Oh, dear Ida

Boy, my great grandmother Ida had some secrets! Some time ago, I was surprised to uncover her marriage license to William Butler where she was listed as Ida Rena Williams, a widow. Who was this Williams guy and why did she never mention him to her children? Was her son Earl actually the son of Williams since he was born three years before her marriage to Butler?

When I attended a genealogy event at the public library, I had a professional genealogist help me search for information about her marriage to Williams. They could not find anything more than I did. A librarian called me today and conducted a more indepth interview. She promised to keep searching.

Tonight, I decided to try searching Southhampton County marriage records online (didn't I do this before?) and there she was! An 1887 marriage license for Ida and a man named Lewellen P. Eley. What!??? No doubt this is our Ida... born in 1868 to parents Eley and Margaret Bryant.

Southhampton County Marriage Book 6, 1886-1890, p. 184

I am flabbergasted. No wonder I was having trouble finding her marriage record to Williams - her last name wasn't Bryant when she married him! Even my great grandfather, apparently now her 4th husband, did not know her complete history. This changes the angle of my research. Stay tuned!

Postscript: At a class at the public library on October 12, I learned how to discern information in the 1930 U. S. Census and got another surprise. The 1930 census tells the age at which each person was FIRST married. Ida was 1st married at age 16! So this marriage to Lewellen Eley must have been her SECOND marriage. That makes FIVE marriages! 

Family Tree - paternal grandmother (5 generations)

My little red-headed grandma "Jack" Abbott has an intriguing genealogy.  The Abbott family of New Jersey were well-known piano makers from England.  John Abbott married into the Whitfield/Godfrey family, who were descendants of some important first settlers in New England including Roger Williams of Rhode Island. My grandmother's maternal ancestors were original land grant holders in Southhampton County, Virginia.  Owens, Bryant, Cobb, Underwood, Chandler, and Edwards are still common names in that area. Eley Bryant was a Civil War POW at Point Lookout, Maryland.  

I still have many questions about this branch of the family tree.  Ida Rene Bryant was the subject of more than one previous post and there are many curiosities about her life. I'd like to know exactly where Eley and Margaret Bryant lived when they moved to Princess Anne County near the end of their lives. I know it was in the Blackwater/Land of Promise area, but have no idea how to find the property.  I'd be willing to bet the house is still there! I'd like to know how the Bryant family originally connected with the Abbott family in New Jersey... Ida Rene's brother Charles Bryant moved from Southhampton County to New Jersey and became a piano dealer.  Another brother, WilliamThomas Bryant, married Rebecca Abbott, George Abbott's sister. William and Bonnie lived in Princess Anne County until his mother Margaret died and then they moved to New Jersey.  Ida Rene later married George Abbott who was 14 years younger than she.  Strange that a family in New Jersey would have so many close ties to a family so deeply rooted in Virginia.

Ida Rene

This post is a continuation of a previous one:  http://descenddance.blogspot.com/2014/01/ida-rene-bryant.html

Ida Rene Bryant > Jacqueline Abbott Zaun > John B. Zaun > Teresa Zaun Austin

There are several unsolved mysteries regarding my great grandmother Ida.  Some of what I have learned from family stories is contradicted by my research.

What I know to be true:

• Ida Rene Bryant was born in 1868 in Southhampton County to Eley and Margaret Bryant.
• She had a twin sister Addie who married Blucher Fletcher and lived in Princess Anne County.
• Ida married William Butler in 1895 and had three little boys, Earl, William, and Rawley. (?)
• She married George Abbott in 1904 and had three little girls, Miriam, Audrey, and Jacqueline, and a son George who died in infancy.
• She died of pneumonia  in 1933 and was buried in Bethlehem Cemetery in Richmond.

Here are the tricky bits:

• Her marriage record to William Butler lists her as Ida Rena Williams, widow.
• Earl Butler was born in 1892, three years before her marriage to William Butler. 
• In the U.S. Census 1900, it say she is the mother of TWO, though it lists all three boys.
• When she married George Abbott, they lived in Richmond even though neither had family there.  The Butler boys did not live with them.
• Some of the facts in William Butler's obituary are not consistent with other records.
• UPDATE (Aug. 29, 2018): Ida was married at age 19 to a man named Llewelen Eley. What happened to this marriage? Annulment? Divorce? Llewelen went on to live a long life in Norfolk, Va, with a new wife and children. 
• U.S. Census 1930 (?) says she was first married at age 16. Her marriage to Llewellyn Eley was at age 19. Who was she married to?

So here are my questions... 

Who is this Williams guy?  How can I find out about the first marriage of Ida's that no one in the family seems to know about?  Was he from Southhampton County or Princess Anne County?  Divorce? Annulment? Death?

