The Children of Charles and Emma Garver

Previously I wrote about Charles and Emma Heilman Garver, my husband’s great-grandparents.  They had nine children, all of whom survived to adulthood, and all but one of whom remained in Michigan for most or all of their lives.  They are shown in this 1930 photo, standing behind their parents:  Alta, John, Bea, Forest, Florence, Roy, Mabel, Walter, and Ray.  I love to trace all the children in a family, not just one.  It’s called “cluster research,” and it gives me a better understanding of the family if I step back and look at the bigger picture...

Walter Garver dug ditches for his father-in-law as a young man—a photo survives.  He and his wife Hazel (Alwood) Garver had fifteen children, fourteen of whom survived to adulthood—one is my mother-in-law.  Walter was a farmer, raising hogs and milking dairy cows, but he also worked for the WPA during the Great Depression on a road-building crew.  He died at age 80, marrying a second time shortly before his death in 1971.

Clara Mabel Garver married Andrew McClellan Leeth when she was 17.  They moved to Colorado at the suggestion of Mac’s doctor, due to Mac’s tuberculosis, but eventually they returned to Michigan.  They had three daughters and a son, and she died in 1969 at age 76.

Forest Garver (pictured below) served in Europe in World War I.  Several photos survive.  On the back of one picture, he calls his flat standard-issue helmet “my little tin lid.”  He later married Aletha Allen and they had three children.  He worked as a repairman in a Flint, Michigan auto factory in 1920, but was a farmer by 1930.  He died in 1978 at age 82.

Florence Garver married Arthur Kever in 1916.  They were dairy farmers and had three daughters.  She died at age 79 in 1976.

John Jacob Garver married Naomi Burton and they had a daughter and a son.  John was a factory worker, and died young—compared to most of his siblings—at age 60, following a heart attack.

Ray Lester Garver drove his sister Clara and brother-in-law Mac to Colorado.  Ray remained there, marrying a Michigan girl named Martha Hutchinson.  He died in Colorado in 1986 at age 84.

Beatrice Garver married John Acre in 1904 when she was 16.  John worked as an auto mechanic.  She and John had two daughters and four sons.  She died in Michigan in 1981 at age 77.

Roy Russell Garver, the youngest son, helped his widowed mother run the farm after his father died in 1931.  But he contracted measles, and the complications that followed took his life.  After he died at age 26 in 1933, his mother was forced to give up the family farm.

Alta Garver, the baby of the family, married James Beattie; it was said in the family that it was love at first sight.  The marriage lasted 63 years.  They had eight children, two of whom died young.  They spent most of their lives in Michigan, where they had a grocery store called Beattie’s IGA Market in Marine City.  Alta was a member of the Order of the Eastern Star, a Masonic organization, serving as “Worthy Matron” (presiding officer).  She and James eventually retired to Florida, where Alta died at age 94 in 2009. 

West View Farm

Some of the happiest times of my childhood were spent in Minooka, Illinois. 

My maternal grandparents were Robert J. Erickson (1888-1968) and Clara Anderson Erickson (1892-1967).  They were married in 1913, and before long, they purchased the farm of Robert’s father, Charles Erickson.  But the Great Depression took its toll on Midwestern farmers like them, and the mortgage didn’t get paid, and by the time my mom was in high school they had lost that farm and then lived on two or three rented farms.  Grandpa was down, but not out.  The same year Mom married Dad—1950—Grandma and Grandpa Erickson bought West View Farm, and paid cash for it. 

West View Farm was 120 acres of Illinois clay loam.  Many of the buildings were already unneeded in the 1950s, having been built for an earlier time.  My grandpa kept a beef steer in the stable, and raised chickens in another barn.  Then there was a corn crib used as a repair and maintenance building, a small shed or two, and a huge barn which wasn’t used for much of anything, along with three empty silos and an old orchard…  and then there was the house.

The view of that farmhouse from Holt Road is something I will carry in my memory forever.  It was a magnificent place, especially when seen from the road across the vast expanse of front yard which my grandfather kept in magnificent condition all the years he lived there. 

We visited the farm most Sundays, and in the summers I would spend a happy week there, following my beloved grandfather and Uncle Bob around the farm.  It was a wonderful place for a child—the windmill, the cistern, the water pump, the corn crib with its souvenirs of my Uncle Bob’s plowing championships, the chicken house, the orchard, the garden, the sundial—and that wonderful house.  Grandma and Grandpa lived on the main floor, and the second floor had been an apartment for Uncle Bob and Aunt Shirley, until the women quarreled and my aunt and uncle built a house down the road.  So now it was unoccupied, with room after room to explore, full of furniture, toys, old clothes, and every kind of thing.

