Warning: This is a lecture. My mother kept her mother’s photo albums safe, and her aunt’s photo album, and her grandmother’s photo album. The photo collections in them overlapped, those of a mother and two daughters, and the three albums formed the basis for three entire photo galleries on my website, and the beginnings of two more. I suppose that if not for those albums, I might never have started the entire project.

On my father’s side of the family there were no such resources, because his parent’s photo album or albums had not been seen in decades. Both had passed away years before, and while I pestered a few family members about it, it became apparent that my dad’s side of my family photo project was to start out without much in it at all.

The tradition of family photo albums goes way back, but it's fading away in the digital age. At a time when we take more photographs than ever, we don’t make prints of them. Not many, anyway, and most of us do not buy scrapbooks and dutifully arrange our prints in them. Try even finding those little adhesive corners, much less a decent selection of albums. While a lucky child may have the opportunity to sit next to his mother and page through great-grandmother’s album, will that child be able to sit and do the same some day with their own children?

I’ve worked in various camera stores, and been associated with many photo labs, and I’ll repeat here what lots of my associates say: we are witnessing entire generations of children who will grow up without a family photo album, be it paper or digital. We have opportunities which our grandparents could only dream of. We can edit and print our own photos at home. There’s no worry, in theory, about protecting the “negatives,” or originals, since we can make exact duplicates easily and cheaply. Indeed, our entire photo collections can be replicated simply, copies stored here and there. But very few people do so, and every day, hundreds, perhaps thousands of us lose everything we have to a crashed hard drive, a smashed phone or other device, or to the whims of storing everything on some internet site or in some “Cloud.”

When disaster strikes, flood or fire, one of the first things people run out of their house with is the family photo album. Not the vacation photos. Not the hobby photos. The family photos are a treasure passed down from generation to generation. Wouldn’t it be nice if we all kept our digital photos in one place, instead of spread out over dozens of electronic devices? Everything can fit into a shirt pocket now, if only we are organized.

On a positive note: several second and third cousins I have met over the last years have sent me copies of photos which I already owned, and it was refreshing to remember that my ancestors had proudly mailed copies of their favorite pictures far and wide. It was a pleasure to be able to identify the folks in them for those cousins, and in that way enhance other photo albums across a far flung group of relations.

So keep your photo memories safe. Make some prints, too, and stick them in an album if you can find one. Each year, make a point of identifying your favorite fifty pictures, collect them in one place, and put descriptions on them. Send copies to others, and while you’re at it, put labels on those too. Someone down the line will be very thankful. Lecture over.

Round Two

There were two things which kept the project going into another year. First, it got a boost from my mother's first cousin, Pat Baribeau. Pat had done some research after the death of her mother in 1995, and she had done it the old fashioned way. While I’m both proud and a little guilty at the same time to have never left the comfort of my chair in most of my work, Pat had done actual footwork, visiting courthouses and churches and cemeteries and more. In the late 1990’s, my mother received a document in the mail from Pat detailing my grandfather Williams’s side of the family. It was a pedigree, complete with dates facts and stories, and in one particular area it carried the family lineage back hundreds of years into colonial Quebec. Others in the family received their own copies. While this was an amazing piece of work, I confess that at the time I did not really care much about it; the genealogy bug hadn't bitten yet. The family copies disappeared over the following years, and when I did became interested, none could be found. Soon my mother had called up her cousin, and a digital version of Pat’s work was in my email, followed a week later by a small stack of photos. Now I had material for another gallery and a half of photos, really filling in my mother’s side of the tree.

I was getting hooked: these were people I had never even heard of. It’s funny how, as a kid, I thought I knew my grandparents, but it turned out that I had not even known their full names, and I had never really thought of the fact that they not only had their own parents, but brothers and sisters too. Those names and surnames which my parents had dutifully penned onto the Christmas cards, or mentioned during conversations with my grandparents, were falling into slots on my family tree.

Another reason the project kept rolling had to do with symmetry. My family tree (the graphic one on the website) was noticeably lopsided, leaning toward my mother’s side. It looked a bit like those trees you see along the highway which have been pruned back on one side to make room for the power lines to pass. Not only did I lack any serious photo material for my dad’s side of the family, I did not even have names for any of my great-great-grandparents there, while on my mom’s side it was not only complete, but I even had photographs for five out of the eight. Worse, even the names for a few of my great-grandparents on dad’s side were suspect, and I only had a photo of two of the four.

