Handed Down: Grandfather's Baby Book ~ 52 Ancestors #49

I have boxes and boxes of handed down items, including my maternal grandfather's baby book.

The BABY'S BOOK

The book is small, about 3 1/2" x 5 1/4" in size, with some embroidered decoration.

Thomas Jefferson Copeland (1801-1877) ~ 52 Ancestors #45

Thomas Jefferson Copeland was born in Boston to Nathaniel Copeland (who died in 1803) and Mary Page (1771-1847). 

He was living in Norridgewock, Maine, by 1840 and Calais, Maine, by 1843. He died March 2, 1877, in Calais and is buried in the local cemetery. His FindAGrave memorial includes a transcript of a local obituary with additional information than what I found in The Kennebec Journal.

The Kennebec Journal, 28 March 1877, p. 3, col. 3 (Newspapers.com).

School Pins and Rings ~ 52 Ancestors #38

Recently, my brothers and I were going through some items that had come from my mother's collection of family treasures.

Some items had symbols on them that needed to be deciphered.

The first items were relatively easy to decipher. This pendant has the Greek letters Beta Theta Pi. It is just under an inch in diameter and is stored in this small leather case.

Grandfather Lowell Townsend Copeland attended Northwestern University in the early 1920s. He was a proud member of Beta Theta Pi fraternity. I shared information from his school yearbook at What Else You Can Find in Yearbooks.

Copeland Cenotaphs in Maine ~ 52 Ancestors #37

A cenotaph is a cemetery marker placed in honor of a person whose remains are elsewhere.

I have a few ancestors who have what appear to be two burial locations, but it turns out that they are buried in one place and have a cenotaph in another.

My second great-grandmother, Sarah (Lowell) Copeland, was born in Calais, Maine, in 1833, living there until the death of her husband, Henry Clay Copeland in 1912 (in Calais). Soon after, she moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, to live with her daughter, Katherine (Copeland) Dunbar and her husband, William Dunbar. When she died on January 9, 1916, her remains were buried in the Copeland-Dunbar plot (Cherry Avenue, Section 6, Lot 49) in Forest Hills Cemetery, in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts, a neighborhood of Boston, not too far from Cambridge.

S. L. C.
1833 - 1916

Grandfather Loved Trains! ~ 52 Ancestors #28

My maternal grandfather, Lowell Townsend Copeland, loved trains. 

In 1947, he and my grandmother took my mother and her younger sisters on a vacation via cross-country train from Pittsburgh.

Ann, Caroline, and Margot Copeland, July 1947

Several years ago, my mother told me what she remembered about the 21-day train trip to the West Coast: from Pittsburgh they went to Chicago, then to San Francisco, followed by Los Angeles, then back to Pittsburgh. Of the 21 days, she remembered that they spent 20 of them on the train.

Nickname: Townsend Toby Lowell ~ 52 Ancestors #21

My grandfather was born Lowell Townsend Copeland on December 21, 1900, to Lowell Copeland and Ethel May Greeley. This is his Cook County, Illinois, birth certificate.

He was called Townsend, to differentiate himself from his father. He is Townsend in census records, on the back of photographs, and in school yearbooks.

In this labeled photograph, Grandfather was 2 years, 9 months old. His nurse / nanny was Elvira and he was very fond of her. This was likely taken at his home or his maternal grandfather's home in Winnetka, Illinois.

For Aunt Ruth [Ruth Lyman Wells, 1862-1943]
Townsend and his Elvira
Sept 1902

Love and Marriage: Henry and Sarah, 1858 ~ 52 Ancestors #18

Maine Marriages, 1771-1907, FamilySearch

My second great-grandparents, Henry C. Copeland and Sarah Lowell, both of Calais, Maine, were married on Wednesday, December 15, 1858. They submitted their intention to marry with the city clerk on December 9. (By the way, the City Clerk's name is Samuel Lambe; it took some creativity to confirm that signature.)

Calais, Washington County, Maine, is one of the northernmost locations in my family tree. It is 330 miles from Boston, a long way to travel in the mid-19th century.

Favorite Recipe: Spiced Pecans ~ 52 Ancestors #14

In recent years, my mother downsized a couple of times and had consolidated her recipes at the family summer house. When my siblings and I were emptying the kitchen for a renovation, I was given my mother's collection of recipe boxes. This week's theme prompted me to take them out of the bag and see what I have.