In the mid 1960s, Grandma Erickson’s high blood pressure finally took its toll.  The heart went out of Grandpa after that, and within a year or two, he was gone, too.  After a protracted legal battle, Uncle Bob bought out his three sisters and carried on with the farm—but the hard feelings lingered, and I didn’t see the farm again for nearly twenty years.  After that, I made occasional visits there, but as my uncle let the place “go to seed” as he got older (and as he went to seed as well), it was harder and harder to make myself drive out there and witness the farm’s slow demise.

Eight or ten years ago my uncle died.  Some time after that my sister and I drove out to Minooka to walk around the old place.  Looking up from the road, across the once magnificent lawn, and seeing the house boarded up brought tears to our eyes.  We walked around the buildings, marveling at how quickly the now-vacant farm was being reclaimed by nature.  We knew it would never be restored to its former glory; if the real estate slump ended and someone bought it, its proximity to Interstate 88 would make it prime property for development.

Last summer my sister and I returned once again.  We thought we were prepared for anything we might see, but we were mistaken.  Where the farmhouse once stood, there were only charred ruins.  I stopped at the farmhouse across the road and was told that it had burned down the previous year—perhaps due to lightning, or squatters who were careless with a cooking fire inside.  I grieve the loss of that farm like I would grieve a dearly loved friend.  But my childhood is bound up in the memories of that place, and always will be.

Those Places Thursday: Michigan Farm Life in the Great Depression, Part 3

Excerpts from the childhood of my mother-in-law, Donna Garver Mosey, in her own words:

“Mom did the milking, since Dad didn’t like working with the twelve cows.  We sold the cream but not milk—we didn’t have the cooling required for milk.  The man picked up the cream once a week.  We had real butter at home, and real homemade bread in our school lunches—which we took with us to school every day if we wanted to eat—no cafeteria in one room schools! 

At Christmastime, we would cut our own Christmas tree from the woods.  Mom made sea foam candy, fudge, peanut candy, and other treats.  Gifts were practical—clothes for school, mostly.  We would also get those old pinball kind of games that you would play on the floor—not one apiece, but one to share for all…  

When I was little our family had gone to church, but we quit going when there were too many kids to clothe and transport.  We went until there were five kids (counting brothers and sisters), but then it got too hard to get everyone dressed up enough.  But after that, we kids were still allowed to go—my dad would even drive us there—and my sisters and I went—Fern and Virginia and I, and Betty when she was old enough.   

We girls didn’t have bikes, but the boys did.  We didn’t do any horseback riding—we only had work horses.  Summer vacations, we worked in the garden and helped with the canning—I liked peeling peaches and tomatoes because you could boil them and the skins would drop right off!...  We always had enough to eat—but it was a lot of beans and potatoes.  I still like beans of all kinds—now it’s a healthy thing to eat.  I’m a “vegaholic” and I like fruit of all kinds.  Of course I like meat, too.  Butchering days were interesting on the farm!

My mother always made a good Sunday dinner with all the trimmings—meat, potatoes and gravy, salad, coleslaw, pie…  We girls once said to her, 'You always cook what Dad likes.”  She said, “I had Dad before I had all of you, and I’ll hopefully have Dad after you’re gone—so yes, I cook what he likes.”  I got the same story from our Fabulous Five with what I cooked for their dad while they were growing up.

8 boys, 6 girls.  Donna is in the front row middle, between her two parents.

I remember the day Doris (the oldest of the fourteen of us) left home.  It was the first time I ever saw my mother cry.   She left to be a housekeeper for somebody; then she met Lawrence and got married.  Charles left next.  He worked for a farmer nearby, the next farm over from his future wife Ellen...  I remember when Forest left home.  A farmer came to the house, wanting to hire a farmhand for milking, etc.  Mom and Dad said, “Forest can go.”  Forest later felt that meant that they didn’t like him as well as the other kids—but probably he was just the right age to leave home…  None of the boys ever had trouble finding work; all the Garvers had a good work ethic.”

Those Places Thursday: Michigan Farm Life in the Great Depression, Part 1

Excerpts from the childhood of my mother-in-law, Donna Garver Mosey, in her own words:

“I was the seventh born of fifteen children.  (The fifteenth one, William, had a bad heart and lived only a few days.)  I was born at home, as we all were.  When a new baby was about to be born, we would go outside to play, if we could, in the old corn crib if it was empty.  There was no telephone, so Dad would go and bring the midwife.   I remember once telling my teacher that when I grew up I wanted to have lots of children, like my mother did.