Another round of photo copying ensued at my parents house over the Thanksgiving, 2008 weekend. I was more thorough that time, making sure to comb through all the albums, and while my mother’s side was augmented to a point near completion (in my estimation at that time), little more turned up for the other half of the tree.

The Toolbox

Something wonderful began to happen: people started to email me, and I began to meet many cousins. The internet search engines indexed my website, listing the names, not only of my direct ancestors, but also of their brothers and sisters. After that, anyone looking for a relative we happened to have in common was likely directed to me. Years later, I had been contacted by dozens of distant relatives. Photos were exchanged and stories were elaborated upon. Steadily, most of the empty spaces on my family tree were filled in, until I knew solid facts about all of my great-grandparents, and most of my great-great-grandparents.

I joined Ancestry.com along the way, and I cannot say enough about how powerful a set of tools they have. I'm a messy guy who tries to be organized, but it always devolves into putting things into stacks, and little more. With Ancestry.com, I could maintain a huge family tree, attach all of my facts to it, and then use it as a reference. The search capabilities are impressive, locating actual images of census pages, and finding other trees with common ancestors.

Where Ancestry.com and the other genealogical sites fall short is in the accuracy of the family trees. I’ve used the site as a huge whiteboard, an organizational tool, and I’ll admit to temporarily posting a lot of questionable data myself, all in the effort to glean more out of the databases - just gaming the search engines. For example: one of my great-grandfather’s brothers was named Joe Fragale. I listed him at one point as “Giuseppe Joseph Joe Pepino Fragale,” all in an effort to find any more data on him. What was his actual baptism name? I’m still not sure. Now that I’m done researching him, he’s listed more simply as “Joseph Fragale.” I've listed very wishful maiden names a few times also, hoping to find concrete links, and some of those fictional names were up there for longer than I'd admit. These ruses work often enough to make them useful tools, so do not believe everything you see out there.

I had a great-great-uncle who was named Floyd Erasmus Rudick. Really. Now old Floyd was listed in some documents as “Eloyd,” a name which was later used by his descendants in naming their own children. In the 1910 census, he seems to have been counted twice, while working at a zinc mine many miles from family. His name? Cloyd Rudick. There are three or more spellings of “Rudick” too.

There's a great-great-grandmother whose name was Susan Walters, and whose married name was Susan Cessna. In two census documents she’s “Susie,“ in two others she’s “Sudie” (her nickname) and in another she’s “Suda,” probably a misspelling by the census taker. I have a photocopy of her newspaper obituary, as well as testimony by phone from one of her granddaughters that she was Susan Cessna, nicknamed “Sudie,” yet several Ancestry.com family trees list her as Suda Cessna, something she was never called, with no doubt in my mind.

One source of misinformation was my own grandmother, Dorothy Rudick-Spieth, who spelled a surname “Weiss,” when in America it had almost always been “Wise”. That one set me back for a while. And she insisted on calling her mother's side of the family the “De Cessnas,” when nobody had used that version for six generations or more. As soon as I searched simply for “Cessna,” I hit pay dirt.

Most of the bigger trees on Ancestry.com, my own included, have portions which are simply elaborate houses of cards, and any inaccurate connection means that everything above it is pure fiction. Families are elaborate things which census data can totally obfuscate, especially the old census documents which don’t indicate family relationships. There are places where, for instance, a man with several children from his first marriage married a woman with several children from her first marriage, and then census pages show children from the new marriage mixed with some of the others. I repeat: Ancestry.com and the others are very powerful tools, but used carelessly, you can really go astray.

Here’s a tool I came up with which was not internet related: I actually wrote letters to houses, addressed to “Whoever lives at xxxxxx,” and I got replies. My ancestors built the places, and the current residents were interested. In both cases, it turned out that they knew some of my relatives.

An Ending

At the close of 2009, on the front page of my website, I proudly proclaimed that the project to be finished. I had made similar proclamations before, and certain people would not let me forget it.

