Finding Grandma's House

My cousin posted on Facebook a picture with our great grandparents, our grandmother and her brother standing in front of a house. The photo was taken in 1908 of their home. She asked me if I knew if the house was still standing.

I actually didn't know but I do remember going to visit my great uncle who was living in the house at that time. Although I was still in grade school the last time I saw the house, I have  memories of several visits there.

As a part of building my family history, I had purchased a 1888 plat map book of the county in which the house stood and a book of burials in the same county. My father took me a few times to see the cemetery with his grandparents and great grandparents graves. At that time the cemetery surrounded the church. In the book of burials, I found the names of my father's family listed at that cemetery but not that of my great uncle. In perusing the book, I discovered that my great uncle was not buried in the cemetery with his parents and grandparents, but elsewhere.

Several years ago my sister and I went to a family reunion on my mother's side. When we moved, she was too little to remember anything about the house, so I thought that it would be fun to visit the cemetery where our father's grandparents and great grandparents are buried. Sadly, the church was demolished and a larger, modern church built near the graveyard.

Since we were in the area, I decided to visit the cemetery where my grandmother's brother was buried too. Little did I realize then that the house was very nearby. Nearly a decade later, I had more tools and information at hand to help me see if I could find the house.

My great uncle and great aunt had no children. When my grandmother's brother died in an auto accident, his wife inherited the house and property. The cemetery in which my great uncle is buried is situated on a portion of the farm. After her death, she left the property and cemetery to her church.

Using Google Maps, I located the cemetery. The satellite view wasn't very revealing. Luckily I found there was a street view of the cemetery and church. Since the cemetery was on the corner of two streets, I was able to navigate along both streets until I found a house that vaguely looked like my grandmother's family home.

The house was obscured by trees and the resolution of the photo was not sufficient enough to allow zooming without the image being blurred. So the next step was to use Google Earth. Again with trees in the way, it was difficult to make a positive identification. That is when I took out the 1888 plat book. Between the image from Google Earth and the plat map, I was pretty certain that I had found the house.

I remember my father turning from the highway onto a long dirt driveway. I could see such a lane in both Google Maps and Google Earth. From Google Maps, I obtained an approximate street address, and was able to pinpoint the address on a contemporary zoning map of the township in which the property was situate.

Zillow had an entry for that address. According to Zillow, the house was built in 1890 and included about 5 acres of land. My great grandparents built their house about that time on a 160-acre parcel. The houses around it, according to Zillow, were built much later. The roof line that I viewed in Google Earth was identical with the exception of what appeared to be an addition at the back of the house.

When I last visited the house, it did not have indoor plumbing. It had a pot bellied stove in the parlor and a wood burning stove in the kitchen. There was a pump in front of the house for water, and outhouse in the back near the barn. The house did have electricity and an old fashioned crank phone. My cousin asked me if the house had indoor plumbing now. Zillow says the house has one bathroom.

I guess the answer is yes! It is probably in the addition that I could see on Google Earth.

Four Generations of Women on the Phone

I had shown a picture of my mother at her business and a picture of my grandmother at her business to a friend. She told me that I must make a collage photo. That is because the photos show my grandmother at a switchboard about 1910 and my mother at a switchboard about 1969.

In the case of my grandmother, she was the operator at the phone company that was housed in the parlor of her father's house. The switchboard supported 24 lines. The picture of my mother was at her business.

My mother had been a rural school teacher before she married my father. She gave up teaching after she married my father. However, after I was born, I became her pupil. I remember before I started kindergarten sitting on our front steps and my mother teaching me to read.

I don't remember my mother working with my younger siblings as she did with me because she did other things to bring money into her household. She sold cosmetics at home parties and took in ironing. I remember the mangle iron that she had to iron sheets and tablecloths. Everytime I iron a sheet, I think of that mangle of so many years ago.

The mangle was so much better than my European ironing board and iron. The only thing that my European ironing board does better than the Walmart ironing board is that is so heavy that pulling the sheet across it doesn't tip it over.

But I digress ... At sometime while I was in grade school, my mother worked for an answering service in Minnesota. At that time. I had no idea that my grandmother had been a telephone operator. She was simply my grandmother who lived in California. She was old.