It appears that she copied recipes to have at two different residences (and possibly to give away), because I see multiple copies of the same recipes in these boxes. (One being Hermit Cookies, which I blogged about over a dozen years ago.) There are recipes in my grandmother's handwriting, recipes from other relatives and friends, and many cut from newspapers.

Here's a favorite of my mother, me, and my family, in my mother's handwriting.

SPICED PECANS

Worship: Margot Was Not a Methodist ~ 52 Ancestors #13

... in fact, she was never particularly religious.

After graduating from college in 1956, my mother moved to Boston where she met my father when they both worked at the Boston Safe Deposit & Trust Company. Over the course of several years, they fell in love and wished to marry.

In the spring of 1963, my grandmother, Helen (Hunter) Copeland, a devoted Presbyterian, contacted several ministers in the Pittsburgh area (where she lived and where my mother grew up) to ask if they were available to marry her daughter and fiancé in the late summer or early fall of 1963. When a minister would say yes, he was available, he would begin to collect information about Helen's daughter and her intended. 

At this point, Helen would let him know that the wedding would have to wait until her future son-in-law's divorce was final. According to the story, this horrified several ministers that Helen spoke with and they refused to officiate at the wedding of a woman to a man who had just been divorced. I believe some were willing to marry the couple, but told Helen that the couple had to wait a year after the divorce to marry.

My parents didn't want to wait.

Helen was able to find a young Methodist minister who was willing to marry my parents in September. My father's divorce decree was final on August 13, less than seven weeks before his wedding to my mother.

Achievement: Margot Wins Able Youth Award ~ 52 Ancestors #11

In 1952, my mother, a senior in high school, took an achievement test sponsored by the Civic Club of Allegheny County (Pennsylvania), the Exceptionally Able Youth Spring Competition.

This is a case where I'm glad I have the original newspaper clippings; they scanned better than the images I found on my favorite subscription newspaper website.

Margot Copeland, of Allison Park, won first place in this achievement test. My grandfather noted the date of this Pittsburgh Press article.

 

Tied for second place were John Trimble and Hugh Pendleton. Suzanne Collins came in fourth.

And here is another photo from the May 29, 1952, Pittsburgh Sun-Telegraph of the top four winners.

Stories From the Census ~ Copeland Family in 1950

The 1950 United States Census became available to the public on April 1, 72 years after its official date. It has been "kind of" indexed, using OCR and artificial intelligence technology. (I say "kind of" because, although the National Archives likes to say it's been indexed, I haven't had much luck just entering names and places into their search fields.)

See the National Archives FAQ page here and start searching here. Read the search tips before you start searching.

One of the first families I looked for was my mother's family in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania. This was a challenge, even though I knew exactly where they lived: on Mount Royal Boulevard.

It turns out that they lived on the border of their enumeration district (ED), a defined region for a census taker (an enumerator) to collect information on the residents who lived there.

The red star indicates where my mother's family lived. The corner of Mount Royal Boulevard and Sample Road turns out to be at a corner of ED 2-365. The blue star indicates where my great-grandmother, Marguerite (Lysle) Hunter lived with her two daughters (in ED 2-366). They lived less than 3 miles from each other. My mother has told me that she and her sisters often walked to visit their grandmother and aunts.

Click on the following images to enlarge them.

1950 U.S. census, Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, Hampton Township, ED 2-365, sheet 39, line 30 & sheet 40, lines 1-4, household 555 (Lowell Copeland family).

Lowell Copeland, my grandfather, was the 48-year-old head of household. The house was not on a farm, but was on more than three acres of land. Lowell was born in Illinois and was working most of the previous week, a 40-hour workweek as a salesman in the industry "Mine Supply." I was able to ask my mother about his occupation and she tells me he sold industrial supplies.

His wife, Helen, age 43, was at the top of the next page and her primary work the previous week was "H" for home housework.

My mother was disappointed that her name was misspelled. (It should have been Margot, with the "t.") Unfortunately, we don't know who provided the information, but my mother believes that if her mother had provided it, she would have said my mother's name, then spelled it.

Everyone age 14 and older was asked about what they did during the previous week. My mother and her sister Ann were "OT" meaning "other." They were in school.

My grandmother, mother, and her sisters were all born in Pennsylvania.

The 1950 census includes six entries on each page for individuals who were asked additional questions. My aunt Ann was asked the additional questions, but all that provided was that she was living in the same house a year prior and was a student with the highest grade of school being 8th grade. (I know she was in 9th grade at this time, a year behind my mother; they were both young for their grades.)