I was happy with it at that time, and here’s why: On my mother’s side, yet another Thanksgiving weekend delving into the family photos had convinced me that my work there was done, for all intents and purposes. I had deliberately copied twenty or so photos which, while obviously old, and by the fact that they were in my great-grandmother Fragale’s album would seem to have some importance, had people in them who my mother could not identify. These were mystery photos from the Fragale and Leisner clans, and I had one last hope of putting names on them.

That hope was my mother’s Aunt Irene, who was 99 years old, and while old age had affected her body, her mind was still sharp. She referred to herself as “The Bionic Woman” because of all the hardware in her hips and knees. She still managed her rapidly dwindling stock portfolio, and did her own banking. I called up Irene, and while our conversation was lively (I had not talked to her in a third of a century), her memories of the old days before 1930 were vague. Mentioning the names of her uncles and aunts didn’t do much either, and I left it at that.

Then I retouched, repaired and enhanced nineteen of those mystery photos, and mailed them off to Aunt Irene, along with a cheat-sheet loaded with my guesses. When the phone rang a few days later, Irene shot out: “Get a pencil,” and off we went. Picture #7, she told me, was of a young soldier named Skelly who had died in the war. “Who was Skelly?” I asked. “I don’t know,” she said “we all just had pictures of him.” The man in the hat in picture #11 was a neighbor: “an old lecher who used to hit on me and my sisters.” He was in the family photo, taken at some lakeshore, because he and his wife had a car, and he would occasionally drive the Fragales around on Sundays to places they otherwise couldn’t go. So far, this was going nowhere, but I was laughing so hard that it didn‘t matter. Then Irene, with a little help here and there, proceeded to identify most of the people in those photos, ticking them off the list one by one. Here’s a lesson: photographs have a special power to trigger memories, so try it! A sadder lesson: Irene’s vision faded away in the three years following my interviews, her mind followed, and she has passed away at 103 years of age. So try it while you can…

This breakthrough, combined with research I had done on the Leisners and Fragales on Ancestry.com and with the help of The Delta County Genealogy Society (Escanaba) website, had added much to my mother’s side of the family tree, and had identified and placed most of the folks in the mystery photos. And on my father’s side there were major advances. The tree was no longer lopsided, and I knew the names of all of my great-great-grandparents. I was amazed, and dad was amazed too. Photos had poured in from some of my father’s cousins, and suddenly I had the makings of two of the three empty photo galleries on dad's side of the tree.

I had photos of seven of my eight great-grandparents, and six out of sixteen great-great-grandparents, with names and dates on all. It seemed like a good place to declare victory in the project. It turned out that I was only halfway done.

Up Against The Wall

When I was kid it was common for little boys to brag of some fraction of American Indian blood in their veins. I remember my cousin Phil claiming that he was one-sixteenth Cherokee (Or was it one thirty-second?) Other cousins were told the same thing as a child. Surely, being the product of thousands of Americans, there would likely be some Indian blood in there, and some African blood too, but I had not found any. Going back as far as I could with the U.S. census documents, and more, my family seemed to be white and European, through and through. Even my ancestors who hailed from southern Italy looked pretty white to me, although the northern Europeans of the time might have disagreed.

In all of the letters I’ve gotten from cousins and contacts, it’s not uncommon to hear things like: “Mom used to say there was Indian blood in the family …”. I live on Indian land now, where many of my neighbors are Native Americans, and I suppose that this situation makes make me as much of an Indian as my bloodlines do, that is to say, not one bit. So if you tell me there are Indians in your ancestry, or for that matter, that your ancestors came over on the Mayflower, then I give you that old Missouri challenge: show me. Turn those old family rumors into facts if you can. If your grandmother “knew” that there was Indian blood in her family, perhaps now you can prove it. What might have been impossible for your grandmother to find may now be right in front of you.

If there's a chance of Native American blood in my family, I know where it would most likely come from: my great-great-great-grandfather Stephen Reddick. Stephen and his family lived in Arkansas with a man who was probably Stephen's father: Ebenezer Reddick. Ebenezer claimed to be half Cherokee, and others who knew him have backed that up. That would make me about 3/4% Native American. It's a small enough slice that DNA testing has missed it, if there at all. False positives abound, and, contrary to popular belief, no DNA test can positively show that you do not have any Native ancestors, or for that matter, show definitively that you do. And why does it matter at all to so many of us white folks? That's an issue I'm unqualified to answer, and which could fill volumes much larger than this essay!

