She's How Old?

The other day I found this 1945 Florida State Census record for a client of mine.  In the middle of the page is my client's grandmother, Francis Phillips, and her grown son Robert Thomas Phillips.

The funny thing:  Look at Francis' listed age!  "21+"?!

I've looked at many hundreds, maybe thousands, of census records, and I've never seen a woman get away with something like this!  

I asked my client about it, and she had this to say:  "My grandmother always looked very young and she was incredibly vain.  To the point that she lied about her age to her 10 and 11th husbands, who were at least ten years younger than her!"

So, that explains Francis' answer...  but she must have been a very persuasive lady to get away with that answer! 

Mystery Monday: George Wendell Phillips - the Rest of the Story

A few weeks ago I wrote a post about George Wendell Phillips, and I was full of questions.  Thanks to two readers (kudos, Deb and Lindy!) and some further digging, I now have some answers.

To recap, George was born in New York in 1887, and by 1920, he had met and married Francis Norton of Miami, Florida.  They had a daughter in 1921 and a son in 1924—by which time George was off the radar, never to be seen or heard from again—at least, not by his wife and children.  A granddaughter hired me to find out more.

We will probably never know what caused the split between George and Francis, but we now know much more about George’s life around the time they met and married, and in the years after they split.  It turns out that George was in the U.S. Marine Corps and was stationed at the air field at Miami, Florida—thus answering the question of how he and Francis met.  

After their wedding in 1920, they made a trip that spring to visit George’s mother in New York.  She was a widow who had remarried by then and moved from Salamanca to North Tonawanda.  Her new husband, J.J. Patterson, was a wealthy man, and they had a houseboat on the Niagara River.  In 1921 a daughter was born to George and Francis in Pennsylvania—how they came to be there remains a mystery.  By 1924 they were back in Miami—and Francis was the single mother of a daughter and a new baby son.  

We now know that George stayed in Florida for at least a few more years; he appears in various records there until about 1929.  After that, he apparently moved back to New York, living in various places, working as a hotel cook.  By 1938 he was living in the Veteran’s Hospital in Bath, New York, where he died on March 2, 1941 of pneumonia.  His death certificate says he suffered severe bronchial asthma (as does my client), and also heart problems (which also run in her family), and he’d had at least one heart attack by the time he died at age 53. 

George evidently never remarried or had any more children; and by the time he died, his parents were both gone, as was his only sibling, a twin who died at one year of age.  George was buried at the Bath National Military Cemetery, probably unmourned and unremembered—until now.  My client says she hopes to travel to New York and place a flag on his grave.  That, dear readers, is what we call “closure.”

Mystery Monday: George Wendell Phillips—Gone Without a Trace

One of my clients has a nagging question and I’m trying to help her answer it.  Her father never knew his father, because for some reason that has been lost to history, the man left his wife and baby daughter and disappeared into the mist, around the time his son was born in 1924. 

George Wendell Phillips was born in Salamanca, Cattaraugus County, New York on November 21, 1887, according to his WWI draft card.  The draft card gives a few more clues.  By 1917 he was 29 and living in North Tonawanda in Niagara County, New York, and working across the state border as a hotel clerk at Reed House in Erie, Pennsylvania.  He was of medium height and weight, gray eyes, and brown hair.  When asked about previous military service, he said that he had risen “from private to captain at Chamberlain Military Institute in Randolph, New York.”  The above photo was taken either during WWI or perhaps earlier, when he was at Chamberlain.

His father, who may have been named George or possibly Benjamin, was born in Wales.  But he had passed away by the 1900 census, and George’s mother Minnie is listed as a widow who has borne “2 children, 1 still living.”  This photo may be George’s parents, but we can’t be sure.

 

Somehow George met a young woman from Florida named Francis Norton, who went by the nickname “Frankie” all her life.  How the two of them found each other is part of the mystery.

George was quite close to his mother, Minnie, and after he and Frankie were married, it appears that they lived with her in New York.  And when their daughter was born in Pennsylvania a year later, George and Francis named her “Minnie.”  

Now the story gets murky…  By 1924, Francis was back in Florida, giving birth to a son who never knew his father.  How Francis went from a wife and young mother in Pennsylvania in 1921, to a single mother in Florida in 1924, is anybody’s guess.    

Francis remarried, but she had no more children.  Her son and daughter never knew anything about their father, and both of them have now passed away.  But my client, who is George and Francis’ granddaughter, found her missing grandfather’s name in an old family Bible, and she has never stopped being curious about who he was and why he left his young family.

We’ll probably never know the “why” of George Wendell Phillips’ disappearance.  But I’d surely love to tell my client what happened to him after he dropped out of sight in 1924.  Maybe someone out there knows something.

I did crack the case, with some help!

For more of the story, see this post.