old letters

It was during the Depression I think that Frank Leverett, famous geologist, got interested in family genealogy, and actually went to Boston to see what he could dig up. My great grandfather Will was in his generation, and also interested, and saved many of the letters from Frank, among which this is one. You can see that it comes from Ann Arbor, and its date is 1940. It's a classic.

In it he claims that Will's father James W. had made a mistake. James W. had come through Boston when he was four; had received some children's things from one of his aunts who was taken with how cute a child he was, and had named that aunt as one of the two that were living there with his grandmother, who he met only that once. They had a stagecoach at the time (1834), had it all decked out, and were on their way from Maine to Illinois.

So this aunt, Frank said, was a relict, or surviving widow, of a Leverett, brother of James W.'s father. But the one who had lost two children was different from the one James W. had named. Frank figured this out.

But my question is this: Is it possible that James W. was right, even though he was only four, and the two lost children should have been attributed to the aunt he named, not the other aunt? These trees are sometimes reconstructed on very flimsy evidence, and are often reconstructed wrong. A child who died, well who knows who its actual parents were? I guess it's just a question. We are using one tree to call James W. wrong, while maybe we should be using James W.'s personal witness to question that tree.

Not sure if anything will come of this. I'll show you the letter if you're interested.

Catherine Mauer

My father, James R. Leverett Jr., once said that most people have pleasant memories of their maternal grandmothers, but he had no pleasant memories of his. His grandmother, Catherine Mauer, moved in with his mother and father and, according to him, made their lives absolutely miserable. As an example he said that his mother was sick and needed medical advice, but couldn't talk to her brother, my dad's Uncle Roy, because grandmother had a feud with him and wouldn't allow him into the house. I was curious about how somebody could become that angry, that difficult, that unpleasant, so I did research into her life.

Born into a family of Ostfrisians, originally from that northern land between Netherlands and Germany, she was born in Ogle County, Illinois, which had a kind of Ostfrisian community. It's not clear to me whether her father, John Singelmann, served in the Civil War or not, but she was born right after that, the third of four daughters all born in Illinois. Her mother, Katharine, may have used the German spelling but named her Elizabeth Catherine with her middle name clearly being the same as her mother's. The family moved to Hancock, Iowa, on the Nishnibotna River, in Pottawattomie County, not too far from Council Bluffs.

As far as I can tell life was difficult out there; it was isolated. I am not sure whether the girls were able to help John with the farming, or whether they were able to hire anyone, but the best I can figure, no, no. The second daughter married a prominent local farmer in the Minden area; Charles and the Mauer clan were from York township, near Minden.

Minden was a German town with lots of Ostfrisians and even a Dutch Reformed Church, which is no doubt where Catherine met Charles. They married in 1893. But John, her father, died that same year. I may have to get the exact dates nailed down here but this is my understanding.

She went with Charles to live at his family's farmhouse in York Township. The house was large but his older brother was already married (to another Kate or Catherine Mauer) and also had several children. She soon had her three children, Leona, Roy, and Verna, while still in that farmhouse. It would be crowded.

If Charles wanted to farm, he'd have several choices. His parents Henry and Anna would surely split their farm into two and let him build on the empty half, given that his older brother wanted the farm and, as oldest, was in line to get it. They could also save money and buy a nearby farm, though cash was hard to come by and this appears that it would be more difficult.

But the last option would be for him to take that Hancock farm once the father died. She may have even hoped or expected him to, since they were family. With her father dead, her mother and two sisters were in trouble. The first sister married and moved out, now leaving her mom with a young teenage girl, her young sister.

Charles would take his share of the farm (I presume) and buy into a hardware store in Council Bluffs, and work there through the early years of the 1900s. He would take Catherine and the three children and move to Council Bluffs where they would live on Harrison St. I am still trying to work out whether this is what he wanted, or whether it was his only choice, given that his brother would inherit the main farm that he grew up on.

Not all people are made for farming; in that era it was mostly running horses, and attaching plows to them, or figuring out how to bring in crops somehow and get them to market. Hancock being isolated, it would take more work, with less reward, than the Mauers were used to, but the Mauers had a fairly successful farm in Minden, and Charles could see what farming would be like in the area. It's a little competitive, brothers on farms isolated day after day, and maybe he couldn't handle that. But also it requires a lot of skills and hard work. Maybe he thought it was too much work.

But here's the tragedy: a couple years later, in early January, the teenage girl, the youngest sister, died. There is no record of what she died of. She is buried at the Dutch Reformed Church near Minden, next to her father. The mother moved out soon after, to move in with the second sister, and died in her sixties soon after (the father died in his fifties). The family was gone.