The Stephen and Ebenezer Reddick relationship is a good example of the problems I've had learning about the lives of my ancestors before the Civil War. The census pages from 1870, 1880, 1900, 1910 and beyond are rich with data, giving family relationships, addresses, occupations, ages (thus approximate birth years) and more. Go back before 1870, and the pages are often little more than number puzzles, breaking households down into groups: male or female, free or slave, this age bracket or that. No children's names or specific relationships at all, short of naming the head of household.

It’s seemed that anything that happened prior to the Civil War might as well have been inaccessible to me, like behind a big wall. I used this image as an excuse to draw a line as to how far back I would look in my research, and since the middle of the nineteenth century also coincides with the early years of photography, it gave me a convenient place to stop. After all, my project was still very much a photo album.

For information prior to that I had rely on others who had pored through courthouse and church documents, and walked through old graveyards, trying to decipher inscriptions on crumbling stones. Some times a last will and testament has been preserved. Real estate documents often survive. Often, sadly, there's nothing more.

My first Ancestry.com forays beyond The Wall were more like a prison break than an exploration. A work of fiction was built, generation on top of generation, until I looked a bit more closely, and realized that it was another house of cards.

I found the path (which turned out to be mostly accurate) leading back to Count Jean de Cessna, the Huguenot ancestor who fled France to found the Cessna line in America. I also found links (again, mostly accurate) to Kentucky pioneers of some note. My Cessna ancestors came through Kentucky, as did Jediah Ashcraft, whose line can be traced many generations further. He was an early settler of central Kentucky, and one of many pioneers who were described as “Indian Fighters,” as if it was just another occupation.

Jediah's parents were named Daniel Ashcraft and Elizabeth. It seems that her maiden name was Lewis, and lots of people said she was the daughter of a man named John Lewis and a woman named Elizabeth Warner. That would be Colonel John Lewis, and Elizabeth Warner would be a daughter to Colonel Augustine Warner. Further expansion of that well documented line leads to Nicholas Martiau of Jamestown, Colonel George Reade and a side line leads to a man named George Washington.

At first, I bought this, hook, line and sinker, and I even made pages for the website which illustrated the entire thing. The simple problem: there was no proof, only a wishful assumption, that Jediah Ashcraft's mother was also the daughter of Elizabeth Warner and John Lewis of Virginia. (And to take what little suspense I have built up completely out of this narrative, a few pages ahead you will find out that none of the Ashcrafts belonged in my tree anyway.)

On a similar lark, I once found a woman, way up the Cessna-Walters branches, and way out on a limb, who was supposedly a daughter of the infamous Scottish Laird, Black Duncan Campbell (Duncan of the Cowl, Duncan of the Seven Castles, etc.) This led me on a wild bit of research into Scottish history, including the construction of a family tree which included the line of Stewarts, and thus Mary, Queen of Scots, and then all the way back to Robert the Bruce. But again, there was no real evidence that the woman in America had any relationship to Black Duncan. For that matter, I had no proof she even existed, since that branch of the tree was shaky to begin with.

This was all good fun at the computer, but several history lessons later I had to admit these were only flights of fancy. Late one night I put down my beer, sighed, and deleted the entire branch leading into Scotland. Then I deleted Elizabeth Lewis, daughter of Elizabeth Warner, replacing her with, simply, Elizabeth Lewis, wife of Daniel Ashcraft of Kentucky. Hundreds of people above them in my supposed ancestry disappeared instantly, and I retreated nearer to The Wall. While just about anything is possible, I don’t count George Washington or the Stuart Monarchs as my ancestors, and while I've gotten closer, I still haven't found any Indians in my family tree..

Old Ladies

My first side project came on my mother’s side of the tree, centering around her grandfather, Mike Fragale. He immigrated from Italy at the beginning of the twentieth century. I had lots of photo material of his family in the U.S., and my great-aunt Irene, his oldest daughter, was alive and well. Between Irene, her daughter Pat, and my mother, I had much insight into that family in Escanaba, Michigan, but one thing had always puzzled me: What on earth led a young man from southern Italy to settle in Upper Michigan? Some Old Ladies were about to show me. I knew that Mike’s brothers and sisters had settled in eastern Pennsylvania and eventually wound up in mushroom farming. I had photos of three of his brothers (with names on them, thank you…) and a photo of his mother and a little girl, Mike’s niece, taken back in Italy. His original wooden trunk, the one he traveled across the ocean with, had yielded a copy of his birth certificate, and gave the names of both of his parents. That’s what I had.