I look forward to sharing more stories from the 1950 U.S. Census.

Same Name: Ruth ~ 52 Ancestors #6

This week's theme is Same Name. I have several branches of my family where I have trouble remembering different generations of ancestors because of names being repeated.

Here is a case where the name Ruth appears in seven generations. As I've noted before, a picture helps visualize this.

Counting Third Cousins

Summer 1982; see
Throwback Thursday-Cousins Day

My current project (which I have spent many months on) has been to identify all the descendants of my eight sets of second great-grandparents. This is to help me identify my DNA matches on the several genetic genealogy testing sites where my results connect me to cousins. Smaller amounts of shared DNA suggests more distant relationships and knowing my third cousins might help identify those relationships.

I have identified 49 second cousins and over 180 third cousins. Note that on my father's mother's side (Adsit-Ashby), I have no known first cousins, second cousins, or third cousins. This makes it difficult to confirm more distant, colonial New England cousins on this side because I've got lots of other colonial New England in other ancestral lines.

Some families were more difficult to track forward than others; it depended on where they lived and whether I could find useful obituaries in online newspapers (among other resources). Then there are families with common names: Bailey, Hunter, Murphy, Smith, Walsh, as well as branches of cousins who moved abroad, making it harder to find them.

Notes:
* The couple's name in bold are my second great-grandparents.
*  In many cases, the number of third cousins is an estimate (especially McAlpin-Rose, Greeley half-third cousins, and Hunter-Freeland).
*  I refer to 3 siblings under my maternal lines and 4 siblings under my paternal lines as I have one sibling with whom I share my father and not my mother.
*  The colors are based on my long-time color-coding system.

PATERNAL-PATERNAL
James Pyle (1823-1900) and Esther Abigail Whitman (1828-1921) had:
   7 children (only 2 had children)
   9 grandchildren
  10 great-grandchildren
  40 great-great-grandchildren (me, my 4 siblings, no first cousins, my 31 second cousins, and 4 third cousins)

David Hunter McAlpin (1816-1901) and Frances Adelaide Rose (1829-1870) had:
  10 children
  23 grandchildren
  48 great-grandchildren
(at least) 139 great-great-grandchildren (me, my 4 siblings, no first cousins, my 31 second cousins, and (at least) 103 third cousins)


PATERNAL-MATERNAL
James Monroe Adsit (1809-1894) and Susan Arville Chapin (1820-1906) had:
   7 children
   4 grandchildren
   1 great-grandson (my dad)
   5 great-great-grandchildren (me, my 4 siblings, no first cousins, second cousins, or third cousins)

Daniel Morgan Ashby (1828-1907) and Mary Elizabeth Gorin (1833-1891) had:
   6 children
   3 grandchildren
   1 great-grandson (my dad)
   5 great-great-grandchildren (me, my 4 siblings, no first cousins, second cousins, or third cousins)


MATERNAL-PATERNAL
Henry Clay Copeland (1832-1912) and Sarah Lowell (1833-1916) had:
   3 children
   6 grandchildren
   7 great-grandchildren
  20 great-great-grandchildren (me, my 3 siblings, my 5 first cousins, my 11 second cousins, no third cousins)

Samuel Sewall Greeley (1824-1916) and his first wife Anne Morris Larned (1828-1864) had:
   4 children
  10 grandchildren
  27 great-grandchildren
  (at least) 57 great-great-grandchildren (my half-third cousins)

Samuel Sewall Greeley (1824-1916) and his second wife Eliza May Wells (1839-1880) had:
   5 children
   3 grandchildren
   7 great-grandchildren
  20 great-great-grandchildren (me, my 3 siblings, my 5 first cousins, my 11 second cousins, no third cousins)


MATERNAL-MATERNAL
James Hunter (1844-1902) and Mary Freeland (1850-1902) had:
  10 children
  10 grandchildren
  16 great-grandchildren
  (at least) 28 great-great-grandchildren (me, my 3 siblings, my 5 first cousins, my 7 second cousins, my (at least) 12 third cousins)  (Some with the surname Hunter are very difficult to trace, as the names are somewhat common.)

George Lysle, Jr. (1845-1900) and his first wife Marion Helen Alston (1850-1885) had:
   2 children
   7 grandchildren
   7 great-grandchildren
   21 great-great-grandchildren (me, my 3 siblings, my 5 first cousins, my 7 second cousins, my 5 third cousins)

George Lysle, Jr. (1845-1900) and his second wife Edith O. Hadly (1869-1933) had:
   2 children. One son died young and the other married, but didn't have any children. No half-third cousins here.