Charles, after many years running the Swaine-Mauer Hardware store with his partner, Mr. Swaine, decided to open a store where customers checked themselves out, like an Aldi's setup. It was quite revolutionary at the time and I believe he did it with groceries, not hardware. We are talking Council Bluffs here, early twenties, the Roaring Twenties. It failed. He gave up, got a traveling salesman job, and died in Watertown South Dakota (on the road) in the late twenties. My dad's grandmother Julia said she always suspected that Catherine had driven him into the grave.

When he died, she had no place to go except in with her youngest daughter Verna, my grandmother. She wasn't talking to her son. Her older daughter was out in California in a small apartment. Verna took her in because she could. She made Verna's life miserable and Verna died early; my dad said he suspected dying was the only way she could get out of it. By this time there was nothing pleasant or loving of her at all.

How could she be this way? I finally concluded that the answer lies out in that Hancock farm, or in the story of what happened to it. By the way I'm not exactly sure what happened to it, so I could be wrong here, but the lack of records or clear testimony suggests that they just sold it out and left it; if nobody could or would farm it, it would go to someone who could. Could she be mad at him for not doing that? Could she have deep down expected him to take and run a farm and take care of her mother and little sister? The bitterness of her sister's death must have eaten away at her, I figure.

There may be more to the story that I haven't uncovered, given that records are scarce and not enough to go by anyway. I keep wondering what I'm missing, or if what I've found is really enough to justify the turn in her life. My father didn't know her until the thirties when it was the Depression and everybody was miserable. Apparently the fight with her son was over handling of Union Pacific stock, the family fortune, and would have been right around then. I have yet to really look into that. Maybe being hungry during the Depression was enough whether her son-in-law, my grandfather, provided for her or not.

Frank Leverett Day

A word should be said about Frank Leverett Day, March 10, which oddly enough I celebrated this year in my own kind of way. I like to tell my family stories about Frank Leverett, though I didn't really have much chance to do it, so I'll do it here.

Frank Leverett was probably the most famous of the Leveretts, a geologist who was in the first Who's Who in around 1900, and then set the record for being in more consecutive Who's Whos than anyone else; he was in that Who's Who until well into the 1920's. That's because a geologist rock star doesn't turn up every year, but he wss solid, deserving, and as famous as he always was every time they went looking for a geologist. He had walked 100,000 miles of the midwest looking for evidence of where the glaciers had receded because he had figured out, based on surface features, what could predictably be found beneath. His methods were particularly useful to the oil boys but that story I will save for later. He at one point went to Chicago for the Columbian Exposition and showed off through his exhibit "Soils of Illinois" everything he had found up and down the lake, and out this way, toward the Mississippi Valley. Though he had grown up in the Iowa Territory, born during the Civil War, his work convinced him that during the Ice Age the Mississippi actually flowed down to the west, down through Columbus Junction Iowa, so his little cabin in Denmark down by Burlington would have actually been to the east of it. Today I live in that territory, more or less, east of the river.

He's a family hero because toward the end of his life he started collecting "data" about the family, and investigating the tenuous connection between the western Leveretts and the original Puritan ones from Massachusetts colony fame. He even went back there, found an old lady living in a house full of antiques in Boston, and inquired about the line, carefully writing down everything he found. When he got to Harvard a friend gave him his edited chapter on The Great Leverett, about John Leverett the President of Harvard in the early 1700s. With this came a general overview of how the Leveretts could have been related and who we really had going back as far as we could. But in this process he became interested in longevity. How long had everyone lived? Was it a genetic trait or what? What kind of averages were out there? Where would he fit in, i.e. how long would he live?

His birthday was on March 10, and so was his second wife's, and together they made a habit of celebrating, every year, having made it to another one.

This year I made it to Chicago, picked up one son near Lakeshore Drive, and went to see two others, also on Lakeshore Drive, to celebrate their grandpa's turning 100 on Mar. 10. A longevity party. This was my ex-wife's father, not mine; in fact longevity is not really a trait of our line. We, like Frank, can expect to make it to about 90 if we're lucky. But what's luck? To me it was to be able to drive on Lakeshore Drive, see the big city at its best, be in a room with three sons, and make it home all in one piece. Here's to Frank Leverett, great map-maker of the midwest. Picture is Frank and Charles, his brother, in Iowa, around the Civil War.

Harvardinates

Harvardinates
True story of the beginning of secular education in the colonies.
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Will

Finally got started writing about Will again. I did it because I was so dreadfully stuck on my fantasy. It worked. Will is totally in-history, real, a part of the living condition. It makes me happy to talk about him.

He was born right after the Civil War in northwest Illinois, but grew up on a farm in Wisconsin and then went to high school in South Dakota. He went to Hillsdale, loved literature, married Julia Reynolds, and headed west.

They made Council Bluffs their home, and that's why the book is called Bluffs Leveretts. His son James was my grandfather; his grandson James Jr. my father; all three were Bluffs Leveretts, as was his sister, and of course the women they married. Because he had only one son, who. himself only had one son, Leveretts are pretty thin in our line, His brother Fred had maybe six or seven and a lot more Leveretts came out of that.