I grew frustrated, and gathered a few phone numbers from internet phone books: anyone I could find who was both old and named Fragale. On my second or third call, I reached a man named Eugene Fragale, and he remembered my great-grandparents! He was a son of Mike’s brother Angelo. I was so surprised that I didn’t get too far in the interview before letting him know that I would like to talk further a few days down the road. Within a few hours, however, I had placed him in the tree, and I was brimming with questions. I called back the next day, and Eugene had gone cold. He had talked to a few family members, who advised that I might be a scammer, so better not to tell me any more. The guy was sincere and apologetic, but insistent, and while I got him to answer a few more simple questions, I also promised that I would not call again, and wished him well. With so many things going on, I left it at that. The project had taught me a patience I never had in my youth, and I had just learned that cold-calling people was tricky at best.

One day I got an email from Melania, who was the granddaughter of Mike’s older sister. Melania had found my Fragale web page, since it listed the name of her grandfather, Serafino Lio (Leo, in America), and she had just finished a research project on him. Serafino turned out to be a lynchpin in the story, having helped several of the Fragales get on their feet in the new world. Melania gave me the addresses and phone numbers of two more Old Ladies: Dolly, a daughter to Mike’s closest brother Angelo, and Helen, a daughter of Mike’s younger sister, Josephine. Neither of them had computers, so we became old-fashioned pen pals, especially Dolly. Each of those cousins (actually first cousins of my grandmother) remembered my great-grandfather Mike, and his family. They had some of the same pictures I already had, but what was wonderful was other photos which Melania and Dolly sent to me, making my Fragale web page come to life. Little by little the Fragale story grew. Dolly even drove to the cemetery to write down many dates on tombstones! Moreover, Dolly filled me in on another Fragale cousin, John, who also settled in Upper Michigan, and it turned out that Dolly’s father Angelo had worked there a few years, too.

If you haven't guessed it, Dolly was a sister of my old buddy Eugene Fragale. She asked me whether I was the guy who had spooked him a year or two back, and we both got a good laugh out of it. Melania sent me a copy of her account of Serafino Leo’s life, which I proudly published on my website, and it inspired me to write a similar account about my great-grandfather, which I called “The Fragale Family in Escanaba.”

None of this would have been possible without those Old Ladies: Melania Ruggieri-Eapen, Helen (Dolly) Fragale-Citino, Helen Citino (yes, same name, but cousins) and of course, my great-aunt, Irene Fragale-Stratten. At that time, they had over 360 years of life experience between them. Yes, these four women averaged over ninety years old.

Next came an email from Lillian, one of Walter Cessna’s granddaughters, adding a few name and date corrections. A few more emails, along with a few phone calls, and I had twelve more Cessna photos, and a lot more information. This lit a fire under me to resume my Cessna research, left idle many months back, which led to an Old Gentleman who had posted some Cessna stuff on another genealogical site. It turned out that he was actually helping his wife, another Old Lady named Peggy, who was a great-granddaughter of Walter Coombs Cessna. Peggy sent me a dozen photos by conventional mail, having no computer in the house, and my Cessna photo gallery had gone from one of the most impoverished pages on my site to one of the richest, and in only a few weeks. I also learned some stories about the Cessnas, so finally I revisited previous work and cemented together the lineage leading back to Count Jean de Cessna in France. My grandmother Spieth would have been so happy.

I capitalize the term “Old Ladies”, but only out of respect for the huge part they have played in the project. Certainly there are Old Gentlemen involved, but my experience is that the Old Ladies are more often the real protectors of the family treasures. They are the ones who usually keep the family photo albums. And of the “not so old” helpers I’ve found, a majority are also women.

