New Zealand Hewlings

I've been trying to answer the question what happened to William and Samuel Hewlings, the younger half brothers of George Robert Hewlings? Interestingly, there is a Samuel Hewlings who was an early settler of New Zealand. He was born in about 1820, married a Maori woman, and had four daughters.₁

Samuel has a brother named William who was married in Leicester. According to the 1841 census William was living in Leicester with his wife and children. He is the only one in the family who was not born in Leicester. Two of William's daughters came to New Zealand and were married there. In New Zealand they are clearly identified with Samuel.

The argument for the family connection is based on three observations:

• Samuel and William are about the same age as  George's younger bothers.
• I have been unable to find another pair of bothers named William and Samuel Hewlings in the readily accessible records.
• George Freeman Hewlings went to New Zealand with his wife and daughter.

The argument against a family connection is fairly strong:

• Samuel and William are common names in England. There is more than one Samuel Hewlings and more than one William Hewlings in the British Isles during the first half of the 19th century.
• Not everyone is recorded - not having a record does not prove a person didn't exist.
• Migrating to be near family is only one reason someone might move.

It is plausible William, Samuel and George Robert are brothers. It is likely. I can't prove it. 

¹Here is a very nice write up. (http://www.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~nzlscant/hewlings.htm)

Grandma Sadie and Grandma June

My father claims he didn't know his grandmother's first names until he was an adult. He always knew them as Grandma Sadie and Grandma June. Grandma Sadie was his mother's mother and Grandma June was his father's mother.²

Grandma Sadie was my father's favorite. He said he was blessed to have two women who loved him unconditionally - his mother and grandma Sadie. Grandma Sadie and I met briefly - I was born in March. She died in May. I am told, I visited Grandma Sadie in the hospital before she died.

Both Grandma Sadie and Grandma June were widows by the time my father was born in 1938. I have the impression that at one point both were living with or near my grandparents. At one point Grandma June and both her sons and daughters-in-law were sharing a house.₂ Apparently, Aunt Melba didn't like the arrangement - she and Lamar moved out to their own house.

My grandfather, June's older son, loved to drive. After my Aunt Nancy was born, my grandfather decided to take the family out to Yellowstone for a long weekend. The baby was left with the two grandmothers. That night my grandmother had a dream that night and saw her baby in a pool of blood. Much to my grandfather's dismay my grandmother insisted the family return to Salt Lake. When they returned they found the grandmothers had been in a car accident and the baby had been in a pool of blood - the baby was fine, the blood had come from her grandmothers.

My niece Julie shares a name with Grandma June. Grandma Gladys, my grandmother, shares the same birthday - April 6, as her mother, Grandma Sadie.

¹Grandma Sadie is Sarah Jane Dibble. Grandma June is Julia Lucretia Bagley.
²1930 Federal Census, Utah Population schedules: Salt Lake County, Salt Lake City (EDs 18-1 to 18-11, 18-135 to 18-136, 18-12 to 18-21) [NARA, T626 roll 2418]

The trouble with L. M. Hewlings

I'm slogging through writing a biography of Louis Edwin Granger. It's been a fascinating process. I keep running into a major difficulty: his mother, Lucy Minerva Woodward. She keeps threatening to take over the narrative. Not only is she a fascinating character in her own right, but she and her family provided many of the primary sources for Louis outside of government and public records. It takes a conscious effort to keep to his narrative and not stray into the stories of Lucy and her siblings.

A Pen Knife and an Educated Thumb

A couple of weeks ago, I had the privilege of making a presentation on collection assessment at Rice University. During the presentation, I presented the experience of a paint expert from PPG - the best measurement of adhesion was "a pen knife and an educated thumb". My point being there are important things that can not be directly measured with numbers. Since then I have started reading Daniel Kahneman's "Thinking, Fast and Slow". I need to modify my thinking slightly.

Kahneman has a interesting view of expertise. Expert intuition is very good but has two major limitations:

• Experts don't know the limitations of their expertise. Either people don't know what they know until they know until someone else asks. Or like Raymond Babbit from the movie Rain Man, an expert is good one thing - counting cards, but doesn't understand the expertise only applies to a limited number of games of chance.
• Expertise needs to be built in a reasonably consistent environment. If the environment is extremely unreliable, all the expert will do is create a superstition. For example, I had a coworker several years ago, who had worked for a trading firm in New York. One morning he got up. He went to work. He read all the appropriate news sources. He made the same decisions based on the same types of information, and expected to make a nice profit for the firm. He lost $300 million. 

So, my example expert developed his skills over a long period of time, used consistent methods to observe on consistent environment and was able to develop intuition to process a complex situation accurately. I believe library services can be asses in the same way, though active observation. And observations a good supplement to the numbers.