Nevertheless he will be of interest to. lov ers of history and of how events and people can shape it. When he got to Council Bluffs it was still the early years and everyone had great hopes for its future, and that of Omaha, right across the river. Little did they know a big depression would hit from which that section of plains would never quite recover. Omaha never outgrew Chicago, never became the center of the known financial universe, never took over economically. The Panic of 1893 did it in because it did in the railroads which were just reaching Omaha and beyond, just stretching into South Dakota and the eastern part of those plains states which could fool you with their productivity. I say fool you because it dries out pretty much a third of the way into Nebraska, South Dakota and even Kansas, they just don't produce that much after a while. In the western part of those states it takes hundreds of acres to support even a handful of cows, so it's not like the breadbasket would ever have been able to take itself from Chicago and plant itself in Omaha. This was something that was destined not to happen.

Will and Julia made Council Bluffs their home for their entire life, even after my grandpa and father gave it up and moved to Des Moines sometime around WW II. I never met him though he lived to know of my arrival in 1954; my brother however did get to meet him, or so he says.

Really his contribution to the world, or at least to Council Bluffs, was as a historian. When he got out there, he looked into the fact that the Bluffs was in Pottawattomie County, and lo and behold found that the Potawatomie (many different spellings) had been extinguished from their homes in Michigan, Illinois and Iowa, and were now, what was left of them, holed up in Kansas. Sure enough this was true of many indigenous tribes, cleared out from Illinois and Iowa, anywhere back east, and now holed up on useless land down in Oklahoma (Indian Country) or thereabouts. Some people wondered about keeping track of these tribes. Who were their leaders? What did they have to say about what had happened? How many had died in the "Indian Wars" and the clearing of the west of all its buffalo and natural sources of food?

Will was on the side of the genuine historian, who simply wants to record the facts and be respectful to all the players. Then as now not everyone was as respectful. Many said, who cares, or, glad to be rid of them, since they fought with hatchets and never could wear a suuit. RAcism was rampant. Will was a minority.

The rest of us rely on them, though, for getting the facts as straight as they can, and what we know today, we know because people like Will did keep records and record what people had to say about what had happened. That era saw the clearing of the indigenous tribes throughout west, almost as thorouughly as they'd been. cleared from Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois. Will attracted historical writing; he published it; he cultivated an awareness of where Council Bluffs/Omaha had been, who had passed through it on their way beyond.

I think my account may lean into the American historian's general dilemma, which is that even a factual account of such a huge massacre sounds overdramatic and is in some ways too much to read. I found this when I borrowed "Bury my Heart at Wounded Knee" and was unable to finish, too gruesome.

Maybe that's your fate if you have empathy, or some respect for your fellow humans.

Pioneer Leveretts

Pioneer Leveretts & the 1600-mile journey - KINDLE SPECIAL WED-FRI - when they arrived in Quincy, Illinois in 1834, cholera had taken 6% of the population - https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09152K335

Story of Joseph Leverett, and the childhood of James Walker Leverett

Genealogy updating

Recently. I was asked by my brother about the two genealogies, Wallace and Leverett, because his daughter, my niece, was interested. Actually I think a lot of us are interested, and a lot has changed on them.

But they were in bad condition. The version that my parents passed along - they were the last ones to actually work on them - I had put online, and they are still there. I could for example link to the Leverett one on the template of this blog, and to the Wallace one on the Wallace blog. But I don't, partly because I know they are outdated and incomplete.

That's about to change. For one thing I am actively working on both, so I will have an updated version for anyone who asks. Almost whatever I do will still be incomplete, as I always find incomplete things virtually whenever I open them.

But I am interested in geography, for example where were they born, and where were they married, and I'm putting those in as I go, where I know them. If I learn more I'll put that in too. I'm in an ideal position to do it because I've researched so much of each family.

In fact I've written six books on the Leveretts, and one on the Wallace side, so that's my excuse for not getting to the painstaking detail work involved in putting in birth dates, death dates, marriage dates, etc. But all that information is there and waiting to be harvested.

In a way I find it reassuring in these troubling times to work with people who somehow survived things like the depression and the Civil War. In some cases they didn't survive, like Percival Nott, who had eleven children and died in Shiloh. I've found lots of interesting people, most of them distant relatives as I don't focus narrowly on the ancestors themselves. There are also the women's families: they enter the picture at the marriage, but they have their own funnel: two parents, four grandparents, going all the way up. As they enter our genealogy we are of course entering theirs. It's a funnel dance, like when Sufis get together.

This post is to say, if you are a Leverett, and have therefore found this blog because you are on that genealogy, or should be, or are interested in the descendants as they came down, Write me with updates or to have a copy, electronically, of what I've got so far. I know a lot of changes I can make to the Leverett one right away, but haven't done it, because I've been mired in the Wallace one where I have to familiarize myself with the main characters.