I have added these third cousins to my tree in Family Tree Maker and plan to upload it to Ancestry, MyHeritage (and perhaps other sites) to help connect me to more cousins. I have added many surnames to my tree and have already identified several cousins on the DNA testing sites while doing this project.

What Else Can You Find in Yearbooks: Grandfather at Northwestern

After reading about Leighton Mount, a college freshman who disappeared during a hazing incident in September 1921 at Under Every Tombstone (see Part 1: The Strange Disappearance of a Northwestern University Freshman - Leighton Mount and Part 2: The Shocking Conclusion), I remembered that my grandfather, Lowell Townsend Copeland, graduated from Northwestern University. He was known as Townsend, and later Toby, to distinguish him from his father, Lowell Copeland.

The family story from my mother is that her father attended Harvard University for one year, where his uncle Charles Copeland was a well-known English professor (see Copey of Harvard). Uncle Charles had Townsend take two English classes, which apparently was more than he could handle, and he flunked out.

He returned home to Winnetka, Illinois, and enrolled in Northwestern University, in neighboring Evanston, and based on the student lists and yearbooks that I found online, he was there in the fall of 1921 when the story of Leighton Mount was all over the news.

From Google Books

Google Books has a few years of the Northwestern University Bulletin / Annual Catalog, which provides lists of enrolled students and I found Lowell Townsend Copeland, of Winnetka, Illinois, enrolled in the College of Liberal Arts for the 1919-1920 school year and for the 1922-1923 school year. I wonder if he didn't take a full course load for a few years, because he was enrolled in 1919-1920 and ended up as a member of the class of 1925.

School yearbooks tell me a little bit about grandfather's experience at Northwestern. Unfortunately, they often didn't provide information for freshmen unless they were class officers (and Ancestry doesn't happen to have the 1923 copy at its U.S., School Yearbooks collection).


The following images are from the 1924 Northeastern University Yearbook (the Syllabus), which covered events and activities for the 1922-1923 school year, when the class of 1924 were juniors (and the class of 1925 were sophomores).

Grandfather was a member of the Beta Theta Pi fraternity and he was listed as Townsend Copeland, a sophomore.

He is in the back row of the fraternity photograph:

Sunday's Obituary ~ Henry Copeland 1912

I found the following obituary on MyHeritage for my second great-grandfather, Henry Clay Copeland. It gives a bit more information about him.

Henry Copeland obituary, Lewiston [Maine] Evening Journal, 8 November 1912, p. 16, col. 6; digital images, MyHeritage (https://www.myheritage.com : accessed 22 November 2019).

Tombstone Tuesday ~ Hunter Plots at Allegheny Memorial Park

In addition to visiting Union Dale Cemetery in late August 2017, my cousin, my husband, and I visited Allegheny Memorial Park. I am ever so grateful that my cousin was willing to drive us all over the North Side of Pittsburgh.

My cousin and I knew several family members buried at Allegheny Memorial. After we visited the office to get the burial location, one of the employees followed us and helped us find the plots, as these are in-ground markers and grass grows over them if they are not edged regularly.

He kindly edged them for us.

There are two plots, side by side of six burial lots each. There are burials in ten of the twelve lots. These six are on the left:

Edward Randolph Gay Married Two of My Cousins

Edward Randolph Gay was born in September 1898 to Edwin Francis Gay and Louise Randolph. In 1902, his father started teaching at Harvard, and in 1906 became Professor of Economic History. He was the first Dean of the Harvard Business School from 1908 to 1919 and was president of the New York Evening Post from 1920 to 1923. [1]

Edward graduated from Harvard University in 1919 and from the Business School in 1920. He served in World War I. [2]

By 1923, he was an assistant dean of Harvard College. Although Ancestry's Yearbook collection doesn't currently include Harvard University's 1919 yearbook, it does include 1923, with Edward's photo on the page with the other deans of the college.

Harvard Class Album 1923 (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1923), p. 11; image, "U.S., School Yearbooks, 1900-1999," Ancestry (https://www.ancestry.com : accessed 22 September 2019)

Edward married Rose Dunbar, on 20 July 1923, at Northeast Harbor, Maine. The Boston Globe description of the wedding is full of Harvard references. Edward's best man was Charles Franklin Dunbar, a Harvard junior, and Rose's brother. [see note 2]

Rose's paternal grandfather, Charles F. Dunbar, founded the department of political economy at Harvard, was dean of the college and, later, dean of the faculty. [see note 2]

Charles and Rose's mother was Katherine Copeland, younger sister of Lowell Copeland (my great-grandfather), and Charles Townsend Copeland, Harvard English professor. Katherine died just over a year later. Rose was my first cousin twice removed.