Ida's birth year is given as 1868 in every early census (1870-1900), but is 1871 in her marriage record to William Butler. The 1910 census gives her birth year as 1877.   The 1920 census says abt 1869. The 1930 says 1868.  I'm guessing that 1868 is correct, which is what is on her death certificate.

It has never been questioned by the family that Earl was Ida's son. They were close all their lives. Is Earl really her son?  Did Ida have Earl out of wedlock and wait three years to get married?  Who was Earl's father?* Was William Butler married (and widowed) a second time between his first wife Sarah, and Ida?  Where was William Butler between 1874 and 1895?  Could Earl have been from Ida's first marriage to (?) Williams and adopted by William Butler?  Earl's death certificate lists William Butler as his father and Ida as his mother, but I have seen other such errors on death certificates. Earl's children believed, and still believe, Ida was their grandmother. 

*(UPDATE August 29, 2018: DNA results have proven that Earl was Ida's son). 

Where did the three boys live after their father died?  There is a record of a "Raligh Butler" living in Laurel Reformatory in Richmond, though his age and father's birthplace are wrong.  Earl later worked as a "reformatory guard" according to the census, so it seems logical that it was the same facility. Were the boys placed in a boys home or orphanage?  Is this why Ida moved from Lynchburg to Richmond, to be near her boys?  Is it why Ida and George lived in Richmond after they married even though neither one had family there?  Based on the fact that many widowed folks at that time were forced to place their children in orphanages, I am guessing that this is what Ida had to do.  The Methodist Children's Home in Richmond was opened just after 1900 - this is a possibility but I haven't been able to prove it.

Why does William Butler's obituary give his age at death as 55 (he was 61), and why did it say he had only one son (he had three)?  His occupation and death date are correct in the obituary.  His tombstone is correct.

So many mysteries!  

Asking the Right Questions

erroneous obit

I had reached a stalemate with my family tree - sketchy details with lots of contradictions and unclear relationships.  I started asking questions, and writing them down.  I identified potential sources of information and tested them out. Answering one question led to three more questions.  I am filling up a notebook with questions!  My notebook has tables, and charts, and maps, and lists... organizing the information in a variety of configurations brings up even more questions.  This strategy has given my research such a giant boost, I can't keep up with all the information I'm digging up!

I started with my simplest question:  Was my great grandfather, George Wright Abbott, the son of Gertrude or Sarah?  Records showed Sarah was his mother, but his obituary named Gertrude (his father's first wife).  I knew Gramp Abbott lived with his daughter Miriam when he died - surely she would have known the identity of his mother?  My potential source:  Aunt Teeny (Miriam's daughter).  When I asked, Teeny told me that her mother Miriam had collapsed when Gramp died and was barely able to function much less write an obituary, so the people at Bliley's Funeral Home wrote it.  So there it is:  the obituary is wrong because strangers wrote it.  Mystery solved.  I am confident in saying that Sarah was his mother.

Another question:  Who was Ida Rene's mysterious first husband?  As far as anyone in the family knew, my great grandmother Ida was married only twice - to William B Butler and to George W Abbott. However, the transcription of her marriage record to William Butler gave her name as "Ida Rena [Bryant] Williams."  So who was this Williams guy?  Also, curiously, Ida and William Butler were married in Princess Anne County, though her family was from Southhampton County.  How did she end up in Princess Anne County? This question took me on an adventure to unexpected places.

from Wikipedia:  Princess Anne County in 1895

I decided that the key was with Ida's twin sister Addie.  I started following tangents on her life.  Addie's grandson Charlie Fletcher told me years ago that the family once lived in Princess Anne County, in the Blackwater area.  So maybe this was the connection to the Williams fellow?  Another Ancestry researcher wrote that Eley Bryant, Ida and Addie's father, farmed the "Land of Promise Plantation" in Princess Anne County.  A search on Google maps proved that Land of Promise Road intersects Blackwater Road in what is now Virginia Beach.  This researcher also wrote that Eley was Southern Baptist - the nearest baptist church at the time was located at the corner of Princess Anne Road and....drum roll....Williams Farm Road. Williams?! Could this be the family?  My mother used to buy vegetables from Williams Farm when I was little.  I still haven't identified Ida's first husband, but I'm getting warmer.  The next step is to search the church's records or the Virginia Beach Courthouse records.

Land of Promise-Blackwater - still mostly farms

The Addie tangent led to answers to other questions that I wasn't even asking.  I discovered that she and Blucher moved to Ocean View by 1930.  She and her mentally disabled adult daughter Ruth lived in the same boarding house on Peachtree Street as her son Blucher, his wife Catherine, and their sons Phillip and Charles. This possibly explains why my grandfather Ernie moved from Richmond to Ocean View when he came to Norfolk to look for work - he briefly lived in a boarding house near Addie.  It also ties in with Charlie Fletcher's stories about growing up in Ocean View and remembering my grandfather there.