My dad was a ‘dirt poor farmer’...  One year a spark from the threshing machine caused a fire on the barn with the crop, so there was no way to make the farm payment to the bank.  So we had to move.  We moved into my great aunt Ellen Garver’s house.  Not a great house, but by sleeping three to four in a bed we kept warm. 

After Grandpa Charles Garver died in 1931, we moved into the family home on Adams Road.  The main floor of the house had a living room with a kerosene space heater, and a sofa, and always some rocking chairs.  The first floor also had the girls’ bedroom and my parents’ room.  In the lean-to part of the house it had a pantry and laundry room and a kitchen/eating area, with a dining table to seat twelve and a wood stove for cooking.  The second floor had only the chimney for heat, and that was the boys’ bedroom.  That house on Adams Road didn’t have electricity until the 1940s, and there was no indoor bathroom until 1946, about the time I got married.

 Besides farming 40 acres of land, Dad worked for the WPA in the 1930s, helping to build Route M61.  They built it by hand, with shovels.  He boarded out during the week and came home on weekends.  The workers who had horses got more money than those who had only shovels and manpower, so since every nickel counted, Dad was hired with a team of horses.   

I started at a country school.  It was 2¼ miles there, so some days, my brother Lester pulled me to school on a sled.  Other days, the milkman saw us Garver kids and picked us up and gave us a ride…  After that we changed schools, to the Browns Corners one room school, half a mile closer to home.  That first school, Brand School, closed after we left, since there weren’t enough students without us!

I had a lady teacher at Browns Corners School, and I loved her.  That teacher was the one who put my name in as the one and only student from our school who was allowed to go on a trip the Upper Peninsula by school bus.  We saw Tahquamenon Falls, Castle Rock at St. Ignace, and rode the Mackinac ferry (there was no bridge then).”

To be continued…  click here

Robert Mosey - From Yorkshire to America

Mosey is an unusual American surname, with no obvious ethnic origin.  But I have learned that it’s English in origin—Yorkshire, to be specific.  My husband’s great-grandfather Robert Mosey was one of his “gateway ancestors”—an ancestor who came from elsewhere to settle in America. 

Robert Mosey (1821-1884) was born in Bishop Wilton, a village in Yorkshire, England, to Richard Mosey and Sibby Johnson Mosey.  From what I’ve been able to find out about Robert’s early history, his parents weren’t the cream of British society by any means… I see a baby born out of wedlock, a conviction for assault, and a “removal order,” for example.  (A removal order occurred when a village sent a poor family back where they came from so that the local church parish wouldn’t have to support them.)  I owe a debt of thanks to Denise Mosey, who still lives in Bishop Wilton, for helping with this information.

Robert eventually came to America (as did his father Richard), probably in the later 1830s.  They both settled in Lorain County, Ohio, where Robert’s father Richard was naturalized and remarried (perhaps twice!) and died in 1872.  Young Robert married a local girl named Elisabeth Bennet in 1842.

The 1850 census finds Robert and Elisabeth in Lorain County with their four children, Robert working as a laborer.  But they continued to move west, probably to find affordable land...  The 1860 census finds them in Elkhart County, Indiana, with seven children (two other sons, Lesven and Daniel, had died).  Robert is a shingle-maker, and the census indicates that he still doesn’t own any land. 

Robert and Elisabeth eventually settled near South Haven in Allegan County, Michigan, where they can be found in the 1870 census.  Now Robert is a farmer and landowner, with land valued at $3,500 and personal property valued at $600.  An 1873 land atlas shows him owning 160 acres.  Quite a progression over twenty years!  He farmed in Allegan County the rest of his life, with several of his sons purchasing farms nearby.

Robert Mosey passed away in Allegan County in 1888, and Elisabeth followed him in death in 1893.  They and six or seven of their eight surviving children were buried at Stephenson Cemetery there.  In a future post I’ll tell more about those eight children who survived to adulthood—Lewis, John, Francis, Jane, Maria, Martha, Richard, and Sarah Elizabeth.

F.I. Wallin - Gateway Ancestor

“How will our children know who they are if they do not know where they came from?”

(author unknown)

I am a fourth-generation American on most branches of my family tree.  The first of my Wallin ancestors to live in America—my “gateway ancestor”—was my great-grandfather Frederick Isadore Wallin (1849-1926)—more commonly known as “F.I.”  

