as it has led me back a few more generations on William’s tree. William senior first worked as an agricultural labourer, then as a “carrier”, i.e. transporting goods by horse and carriage, likely for the railroad, and then at the end of his life as a “coal higlar”, i.e. selling coal by horse and carriage. He lived in Timberland his whole life.

William junior was much more of a wanderer. He married Emma Green at St. Cuthbert’s, the Church of Wilton-in-Cleveland in Wilton, North Yorkshire, between the towns of Redcar and Eston, on January 10, 1871. She was also from Lincolnshire, so it is not known if they met in Lincolnshire or Yorkshire. They were born the same year, so they were both twenty-one when they got married. They resided in the nearby town of Lazenby, where he was a “labourer in the iron mines” and she was a “dressmaker”. (It helps that they got married in a census year, so this helps to expand the picture of what their life was like then). Their address was 8 North Street, Lazenby, Yorkshire. You can read my blogposts on Emma for the details of their lives in England and Canada, and for more family stories about William and his problem with alcohol. These can be viewed at: http://mydescentintodescent.blogspot.ca/2012/11/emma-green-cook-part-one.html and http://mydescentintodescent.blogspot.ca/2012/11/mr.html.

As I mentioned before, William came to Canada, with his brother Elijah, a year before his wife and family. The family lived in Ontario before homesteading in Assinaboia, later called Saskatchewan. Specifically, they lived in the Orangeville district of Moosomin. William himself states in his homestead record in 1899 that he received “entry” for the northwest quarter of Section 12, Township 15, Range 31, 1^st Meridian in October 1893. He states that he built a house on the land in 1895 and began residence there in February 1896, staying there until September of that year. The house was a 16 by 20 foot log cabin with a shingle roof, worth three hundred dollars in 1899. He returned in April 1897, and was joined by his wife and nine children in October of 1897.  In a statement made in 1899, he revises the dates for residency and the construction of his house to be about a year earlier. This makes more sense, as his youngest son Alfred Godfrey Cook was born in Assinaboia East on March 3, 1995. I suppose his wife and children could also have been living in the area, but in other accommodations. In 1893, he “broke” five acres; in 1894 he cropped five acres and broke ten to eighteen more; in 1895 he cropped fifteen acres and broke another twenty-two; for a total of 95 acres broken by 1899. In 1894, he had three horses and two cattle, and by 1896 he had four horses and five cattle. Finally in 1899, he had six horses, three cattle and nine pigs. Also on his land was a 17 by 24 foot stable, and a 14 by 17 granary, both with sod roofs. He also had a pig pen and two wells. There is no mention of the specific grain crops that he cultivated.

In 1906, the family is still living on the farm, but the five oldest children have left home, and all of these are found in fairly nearby communities. By 1908, William and Emma are living at 144 Donald Street in Winnipeg, Manitoba, where he is a “retired farmer”. He died there on January 14, 1908 of diabetes at the age of fifty-eight. He is considered to have been one of the original homesteaders in the Orangeville area of Moosamin, Saskatchewan, and in listed as such in Moosamin Century One: Town and Country: http://www.ourroots.ca/page.aspx?id=2885403&&qryID=dfe164d4-6cf2-4fb1-80e8-bee672ef570e.

The Harts and the Marlows in the 1916 Canada Census of Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and Alberta

I have just discovered that Ancestry considers it “fair use” to use some records, such as census pages, in blogs. I thought I would share today a discovery I made a while back when I was researching the Harts, i.e. the Melvin J. Hart family, the family of my great grandparents and my grandfather, George Hart. I was examining the index of 1916 Canada Census of Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and Alberta, and could find Melvin and his family, but could not find the Joseph H. Marlow family, i.e. that of my other set of paternal great grandparents. When I went to the actual image of the census page with the Harts, I noticed familiar first names of the Marlows above, such as “Zella” and “Annabel”, and looking more closely, I could see that they were the Marlows. At that point, I had not yet realized that the Marlows and the Harts were neighbours. I was curious to find out why I could not find the Marlows on the index, and soon discovered that they had been mistranscribed as having the surname “Cardow”. This was so far from the correct surname that it would have been very difficult for anyone to find the family on a search. I submitted a correction to Ancestry, and received an email from them thanking me for this.

Here is a section of the 1916 Canada Census of Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and Alberta showing the Marlow and the Hart families living next to each other near Lougheed, Alberta, Canada:

Courtesy of Ancestry.ca

(You can click on the image to view it larger). It is easy to see from the handwriting how the surname Marlow could have been mistaken, as the “m” does resemble a “c”, and the “l” like a “d”. You can see that four of the Marlow daughters are missing from the family. Lena Sarah, my grandmother, would have still been in Illinois with her husband George Smith and their family. They were not to come to Canada to stay until 1919. Maud and Dollie were both married with children and living in the area, and Winnifred had died two years earlier in 1914 of typhoid at the age of twenty-two, which is coincidentally the same age at which Dollie was to die in 1919, but from influenza. I am wondering if the Dollie’s death played into Lena Sarah and George’s decision to come to Canada.

It is interesting to note that Melvin Hart and his two sons, George and Alva, became naturalized Canadian citizens in 1908, only three years after coming to Canada from Iowa. This would have also been the same year that their homestead claim was “proven”. It appears that none of them had any intention of moving back to the States. Susan Hart, nee Monk, was born in Ontario so did not need to change citizenship. Their daughter Flora Jane Hart Jeffers was living in Edmonton in 1916 with her husband Roeberry Jeffers and their son Albert. Their other daughter, Lottie Hart Kells, had just married Robert Kells in March, and was living in the Lougheed area with her husband and her sister's son, Charles. I did not include the section about literacy in the image above, but it is also interesting to note that all of the adults were able to read and write except for Melvin Hart’s son Alva, who could neither read nor write. He was to die by a lightning strike in 1922. The farms of the Marlows and the Harts would have been quite different as the Harts were homesteaders, having cleared their own land and built their own homes and barns. The Marlows had purchased a ready-made C.P.R. farm with pre-planted crops. This does not mean that life would have been easy for them, as the C.P.R. houses were notoriously small and inadequate for the weather, and many of the pre-planted crops failed, including the Marlows’ potato crop the first year.

That the Harts and the Marlows were neighbours is significant in my own family history as my grandmother, Lena Sarah Marlow Smith, purchased the Marlow farm after the deaths of her father and husband, which made her the neighbour of my grandfather, George Leslie Hart. This would have brought them closer together, which led to their marriage in 1930, and the subsequent birth of my father.