Douglas Avenue (click on link at bottom of this post for the most recent info)

I am delighted to have finally solved another baffling mystery about my maternal grandmother's parentage.  All her life, my mother has believed that her maternal grandfather was named "Augustus Douglas Allen," because that's what her mother told her it was. In months of research, however, I have never come across that exact name.  I did find many records for "Augustus Dozier Allen" and "Augustus D. Allen," but I could never be sure that I had found the man I was looking for.

Tonight, after reviewing the information on Mom's side of our family tree, I was showing her some of the documentation I had gathered on her family.  I pulled up a Wichita City Directory from 1911, and sure enough, there was "Augustus D. Allen."  It took a minute or two to realize what I was seeing underneath his name, but it slowly registered... his business address (A. D. Allen Real Estate and Loans) was...drum roll...

                         121 Douglas Avenue! *

My grandmother, that sad, abandoned little girl, had remembered only bits and pieces of information about her childhood in Wichita, and she put them together as best she could.  Now, it all makes sense.  

Augustus lived with his family in Wichita.
Eva was sent to a hospital for the insane at Old Fort Supply (near Woodward) in Oklahoma.
Ethelyn (Teresa) was sent to an orphanage Paris, Texas, then worked as a nurse in Oklahoma City.
Augustus continued to live in Wichita and married Emma in 1905.
Note the proximity of the locations though they are in three different states.

I do not take for granted that I can access all the information I need from my living room couch.  Up to very recently, people had to take long sabbaticals and travel all over the country, visiting libraries and courthouses to search through reams of documents for rare nuggets of information about their family's past.  In just a few days I have revealed things about my grandmother's life that she never knew, and could never know, in her entire lifetime.  I pulled up Google Maps, searched for "121 Douglas Avenue" and was virtually transported to the very spot that my great grandfather conducted his successful real estate business.  (It's now a vacant lot in the middle of the city).  Less than a week ago, I knew absolutely nothing about the man and now he is a tangible reality... to me, it's just amazing.

121 E. Douglas Avenue.  Now a vacant lot.

*postscript:  in the process of compiling a timeline of Augustus' life, it became obvious that A. D. Allen Real Estate was established much later than my grandmother would have remembered.  However, in investigating his early work in Wichita, I found that he had worked at the Kansas Bureau of Immigration, also on Douglas Avenue.  This is what my grandmother would have recalled from her year or so in Wichita with her mother and father. 

Update - January 2, 2015:  New information had brought up questions about the above story.  See the updated entry, "My orphan grandmother," for the newest information on Augustus D. Allen:  http://descenddance.blogspot.com/2013/12/un-common-ancestry.html