I can remember most of the various occupations that my mother while I was growing up. So when we moved to California, I wasn't surprised when my mother secured a job as an operator at an answering service. She shortly became the night supervisor and acting manager when the manager was away. My mother complained enough about the manager and her ineffectiveness to the point that my father told her to start her own service.

My mother took up my dad's challenge and did start her own business that she successfully ran until her death. I found a photo of her taken in the early days of her business. I was away at college at the time my mother was building her business. She worked seven days a week.

After my father and a sister died, I was lucky to find the photo of my grandmother at a switchboard. It was this photo and the one of my mother at her business that I showed to the woman who owns my gym. As I was making the collage of the two photos, I recalled seeing a photo of my sister as a toddler with a play phone and a photo I took of my daughter as a toddler on the phone.

I had an "aha" moment.  I had pictures of 4 generations of women all using the telephone over a period of 70 years. My grandma worked on a 24-line switchboard. My mom had three 100-line switchboards with rotary dial. My sister played with a toy rotary dial phone. My daughter played with a real touch-tone phone. Much has changed since these pictures.

The 1949 Merc

A friend posted a picture on Facebook of a red car that looked like it was made in the late 1940s. It reminded me of the first car that my dad bought. It was a black 1949 Mercury. He bought it sometime in the 1950s after I was old enough to remember our getting a car.

We had that car until 1957 when my dad bought a new Dodge station wagon with a push button automatic transmission. Although I was much older when my father bought the Dodge, I don't have very many memories of that car until I started to drive.

My dad called our first car "The Merc." We didn't have a garage so "The Merc" lived outdoors. In the winter, my dad would go out in the cold to start the car and then come in the house to have breakfast while "The Merc" warmed up.

I don't have very many memories of being driven in "The Merc" during the winter other than at Christmas time when we would drive through the neighborhoods in North Minneapolis with houses decorated with lights. We also would go to downtown Minneapolis to see the store windows at Daytons and Donaldsons department stores. They generally had animated scenes in their windows.

Most of my memories of "The Merc" were of trips to northern Minnesota to visit my mom's family or to Anoka County to visit my dad's family. The trips to my mom's family near Pine River were long as experienced by a child under the age of 11.

We didn't have safety belts on those days so one of my favorite past times when we were driving home at night was to lie on the back seat with my back on the seat and my butt against the upright part of the back seat and watch the street lights as the car moved forward. As we approach Minneapolis, I could see lights from the high rise buildings. (These buildings were not a high rise as they are today.)

I also remember when a tire would blowout and my dad changing the tire. It seemed to happen regularly. I have had only one blowout in my 50 years of driving. That was in 1991 on Intersate 5 when I was driving back from Sacramento with my kids. I took them to Railfair 1991. Each time that I watch the movie "A Christmas Story," I relive those tire blowout moments on "The Merc."

People didn't take photos like we do today. Film was expensive as was the cost to have the photos developed, so I don't have a picture of "The Merc."

Swedish words that don't translate to an English word

I was asked years ago to have a document translated from French into English. I decided to try to translate it myself. It didn't take me long to realize that I was the original author of the paper.

As I began to translate the document, I then realized that English has a much larger vocabulary than the French language. That triggered me to look at other languages and the richness of each one's vocabulary. I was surprised at the limited size of the vocabulary of many languages.

My research confirmed that English is a language of a very rich vocabulary. However, all of us English speakers shouldn't get too cocky. My Swedish friend gave me a list of Swedish words that had no single English word equivalent.

I suspect that I'd find similar lists in other languages.

These are the words that my friend gave me and their meaning in English:

Bädda – to make the bed

Diska – do the dishes

Övermorgon – day after tomorrow

Träningsvärk – training ache

Hen – he or she

Somna – to fall asleep

Snyt – to blow your nose

Mil – ten kilometers

Sugen – something you have a real desire for

Sambo – someone who lives together with their boyfriend or girlfriend

Stoutenburg, Calaveras County, California

A surprising find searching for Stoutenburg on Google...Stoutenburg, California

Wikipedia has a page for Stoutenburg, California. There is not much information on the page but it did reference page 808 of a book. In 1998, David L. Durham authored a book, California's Geographic Names: A Gazetteer of Historic and Modern Names of the State.

