Who Are These People?

My great-grandmother Carrie with three of her grandchildren, George, David, and Florence, c. 1910

Yes, who are these people?

While checking my Ancestry.com profile the other day, I came across pictures posted by someone descended from my mother's father's family tree. I don't know who it is. I'd seen one of the pictures before, but the rest were new to me. The one above was particularly interesting.

Carrie and three of her grandchildren... She had at least one other grandchild at the time, but it was complicated. There may have been others. Some she may not have known about.There was a boy living in Wabash with his mother. His father, Carrie's son  Clyde, had been killed in a hunting accident shortly before the boy was born. There would be other grandchildren later, including my mother. But these three were interesting to me for who they were.

George, David and Florence were the three children my mother's father sired with his first wife Maud. By 1910, Maud and my mother's father (Lawrence) had divorced and by the time this picture was taken, Lawrence and my mother's mother (Edna) were married. Maude, so far as I've been able to figure out, had moved to St. Louis and become a housemate/companion/wife? of Lawrence's brother Hal. The boys were sent to live with their grandparents. Florence, on the other hand, was sent to live with another of Lawrence's brothers, Frank and his wife, a different Edna. But exactly when that happened, I can't say.

So what I see in this picture is my great grandmother, two of my uncles, and an aunt. Though these children were my mother's half-siblings -- and there would be others -- they are my grandfather's children and thus are my uncles and an aunt, without a half-measure.

George came to visit my mother and me in the mid-Fifties, I believe it was 1956 or 57. My mother had tracked him down by calling everyone in the LA phone book with her father's last name, and sure enough, she located George. I'm not entirely sure that he knew of her or she of him beforehand. But they got together, and I remember him as a rather jolly fellow though I can't say that he seemed like any kind of relative at all. So far as I knew at the time, I didn't have aunts or uncles (later I would find out I had quite a few of them). I didn't have grandparents. My father was far away. My (half) sister had moved away when I was three and I very rarely saw her. I didn't even know she was living in Los Angeles the first few years my mother and I lived there, for example. She was a student at LA City College.  And trying to break into show business.

Through relatively recent research, I found out a bit about George. He had quite a life. When I look at the picture above, I see a striking resemblance to his father. What I remember seeing when he came to visit was a rather distinguished middle aged man, salt-and-pepper hair, wearing a suit and tie, polished shoes, smelling of Old Spice. I think he drove a black Buick. He smiled and laughed a lot while I was around, but my mother wanted to talk to him privately, so I went in the other room and watched TV while they talked. It seemed serious.

They no doubt talked about their father. George was born in 1898; my mother was born in 1911. There was quite an age gap. Another half-brother was also born in 1911, but I doubt either George or my mother knew of him. A half-sister would be born in 1914, and my mother certainly knew about her as she mentioned her to me by name (Helen) as someone she had seen/met at her father's funeral in St. Louis in 1916.

I wonder if George and David and Florence and Carrie went to Lawrence's funeral. The pater familia, D. H., probably didn't go, as he didn't look well in a family portrait taken the year before at the 50th wedding anniversary of Carrie and D. H. Given that Lawrence had established yet another family in St. Louis it was obvious things could get ... complicated.

George and David both went to Arsenal Technical High School in Indianapolis, a rather prestigious technical school, but I have found no record that either of them graduated or even made it to senior year. If that's the case, it would be sad, to say the least.

Florence seemed to flourish in the household of her aunt and uncle, and died in Florida 92 years old. The boys didn't live so long. David died in San Diego at 55; George died in Los Angeles at 65.

Carrie died in 1918, I suspect she was one of the hundreds of thousands of Spanish flu victims in the United States. Her husband, D. H., died in 1921. By then, the boys were grown and one assumes they were on their own. Lawrence was dead. Maud moved back to Indianapolis.

Marie, Lawrence's wife in St. Louis, married the yard boss of the rail yard where Lawrence was killed and she died there in 1987, two days after my mother died in Butte County, California. Marie's daughter Helen committed suicide in 1940 on the anniversary of her husband's death from cancer.

I'm sure there are amazing stories for all  of these people, but for the most part, I didn't know anything about any of them. I wish I could have asked George about his stint in San Quentin when he came to call. But no.

Surprising how many records, though, turn up on Ancestry.com.