Richard and Ester Bagley Part II - Wild Speculation

Warning: the following is highly speculative and based on the flimsiest of evidence.

I was poking around ancestry I found an email attached to a faded photocopy of a page in a family bible. The email detailed the Bible's origin and current location and transcribed the page. The page lists the births and some deaths of the family of John A. and Anna Bagley. It also include the family of Anna's second husband, Rev. Samuel Olney. Assuming a parent child relationship (not explicitly stated, Chapins C Bagley (Cyrenus Chapin) is the oldest son of the marriage between Anna and John. John was born in 1788 and died in 1821. A note states that Anna's obituary states she had five sons and two daughters. At least four of those sons are sons of her first husband John Bagley. Other materials online put John's birth in PA.

So conjecture: Let's say John A Bagley the father of Cyrenus Chapin Bagley was born in Luzern county, PA. Then it is quite possible he is the boy in the household of Richard Bagley in the 1790 census. Luzern county was settled by people from Connecticut. The two colonies/states contested the area until after the end of the American Revolution. If Richard Bagley returned to Connecticut after 1790, then he could have been in Hartford for Edward Bagley's birth. If Edward Bagley who migrated to Utah is also the son of the same Richard Bagley, John A Bagley would then be the older brother or half brother of Edward Bagley. This is potentially testable, Cyrenus Chapin has brothers who could have living male descendants. If it turns out the two families are related, it would at least indicate John and Edward would be at least cousins.

If John and Edward are brothers it would indicate a earlier birth date for Edward. While it's not unheard of for men to father children into their 60s, the 1800 or 1801 date would be more plausible than the 1810 or 1815 date, if Esther is also the mother of John.

Elizabeth Granger Bemis - Part 2

In the realm of strange coincidences, there was another Granger living in Littleton Colorado at the time of Elizabeth Bemis, Gershom Frank "Frankie" Ford.  Frankie was the daughter of Charles Edward Granger, the uncle of William Granger, her father, and half brother of her step-mother Louise Hill.

Frankie moved to Colorado with her widowed mother and an older brother and sister. She married Carrie Ford and moved to Littleton, Colorado. They had three children before she died in 1917.

Both Gershom F. Ford and Elizabeth Granger Bemis are buried in the Littleton Cemetery in Littleton Colorado.

Elizabeth (Lizzie Josephine) Granger Bemis

The Edwin A. Bemis Library recently published  a digital copy of So I Took An Apple, the Autobiography of Edwin Arnold Bemis, the son of Elizabeth Granger Bemis. Edwin is my cousin - our common ancestor is Daniel Granger - me through his third son, Henry Hinsdale, Edwin through his oldest son, William Foster Granger. 

In this autobiography, Edwin speaks briefly of his mother’s family and states she didn’t know much about the Grangers but spoke fondly of her foster father Luther Hill. She chose to live in Littleton because of Luther and named her first son Luther Hill Bemis after him. Luther Hill was very important in her life, and he and his wife Louise were for all intents and purposed her parents. She remembered very little of her birth parents, William Granger and Samantha Stone. 

Lizzie Josephine, as a Elizabeth was known, was born in Hardwick, Massachusetts, on March 3, 1856 to William Granger and Samantha Stone. William and Samantha had two more daughters - Nellie Maria, born February 9, 1859 and Cora Louise, born November 28, 1861. At the beginning of 1865 William had a wife and three little girls. Within seven months his wife and two of his daughters died of consumption, leaving a young widower with a four year old daughter.  Apparently, William placed his daughter into foster care with Luther and Louise Hill.

William Granger was related to Lizzie's foster father, Luther Hill through marriage:

• William is the son of William Foster Granger and Elizabeth Mead. 
• William Foster is the son of Daniel Granger and Catherine Johanna (Nicholls) Granger. 
• After Catherine died, Daniel Granger married Fanny Mead. 
• Fanny and Elizabeth Mead are sisters. 
• Luther Hill married Louisa Augusta Granger, the daughter of Daniel Granger and Fanny Mead.

So William, Lizzie's father, is both the first cousin of Louisa Hill since her mother and his mother are sisters and her nephew since she is also his father's half sister. So Luther Hill would be his uncle as well as the wife of his cousin. Luther and Louise only had one child, a daughter, Louise who only lived for about six weeks in 1861. 

I imagine, William, an overwhelmed grieving widower placed his daughter with a childless couple he knew, loved and trusted. They loved and cared for his daughter. When he remarried I imagine, he was unwilling to take his daughter from her home. I believe she had two sets of parents that loved and cared for her. 

If you would like to read more about Luther Hill, he has a biography in History and genealogy of the Kent family : descendants of Richard Kent, sen. who came to America in 1633 by Dale, E. I. and Kent, Edward E., 1899.