Apparently Stoutenburg was a settlement during the California gold rush near Murphys, California on Coyote Creek. Wikipedia claims that the settlement was named for a German gold miner. Mr. Durham may have gotten his information about this settlement from an article published in 1927 in The Concord Society Historical Bulletin No. 6. The Article written by Erwin G. Gudde was entitled, German Pioneers in Early California. Dr. Gudde was an assistant professor of German at the University of California in 1927.

He wrote on page 16, the following:

The German gold seekers, moderate and industrious, formed a large percentage of these and established a number of mining camps, among which were Stoutenburg, Mosquito Gulch, and Dutch Flat.

I doubt that it was named for a German Stoutenburg. I have seen many instances in which Stoutenburg is seen as having German origin. Even people who are named Stoutenburg but no little about the name often believe it to be of German origin. The name is derived from a Dutch city in the Utrecht Province.

Since I do know that Stoutenburgs were in California during the gold rush, the settlement was probably named for a man named Stoutenburg and who was a miner.

So where was this settlement?

Calaveras County is one of the counties in California on the western side of the Sierra Nevada mountain range in which gold was mined. According to the book, Stoutenburg was located on Coyote Creek west of Murphys. Looking at satellite images and maps, I was able to find Coyote Creek.

It runs through or near the towns or villages of Douglas Flat and Vallecito on its way to the New Melones Lake. Although I have not been able to pinpoint the location of Stoutenburg, it was probably somewhere near Douglas Flat. Coyote Creek originates east and south of Murphys.

Death Certificates - How Accurate?

This past fall I had gotten prints from microfilmed copies of death certificates of relatives who died in Minnesota. I scanned each certificate to create an electronic copy and then filed the paper copies. While I was doing this, I came across the death certificates of my parents, father-in-law and my brother.

Generally the informant, the person providing information such as place of birth, date of birth, parental information, occupation, etc., is included on the certificate. The informant is typically the surviving spouse or a son or daughter of the decedent. Occasionally, a parent or a brother or sister of the decedent is the informant.

I reviewed that information that was recorded on each those four death certificates and noted to myself who was identified as the informant on each one. My sister was the informant on my dad's certificate. My dad was the informant on my mother's. On my father-in-law' death certificate, my mother-in-law was recorded as the informant. However, my father was the informant on my brother's certificate.

Why is this significant?

A parent has more first hand information about his or her own child. The parent knows when and where his/her child was born. Most people know when and where they were born. Most people know when and where the spouse was born. Therefore, the information provided by a parent is usually more accurate than the information provided when the informant is a child, spouse or sibling. So as I perused each of these four death certificates, I was not surprised to find errors.

My mother's father died when she was 3 years old and her mother died when she was 6. So my father never knew his parents-in-laws. Both my maternal grandparents had a middle name, neither of which my father provided on my mother's death certificate. He also apparently was not aware that Max was not my grandfather's given name but a shortened form of his middle name, Maxwell. My grandmother was born in Wisconsin, not in Minnesota as my father obviously believed.

My sister was the informant on my father's death certificate. So what was the information that she provided that turns out not be be accurate? My father was a prototype machinist and not a machinist researcher. She estimated the number of years that my dad was in his occupation and was off by a year in the number of years in which my father lived in Orange County at the time of his death. My sister apparently did not know our grandmother's middle name as it does not appear on my father's death certificate.

I found it amusing that my mother-in-law was named as the informant on my father-in-law's death certificate as my husband called me to provide answers for the death certificate. Since I have been researching my family and his family, I actually knew more than my mother-in-law or my husband knew about my father-in-law's family. The one item that I didn't know at the time of my father-in-law's death was the name with which his father entered the United States.

Later, I found the ship manifest of the ship on which he, his mother, his twin brother and his older sister sailed from Europe. From all indications, my husband's great grandfather had changed his name before the rest of the family came to America. Thus, the name on my father-in-law's death certificate was the name that his father used throughout his lifetime.