However, by May of 1925, Edward and Rose Dunbar were divorced, as he married Rose (Greeley) Pritchard, as her second husband, in Santa Ana, California. [3] She was my half first cousin twice removed.

Rose Greeley was the adopted daughter of Louis May Greeley and his wife Anna Lowell Dunbar.

With all the repeating names and multiple marriages, I had to draw a picture to see how Edward Randolph Gay's wives were related to my grandfather, Lowell Townsend Copeland.

Wordless Wednesday ~ Grandfather and Greeley Cousin?

My grandfather, Lowell Townsend Copeland, was born in December 1900 in Winnetka, Illinois. His maternal grandfather was Samuel Sewall Greeley, who had several children with his first wife before she died. They all lived in the Chicago area and my grandfather was close to his Greeley cousins. In fact, my mother stayed in touch with some Greeley second cousins for many years.

I think this might be a Greeley cousin playing in the snow in Winnetka, Illinois, sometime in the first decade of the last century. He looks like he is showing off the snow tunnel that he has just dug.

And I think this is the same boy in the go-cart with my grandfather leaning on the cart behind him.

His half-first cousins on his maternal grandfather's side include:
Samuel A. Greeley (1882-1968), son of Frederick Greeley (1856-1912)
Morris L. Greeley (1893-1982), Sidney F. Greeley (1894-1988), and Joseph May Greeley (1902-1996), sons of Morris Larned Greeley (1863-1945)

If any Greeley cousins can confirm the identity of this boy, please let me know if my theory is correct.

The Grandparents of My Grandparents

Dana at DanaLeeds.com and Jen at JenGenX Files both recently wrote blog posts to answer the question:

How many grandparents did their grandparents likely know?

This question intrigued me and I decided to figure it out while also looking for photographs of my grandparents when they were children.

PATERNAL GRANDFATHER, CHARLES MCALPIN PYLE:

Paternal Grandfather, Charles McAlpin Pyle

Charlie was born in 1893. He knew three of his four grandparents because they were all part of the same social circle in New York City and Morristown, New Jersey:
   James Pyle died in 1900, when Charlie was six and a half.
   His wife, Esther Abigail (Whitman) Pyle, died in 1921, when he was 28, two years after Charlie married.
   David Hunter McAlpin died in 1901, when Charlie was seven and a half.
   (His first wife, Frances Adelaide Rose, died in 1870.)

~~~~~~~~~

Lowell Copeland Lived in a Church

It recently occurred to me that I had never looked for my great-grandfather, Lowell Copeland, in a city directory, which is a genealogical source that can provide different information than a census, a vital record, or a newspaper article, and if you're lucky, you can find an ancestor in consecutive years and see if there are any changes.

As I have previously shared at Grandfather's Occupation, Lowell Copeland was living in New Trier, Cook County, Illinois, between 1900 and 1920 and all three of his children were born there. By the time of the 1930 federal census, he was living in Michigan City, Indiana.

Lowell Copeland appeared in Chicago City Directories from 1897 to 1902, where he was listed as Asst Treasurer, Sullivan Machinery and resided in Winnetka. He appeared in the Evanston City Directory (living in Winnetka, a nearby suburb) from 1912 to 1922. 

Some time between 1922 and about 1926, Lowell moved to Michigan City, when his information might have been collected for the following year's city directory. His entry is in a gray rectangle in the image.

Caron's Directory of the City of Michigan City, Ind. for 1927-1928 (Louisville, Ky: Caron Directory Co., 1927), p. 131; digital image, Ancestry.com (https://search.ancestry.com/search/db.aspx?dbid=2469 : accessed 10 January 2019).

His name was Lowell Copeland; I'm not sure why the middle initial T appears here; his son (my grandfather) was Lowell Townsend Copeland.
Ethel M. (Greeley) Copeland was his wife.
His occupation was pur agt: purchasing agent for the Sullivan Machinery Company, which I wrote about at Grandfather's Occupation.
Lowell and Ethel lived at 614 Franklin. Well, the first thing I like to do when I see an address in a city directory is to search for it on a map.