Never ignore childless siblings, part 2

My wife's grandfather had two older sisters, Bonnie and Nellie, who never married and had no descendants. Both had professional careers in the first half of the 20th century, but we never learned much about them, partly because they had decamped to California by the mid-1920s. I've been working on their mother's family for publication(s) and found that I pretty much had to reconstruct their professional lives by wide searching and judicious use of on-line newspapers and directories. It made me feel that perhaps they had not been taken seriously enough by other family members.

In the course of this searching I came upon a contribution Bonnie made in 1927 to a folk music collection, and that ended up on a folk-music site, Bluegrass Messengers. It was the lyrics to a folk song that their grandfather William was said to have brought with him from England to Wisconsin in the late 1840s, and that his son Sam, their father, now a Wisconsin blacksmith, sang for them. (If you know any ballad tunes at all, you will see how the rhythm fits; I haven't got hold of an audio version yet.)

My hair, what there is of it, stood right up on end. Of all the things I might have expected, a chance to eavesdrop on Sam and Harriet and their three children by the fireside, most likely in the 1880s when the children were growing up, was the last thing on my mind. What a gift, one their grand-nephew-in-law only opened by accident 90 years later.

It's a cliche because it's true. You really never know what you will find. By the same token, we never know how some small act of preservation now may reverberate in future generations.

136 years ago: the Upper Midwest from the back of a horse

During the 1800s, even ancestors who would end up staying home often tried going West to see how it suited them. My great-grandfather spent a few years in Kansas hoping to alleviate his wife's asthma, but they returned to southern Illinois.

And in the spring of 1879, my wife's great-grandfather left his young family behind for several weeks and took a 430-mile horseback ride west across part of Wisconsin and most of Minnesota. He sent back postcards and letters, which I transcribed and annotated, and which have now been published in the Minnesota Genealogical Quarterly. It's all there -- the rain, the cold, the boredom, the jokes, the universal presumption that if your traveling companion fell sick you could find him a bed in a farmhouse along the way, and forge on.


"Across Wisconsin and Minnesota on Horseback, 1879," Minnesota Genealogical Quarterly vol. 45, no. 4 (2014): 7-9.

The Winning of the Midwest

My wife's great-grandfather Sam Scholes was county clerk of Green Lake County, Wisconsin, until the 1890 election, when a Democratic Party tide swept him out of office. That garden-variety genealogical fact didn't mean much to me until I read Richard Jensen's history, The Winning of the Midwest: Social and Political Conflict, 1888-1896 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971). As he tells it, that election turned in large part on the dominant Republicans' letting the anti-liquor crusaders take over the party and alienate Germans and other immigrants.

[UPDATE AND CORRECTION Friday afternoon: The hot issue, as Jensen correctly explains and I didn't, was the Bennett law to enforce teaching of English in schools. This issue aroused the same crusading zeal and the same resistance from the same groups, provoking just enough of them to either stay home or vote for the Democrats -- hence my confusion. Beneath both issues nativism was also an element. This is a good example of why blogs are like indexes: go to the source, don't take our word for everything!]

Of course this book is almost two generations old itself now. It's social history told through politics and statistics (with 27 tables, such as "Unskilled as Proportion of Non-Farmers by Politico-Religious Groups, Illinois 1877-1878"), which seems kind of retro in itself. And the shadow of the 1960s campus revolts looms large just behind the story. The division Jensen sees clearest is that between crusading moralists (in that era, the prohibitionists) and countercrusading pluralists (the party bosses), and he is no fan of crusading.

The history I was brought up on assumed that Altgeld and Bryan were heroes, and that the 1896 Bryan-McKinley Presidential election was a contest between the good-guy crusaders and William McKinley's business cronies. (The good guys lost, of course, but they got to write the history books.) The story Jensen tells is quite different and more thought-provoking. Check it out, but don't even try to fit these people into today's shopworn categories. They won't fit.