Marguerite Hunter: A Registered Voter in 1912 (in California)

As I shared at Early 20th Century Hunter Sister Update, I found my great-grandparents, Percy and Marguerite Hunter, in a list of registered voters at an ancestry.com database: California, Voter Registrations, 1900-1968. In 1912, Marguerite and Percy were registered Republican voters, living at 2510 Buena Vista. See the bottom two lines in the image below:

Ancestry.com; California Voter Registrations, 1900-1968; Original data: State of California, United States.
Great Register of Voters. Sacramento, California: California State Library. Year: 1912; Roll: 7; Berkeley Precinct 35.

I just read a post at the Searching for Stories blog where I learned that California women had only just gained the right to vote in a 1911 referendum. It's very likely that my great-grandmother Marguerite voted in the 1912 presidential election! (See 1912 California presidential election results at Wikipedia.)

Page 5 headline from GenealogyBank.com: San Francisco Chronicle, November 6, 1912

The family returned to Pittsburgh by the time of the printing of the 1913 Pittsburgh City Directory, and Marguerite lost the right to vote until the 19th Amendment passed in 1920.

Exercise your right to vote - 100 years ago in Pennsylvania, my great-grandmother, Marguerite Hunter, could not, after having been eligible to vote four years earlier in California.

Early 20th Century Hunter Sisters - Update

I have written about my grandmother and her sisters a few times:
Wordless Wednesday ~ Hunter Sisters Circa 1911
Wordless Wednesday ~ Hunter Sisters Circa 1909 (This date is in error, and now I've determined that some of the facts need changing yet again!)
Early 20th Century Hunter Sisters Stories

My maternal grandmother, Helen, was the youngest of five girls of Percy Earle Hunter and Marguerite (Lysle) Hunter. I know that the oldest sister, Marion, died on November 30, 1913, of pneumonia, at the age of 14. She died in Pittsburgh and I shared her death certificate here.

My mother's sister recently gave me some photographs from the 1900s and 1910s that had been developed sometime in the 1940s. This is one of them:

Mary, Helen, Margaret, Caroline

Compare this photograph with the one that my second cousin shared with me in 2013:

Caroline, Margaret, Helen, Mary

Thomas Goodwin Wells - Prosperous? - 52 Ancestors #17

For this week's 52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks writing challenge from blogger Amy Crow Johnson of No Story Too Small, the theme is Prosper. The ancestor I selected was prosperous, yet suffered a terrible tragedy before he turned 50.

My 3rd great-grandfather, Thomas Goodwin Wells, was born on November 23, 1804, in Hopkinton, New Hampshire, to Thomas G. Wells and Lucinda (Lyman) Wells.

A couple of years ago, I learned that he was married before he married my 3rd great-grandmother, Elizabeth and this first wife died young. See Who Was Mary Eliza Wells? for the details. In 1838, he married Elizabeth Sewall Willis. He had five children with her.

In the 1850 U.S. Census, he is enumerated in Walpole, New Hampshire, as a farmer. His household includes his wife, Elizabeth; his three oldest children: Eliza, Henry, and Louisa; his father-in-law, Benjamin Willis; and two servants.

1850 U.S. Census, Walpole, Cheshire County, New Hampshire, record for Thomas G. Wells

However, someone recently found my FindAGrave memorial for Thomas Wells and contacted me to share information he found about fellow travelers of his second great grandfather. It turns out that Thomas was NOT in New Hampshire in 1850, but in California!

Thomas Goodwin Wells was one of 210 passengers and crew members who boarded the sailing ship "Sweden" in Boston Harbor, on March 1, 1849. Their destination was San Francisco, via Cape Horn, South America. The ship arrived August 3rd. This link shows "T. G. Wells," a 44 year old "exchange broker," from Walpole, Massachusetts [sic: should read New Hampshire], listed in a logbook kept by fellow passenger Benjamin Bailey. A photo of each page of the entire logbook can be read by entering page number "1" in the box, once at the above link.

A transcription of the same logbook (which can be easier to read than the handwritten pages) can be read page by page here.

Uncle Reuben Lowell and the California Gold Rush

"California Clipper 500" by G.F. Nesbitt & Co., printer
Wikimedia Commons 

Today is the 167th anniversary of the discovery of gold in California. An extensive Wikipedia article notes that on January 24, 1848, James W. Marshall found gold at Sutter's Mill in Coloma, California. This started the "Gold Rush" of men going to California to seek their fortune.

I have a second great grand uncle (probably two) who traveled from Maine to California as part of the Gold Rush.