Back to The Wall

There was another thing which could stop my research in its tracks, another Wall, and it was the Atlantic Ocean. More of a “Moat” I suppose. For some of my ancestors, the oldest, sometimes only, documents available are ship’s manifests, and thus ports of departure and dates of departure and arrival might be most of what we know. This is true for all the Gieses, Poraths and Leisners making up one corner of my site. A ship’s manifest could give up a few more tidbits, though, like who paid for the ticket, or who the passenger was meeting with on the American side. You can glean which parts of the Old World they came from, but the names of their parents and grandparents, much of the story, will probably never be known. Face it, these were not famous folks, only farmers who put almost everything they had into a passage to America. To learn more, I would be happy to climb The Wall, or swim The Moat, but it‘s probably not going to happen.

I’ve done my work while seated in my office near Santa Fe, and if I’m too lazy to travel to Michigan, Ohio, Arkansas or Kentucky for my data, just imagine what the chances of a trip to Germany are! I’d just get there and want to drink the beer, or I would find out that the records had been stored on an upper floor in Dresden, with my luck. So I thumb my nose at the Gods of German Genealogy, and dare them to send me another contact like the woman I’m about to introduce…

My great-grandfather Mike Fragale’s birth certificate names his parents, Concetta Mascaro and Gabriele Fragale, who never left Italy. Dolly Citino, Mike’s niece, came up with a transcription of Concetta and Gabriele’s wedding certificate, which names their parents, names I had never expected to know. There it stayed, until I got an email from Marti Mascaro. Marti’s relatives were from the same area as my Fragale relatives, the little locales of Serrastretta and Accaria. Marti was digging into her Italian past in a way that put me to shame, and also blurred my vision when I tried it. She was plodding through microfilms of Italian marriage banns and birth records, available by order at any Mormon family research center. The documents are copies, in Italian, of handwritten books, page by page.

I tried it. I learned just enough Italian genealogical lingo to interpret those pages. I realized just how daunting a task it could be, and I gave up, heaping admiration onto Marti. She had actually done about half of what I needed anyway, without knowing it. One of the families she had laboriously pieced together turned out, by chance, to be that of Mike Fragale’s mother. As I reasoned with Marti: I know that those families were all intertwined for generations, but how many families could there be in that small rural area with a father named Michele Mascaro, a mother named Caterina Citino and a daughter named Maria Concetta Mascaro, who was born in 1850? All of that fit with my data, and out of it I got the names of Concetta’s four siblings, and the names of all four of her grandparents. That made three generations, complete, and all of them on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean. They are my great-grandfather’s great-grandparents, on his mother’s side. Oh, for that other side, though.

While Marti was researching the Mascaros and Fragales of the Serrastretta area, I asked her for the favor of keeping an eye open for a man named Gabriele Fragale, Mike’s father. That’s the lineage I’d be more interested in, since the Fragales in Pennsylvania who I could not identify (and one important Fragale in Michigan) were possibly Mike’s cousins, presumed descendants of Gabriele’s brother, or brothers. Also, somewhere in there is my great-grandfather’s middle name, and possibly the names of a sibling or two who never crossed the ocean to America.

The Spieths

The Spieths were from Ohio and the Spieths were German. That's about all I knew about the Spieths when I started the project in 2007, and for quite a while, it stayed that way. There were were so many other nooks and crannies to explore that I just kept the Spieths on the back burner and let them simmer. Occasionally something came my way, but for the first several years, I just left those Spieths alone.

The tree slowly became filled in with names and photographs. Some of my father’s cousins sent a barrage of photos, and after that I had Spieth grandparents who existed in more than just my memories. I imagined myself reconstructing grandma and grandpa Spieth's lost photo albums. Little mysteries were solved, like why my uncle was named Cecil Willis Spieth. (His grandfathers were named Cecil Edward Rudick and Willis Arthur Spieth. They could have picked Arthur Edward Spieth, but no. I don’t blame him for going by the name Bill, or my father for his preference for his middle name, Ron, over his given first name, Walter. It seems that the third son, Phil, was the one who had gotten a name that he could live with.)

Michael Ronald Spieth (yours truly) had a father named Walter Ronald Spieth (Ron), who had a father named William Henry Spieth (Hank), who had a father named Willis Arthur Spieth (Art), who had a father named George William Spieth. He went by William, and he was born and died in northeastern Ohio, before my dad was born. I’ve never been in contact with any person who met him; I have no photos of him, or of his wife, or of his daughter Pearl, Art's sister.