Frederick’s mother died in childbirth while having him.  In Sweden he was a tanner and the son of a tanner—one of the lower occupations on the social scale.  Yet a number of his personal papers survive, and the records say that he “read aloud well” and had a fine tenor singing voice.  He came to America (via Gothenburg, Sweden; Glasgow, Scotland; and Moville, Ireland) on the ship “Anglia” in May of 1871 at the tender age of 21; the ship’s steerage class passenger list was filled with Scots, Irish, Germans, Swedes, and a few Norwegians.  He was a lieutenant in the New York National Guard from 1874 to 1878—when this picture of him was created.  He became a U.S. citizen there and married Christine Bengston/Wennerholm, another Swedish immigrant.  The 1880 census finds them living with their baby son in Jamestown, New York, where Frederick is a store clerk.  But soon the young family went west to Nebraska, where Frederick was a peddler by trade, according to the 1885 Nebraska census.  By 1900 he is a farmer, and he and Christina have seven children—Isadore, Inez, Frederick, Ithel, Aurora, Sture, and Leonard.  Soon afterward he and Christina “moved to town” (Hordville, Nebraska) and built a store.

These words were written by his grandson Robert (my father) about Frederick’s later years:

“Old Frederick never really liked farming.  When his son Sture was 17, Sture wanted to go out on his own; so he told his father that he would finish out the year on the farm, and then help his dad build a store in town during that winter.  (This proposal was prompted by the old man telling Sture that there wasn't enough money for a new ball glove this year, while unloading a gallon of whiskey from the supply wagon.)  So they built the store, with living quarters in the back and twelve rooms upstairs, which made it a hotel.  The guests were traveling salesmen who went by train and would time their routes so as to spend an evening playing cards and having a few nips with F.I.  Let it not be thought that he was a bad man; he was a founder of the Fridhem Lutheran Church in Hordville.  This would have been about 1910, and Gramps ran the place until about 1920.  Later his son Leonard had a store in the same building, but the hotel business went out with the automobile.”

F.I. lived to be 76 and died in 1926; Christina died in 1935.  They are buried at the Fridhem Lutheran Church cemetery in Hordville.

Carl Peterson, Nebraska Pioneer

My great-grandfather, Carl Peterson, was an immigrant and a pioneer, as was his wife Emelia.  Thousands like them came from Sweden in the 1880s—due to massive crop failures there—to settle on farms in the American Heartland.  My great-grandparents’ story is not unique, but it’s no less precious to me for being common.  It’s because of their willingness to start a new life on a new continent that I can sing “God Bless America” today as I remember my debt to those who came before me.

Carl, who went by Charles or Charlie, came to America in 1881 and first settled in Chicago, where it is said he worked in a steel mill.  He married Emelia Fryksdal (another Swedish immigrant) in 1883; their first child, Carl, was born there.  But soon they headed west to the plains of Nebraska, as so many Swedes did, where they settled on a farm in Hamilton County.   

His grandson Robert Wallin recalled, “In 1885 he bought 160 acres from the Union Pacific Railroad for $6 an acre.  He put down $360 and had a $600 mortgage, which he renewed 10 years later for the same amount ($600).  They put up a temporary house.  Charles had two mules and a cow, and he used the mules to break up the land.  Halfway through, one mule died and he finished the rest with a mule and a cow...” 

A fine new house was built in 1903.  The historic Oregon Trail crossed right through their property; traces of the ruts could still be seen in the 1960s when my family visited the old homestead.  Carl and Emelia had eight children there, all of whom survived to adulthood, and he and Emelia remained on that Nebraska farm for the rest of Carl’s life.  

Carl became an American citizen on January 29, 1903, at the district courthouse of Hamilton County in Aurora, Nebraska; his citizenship certificate, a cherished possession, survives.  (Because of the “derivative citizenship” laws in effect until 1922, Emelia would automatically have become a citizen when Carl did.)

Carl never saw his homeland again.  He developed stomach cancer in his fifties, and died in a Chicago hospital in 1917.  But his wife Emelia and two of their daughters returned to Sweden in 1920.  Photographs survive from that trip, including a picture of the small cabin in Borgestorp, Sweden from which Carl came to America.

Carl’s obituary was a fine tribute.  It is titled “Another Good Man Gone” and reads, in part, “No man was held in higher esteem by his neighbors and the community generally than Charlie Peterson.  A man of strong conviction, he had the faculty of holding the respect of those who differed with him most radically…  The world can ill afford to lose in these trying times men such as Charlie Peterson, but the work he did and the example he set for unwavering loyalty will live long after his body turns to dust.  He fought the good fight and kept the faith.”