Reuben Braddock Lowell (1827-1910) was a son of Reuben Lowell and Sarah (Smith) Lowell of Calais, Maine. (His sister, Sarah Lowell, is my second great-grandmother.)

The Historic Genealogy of the Lowells of America from 1639 to 1899 by Delmar Lowell (1899) (see Google Books, p. 488) claims that Reuben's brother George Albert Lowell (1831-1907) also went to California in 1849 with his brother Reuben, but George doesn't appear in the 1850 census. He may have been missed, as taking the census in California in 1850 was a challenge for enumerators.

Early 20th Century Hunter Sisters Stories

At Thanksgiving I was able to discuss the photograph of the four Hunter sisters with my mother and she corrected the previous thinking about who was in the photograph AND the date of the photograph AND the location of the photograph. I was able to show her the image on my iPhone and zoom into the picture to see each face closely. Looking at a closeup of the oldest girl at the left, she assured me that this was Caroline. She also told me that the photograph was taken about 1914 in California.

I also realized that I should have recognized my grandmother. Looking closely at the photo of the five sisters that I shared in July 2011 (also below) one can compare photos and tell which sister is which in the later photo.

Mary (8), (in back) Helen (4), (in front) Margaret (6), Marion (12), Caroline (11)
(ages estimated based on dating photo to late 1911)

The photograph also prompted a couple of stories about her mother and her older sisters.

Marion, the oldest of the five Hunter sisters, died in late 1913 of pneumonia. It was the fourth time she had suffered from it.

After Marion died, Marguerite (her mother) was absolutely devastated. Percy (her father) decided the only way to help her cope was to divert her, so he took a job opportunity in Oakland, California, and the family moved and lived in California for a couple of years. My grandmother, Helen was not quite 7 years old when her sister died. She admired a girl down the street (a couple of years older) while living in California and named her oldest daughter after this girl.

This photo was taken soon after the Hunters moved there.

June 12, 2015 Update: Additional information from my aunt has changed the timeline of this story and these pictures. See Early 20th Century Hunter Sisters - Update for the updated information.

Caroline (13-14), Margaret (9), Helen (7), Mary (10-11)
(ages estimated based on dating photo to early 1914)

You will notice in this picture that Caroline, Margaret and Mary hold dolls. My grandmother, Helen, when she received a doll as a gift, would announce that the dolly was sick and that she had to be put to bed, so her doll was not in this picture because she was recovering from some illness. I wonder if this was how Helen remembered Marion, ill in bed.

The death of the girls' oldest sister had an effect on all of them for decades. A story shared by my second cousin, a granddaughter of Caroline, above, follows:

I do remember my Grandma Caroline never being able to view a dead person. According to the practice of the day, she was forced to look at her sister Marion and kiss her goodbye when Grandma was 12 and could only remember Marion in her casket after that. She could not view her Father at his death [Percy died in 1937], but had dreams about him for years afterward. She would step off the elevator at the top floor of the Horne's store (I think, but it may have been Gimble's) and see him walking down the hallway toward the restaurant that was on that floor. She would run after him calling his name, getting a bit closer with each dream, but never catching up to him. Until one night when she got very close and great grandfather turned around and said, "Caroline, you have got to stop following me." She never had the dream again.

And another story from my mother:

Grandmother [Marguerite] could not talk about Marion for years after her death. Twenty-two years later, when my mother was born, Percy and Marguerite came to the hospital to see their youngest daughter's first child. Percy picked her up and touched her skin and said to Marguerite, “Her skin is so soft, it feels like yours and like Marion’s” and after that, they could speak of her. They hadn’t spoken of her AT ALL before that.

Thank you to my mother and to my second cousin for sharing your stories!

Another 1940 Census Find - Edgar Rust in California

As noted in my previous post, indexes for the 1940 census are being made available at both Ancestry.com and at FamilySearch.org. When I noticed last week that Massachusetts was available at Ancestry.com, I made a point to search for Edgar Rust, born about 1882 in Massachusetts, in order to provide corrections in the index for just about everyone in the household due to the errors, not in the indexing, but in the enumeration. See here for my analysis of that household.

In recreating the search today, this is what I see:

I won't detail the corrections I had to make for the Rust family in Newton, but you can see that one correction I made was to Edgar's name which was indexed as Edna!

Last week, before I made that correction, it was the Edgar C. Rust in Monterey, California, which appeared as the top result.

1940 U.S. Census, Monterey, Monterey, California, Roll T627_268,
E. D. 27-34, page 83A, lines 9-10, record for Edgar C. Rust and Elizabeth Rust

The detail shows much more accurate information than what I found at their home in Massachusetts, which now I'm sure was reported by a neighbor because they were in California, where I understand they spent several months each year.