This tangent led to yet another discovery, one that has been haunting me ever since my son Adam bought a house on Newport Avenue in Norfolk.  Which house on Newport Avenue did my dad live in as a boy? In a search for my grandfather Ernie's address in Ocean View, I stumbled on his address on Newport Ave in a 1952 city directory - there it was - 4306.

"Gramp" standing in front of 4306 Newport Ave in 1954.

4306 Newport Ave today

Plain brown wrapper

I received a mysterious package in the mail today from Aunt Teeny.  It was a thick packet of papers, but was addressed to "Leah & John" at my address.  So I called Aunt Teeny and she said that she had found a pile of genealogy papers and put them in the mail for me.  No clue why it said Leah & John.  When I opened it, it appeared to be a random assortment of letters and old typewritten documents.  On closer inspection, I realized that it was years of correspondence between Aunt Miriam and Uncle Herman and a relative in New Jersey named Ray Eggers.  Mr. Eggers had spent years doing research on the family and had published books about it.  He was particularly determined to prove the link with Roger Williams. He did it the old fashioned way, by traveling all over the Northeast doing research using primary documents.   It took more than a decade, but he finally accomplished his mission.

As I scanned the documents to post online, it occurred to me that Ray Eggers was probably a source for the Weismantel family Ancestry research as well.  I have been communicating with Matt Weismantel through Ancestry over the last year.  Ray's connection with Marge Weismantel was the source of many photos and documents, as well as the Bryant family Bible, all of which had already been shared with me by Matt.  We are all descendants of Roger Williams through the Abbott line.  

All of Ray's work and correspondence is now posted in Google Docs and has been shared with my fellow Ancestry researchers.

May Abbott Cowan, half sister of George Wright Abbott > Bonnie F. Cowan > Raymond F. Eggers.
[George Wright Abbott > Jacqueline D. Abbott > John B. Zaun > Teresa Zaun Austin]

In talking with Aunt Teeny this afternoon, more stories came out about the Butler family.  She said that Rawley Martin Butler came home from WWI with syphilis.  He came to live with the Lukhards when Junior (Herman, Jr.) and Dee (Rawley) were young and shared a bed with the boys until the syphilis was discovered. Rawley's wife Hilda divorced him and he eventually died of it in 1944.  Rawley's grandson questions some of these details, however, because Rawley and Hilda had two children in the 20's and she lived to a ripe old age.  He also said that Rawley had been known to have a gambling problem and had lost the family home which could very well have been a reason for the divorce.  The chronology of this story doesn't exactly make sense, but either way, it's a very sad situation.

Fast Facts

We have a double link to Roger Williams through the marriage of Samuel Godfrey and Patience Sabin whose mothers (both granddaughters of Roger Williams) were first cousins.  

Roger Williams, an anti-Puritan, was exiled from Massachusetts Bay Colony.  He survived in the wilderness by depending on the Indians.  He had an exceptional language ability and learned several Indian languages which he later wrote a book about.  He founded Providence Rhode Island and started the First Baptist Church in America.

Capt. Samuel Godfrey was one of the Sons of Liberty who took part in the famed Gaspee Affair, a fiery event in Rhode Island which was instrumental in sparking the American Revolution.

The Hickock/Hiccox/Hickok family is connected through Anna Dillingham Crofford.  Our ancestor, Hannah, was a 6^th cousin to Wild Bill (James Butler) Hickok.

Joost Van Den Vondell was the “Shakespeare of the Netherlands” in the 1500’s.  His great great grandson came to America in the late 1700’s. (Later note: this connection is not definitively proven).

Charles Wesley Wandell b. 1819 was a missionary to Australia.  He wrote a letter in 1869 from White Pine, Nevada to his sister Miriam Olivia (our ancestor) saying that he was glad to hear that she was “coming west” by railroad and covered wagon.

Thomas Welles, 4^th Gov of CT – through Judd ancestry.  Was a first settler of Hartford, and is memorialized on a monument there. 

Orrin Judd was a well known preacher in Connecticut.  His scandalous divorce is documented in the newspaper of the time.  He wrote a translation of the New Testament Book of Matthew (look him up on Amazon).

Sarah L Wright married Whitfield Abbott – 2^nd marriage for both – both had been widowed.  Their child was George Wright Abbott, a carpenter, who became my great grandfather.  Sarah was then widowed again at age 36.  Sarah’s mother was born in Ireland.