As I gathered facts about my ancestors and relatives, I saw errors like these in many of the death certificates that I had obtained. The information often did not concur with what I saw in birth, marriage, and census records of the decedent.

Many of the certificates, the informant would not know the decedent's mother's maiden name. Often the informant would not know where the decedent's parents were born. Occasionally, I saw a death certificate that the informant did not know the names of the decedent's parents.

So as you read the information recorded on death certificates, it is important to know how the informant is related to the decedent. The farther removed, the more likely to be suspicious of accuracy of the information provided.

However, do not discount it altogether as there is likely to be a basis for why the informant may be confused. My father believed his mother-in-law to have been born in Minnesota. She along with her parents and siblings moved from Wisconsin to Minnesota when she was a young girl. Although she died as a young woman, her family remained in the same location in Minnesota for generations.

Update on Stoutenborough Lane

In my post about Stoutenborough Lane in Redondo Beach, California, I had speculated that Charles Henry Stoutenborough was the person for whom that street was named. A bit more research has convinced me that Stoutenborough Lane was indeed connected to Charles Stoutenborough.

His parents and siblings remained in New Jersey except for one sister, Elizabeth moved to San Francisco and was married to her older brother's business partner, Alexander Richards Baldwin. Charles Stoutenborough and Alexander Baldwin were in a partnership as stockbrokers.

Baldwin was also an investor in real estate. However, Baldwin died in 1889, three years before Redondo Beach was incorporated. Charles Stoutenborough died in 1906. His sister was still living in 1930.

Elizabeth's son, Alexander, was a lawyer who became general counsel and a vice president of the Western Pacific Railroad. In 1918, Alexander was appointed by Judge Walter H. Sanborn as one of two receivers in the bankruptcy of the Denver & Rio Grande Western Railroad (D&RGW). He served in that role until 1921 when the D&RGW Railroad was reorganized emerged as the old Denver & Rio Grande Railroad.

Now that I found a concrete tie of Charles Stoutenborough to the railroad business in California, I was still curious about a tie to Julius Kruttschnitt. As I wrote in my prior post,
Julius Kruttschnitt was chairman of the Southern Pacific Company Executive Board from 1913 to 1925 and president from 1918 to 1920.

The San Francisco Blue Book of 1899 listed the members of the Pacific-Union Club. This club was an exclusive club whose building was located in the financial district at the corner of Post and Stockton Streets. Included in the list are A. S. Baldwin of 10 Montgomery Street, J. Kruttschnitt of 4 Montgomery Street and C. H. Stoutenborough of 325 Pine Street. Stoutenborough's office was a couple of blocks away and down the street from Montgomery and accross from the Pacific Coast Stock Exchange.

So it looks like Stoutenborough and Kruttschnitt were at least passing acquaintances. But I couldn't find a concrete connection of Stoutenborough and Kruttschnitt to the city of Redondo Beach. I looked at each page of the 1900 Census of the enumeration district in which Redondo Beach lies. I didn't find a Kruttschnitt Avenue nor did I find a Stoutenborough Lane. Nor did I find these streets in 1910 and 1920 Censuses.

However, as I looked at the 1920 Census sheets of Enumeration District 538 in Los Angeles County, I noted the names of many of the streets. I found streets like Huntington Lane, Pullman Lane, Stanford Street, Gould Lane, Marshallfield Lane, Vanderbilt Lane, Armour Lane, etc. These streets are named after wealthy, 19th Century industrialists.

Comparing the streets that I found in the 1920 Census with the streets I viewed with Google Maps, I found about half of the streets were recorded in that census. The streets not found in the 1920 Census were likely laid out but no one lived on them at that time.

I was curious as to why Charles Stoutenborough had a street named for him in a city that was almost 400 miles away from where he lived, worked and died. Since Cornelius Vanderbilt, Leland Stanford, Jay Gould, Marshall Field, et. al. had no real connection to Redondo Beach, I think that Charles Stoutenborough was just one of many wealthy businessman that had ties to the railroads and 19th century industry.

Hill Lane, formerly, Stoutenborough Lane, Redondo Beach, CA