Maria Augusta Stevenson and Lettie A. Thorndike

Once upon a time, Maria Augusta Standish married the Unitarian minister, Reverend Benjamin V. Stevenson. Maria was the daughter of Moses Standish, who was a descendant of Miles Standish, the pilgrim leader.

In 1846, Maria Stevenson gave birth to a daughter and died. The daughter was named Maria August Stevenson. She was born in Barre, Massachusetts. There is no record for the daughter's death. Reverend Stevenson remarried 18 months later and his new wife gave birth in New Hampshire to a daughter named Maria Augusta Stevenson.

Maria A. Standish had a younger sister named Vrylina. In 1851, Vrylina Standish married John J. Thorndike, the son of Nathaniel R. and Sarah E. (Giles) Thorndike. The Thorndikes had a daughter named Letitia "Lettie" Thorndike who was probably born in 1846 and married Louis E. Granger in 1870.

Perhaps Maria and Lettie are the same person:

• There is no birth record for Lettie (Thorndike) Granger. Both girls were born in 1846.
• The first record we have for Lettie is the 1850 census where she is listed as a four year old boy name Augstius. Should this have been Augusta?
• Massachusetts didn't have an adoption law until 1851. An adoption would have been private and if it were recorded would have been in journals and letters.
• The Thorndikes and Stevesons knew one another by 1851 because of the marriage of Vrylina and John. Did they know each other before then?
• On the 1900 Census, Sarah acknowledges three births with one living child. Three sons' births are recorded and accounted for. John J would have been the living child. Lettie was still alive at the time. Did Sarah speak with the census taker? Did she not count Lettie, or was Lettie adopted?

It's quite likely, Maria Augusta Stevenson is not Lettie Thorndike. Maria Augusta Stevenson could have died and left no death record. Reverend Stevenson could have entrusted his daughter to someone in his Barre congregation. She could have been sent to live with another family member.

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.