Around 2010 I took a deep breath and tackled the “Spieths in Ohio” puzzle. I tried to connect different families through the census from decade to decade, and it was apparent that there were a veritable Spieth-load of us. I had a big chart with individual families tacked to it, with each column representing a census year, and by moving the families around as I matched them, the big picture was slowly coming into focus, but the origin of George William Spieth remained a mystery. Did his father come from Germany? His Grandfather?

An important ancestor was Christian Andreas Spieth, sort of a father to many of the Spieths in Ohio, though he never came to America. His own lineage is well known. Another source of Spieths in Ohio was Christian Andreas Spieth's brother, Johann Friedrich Spieth, who had grandchildren who came to the state.

In 1832 and 1833, five of Christian Andreas Spieth’s children immigrated to America, by my count: two sisters and three brothers. The brothers eventually had twenty-four children between them. This is why many of us Spieths trace our way back to Germany through Ohio.

There were people who had documented the German side, but their accounts ended on that side of the ocean. I had documented it from this side, and hit the same barrier. Connecting the two would yield thirteen or more generations of Spieths!

Then I finally found William's father in the census. He was John David Spieth, and he had nearly slipped through the historical cracks. Christian Andreas Spieth’s son, Johann Adam Spieth, came to America with his wife and three children, but they had one additional child after immigration. It was John David Spieth (notice the American name), and he's not on the German pedigrees. John David Spieth died at only 36 years of age, he only appears in one U.S. Census, and to top it off, Ancestry.com had transcribed his name as “John Speech.” John David Spieth had five children when he died, and the oldest was named William Spieth, born in 1858.

I found John David Spieth’s 1870 census document about the same time that I found John Troeger, fourth cousin twice removed, whose website states: “I collect dead relatives and sometimes a live cousin!” He had been at this genealogy thing far longer than me, and I was certainly a live cousin.

I was searching one afternoon, not expecting much, plugging in variations: William Spieth, George Spieth, William G. Spieth, George William Spieth, and in desperation, German takes on it like Wilhelm Georg Spieth. On John Troeger’s website, it looked like just another transcription of a now familiar German lineage of Christian Andres Spieth, but I looked a little closer. There, under Johann Adam Spieth, were not three children, but four. It was the first time I had seen the name of John David Spieth, the American born one. Searching for John David, I soon found that 1870 census page, and William.

I emailed John Troeger, mentioning my great-great-grandfather William Spieth, feigning ignorance in the matter, and wondering who his father was. To my relief, John Troeger quickly pointed to John David. I carefully replied that I was thankful, but how could I really know that the puzzle was solved?

In addition to collecting dead relatives, John Troeger collected documents to prop them up. He grew up in northern Ohio. He sent me several documents, among them a copy of George William Spieth’s death certificate. While his parents are unknown (bad news), it gives his exact date of birth (good). Another document contained excerpts sent from the Zion’s Evangelical Lutheran Church, of Valley City, Ohio, among them: a record of a marriage between a Johan David Spieth and a Christina Catherina Schect, then listing the birth to them of a boy named Georg Wilhelm Spieth, the birth date exactly matching the one on my great-great-grandfather’s death certificate. And that was good enough for me.

Rudicks, Ruddicks, Reddicks and Riddicks

The seeds of my Rudick research were sown on the very first day the entire project began, in August of 2001. I sat down in my parent's dining room with a photographic copy stand, my camera and a pad of paper, and sketched out a diagram of my near ancestors. The names were vaguely familiar, having heard them here and there during my childhood, but here were my first insights into how they fit together. On mom's side were the Williams kin, and the Gieses and Fragales and Leisners and more. With dad there were the Spieths, of course, and the Wises and Cessnas and Rudicks.

“That's R-U-D-D-I -C-K, isn't it?” I asked, spelling it out in a way which seemed natural to me. “One D” my dad interjected. He knew his mother's maiden name, of course, yet it did not look quite right. How little I knew then of how those two spellings were the tip of a small genealogical iceberg floating in the path of my future explorations, or of how many years I would chip away at that iceberg, becoming the wildest branch of research I would embark upon.

A dozen years later, I'm still at it. I've met more cousins looking into the Rudick/Ruddick/Reddick families than in any other branch of my family. There's John Dunkin, who first alerted me to the fact that my great-great-grandfather John Rudick was not dead in 1900 when his wife was listed as a widow in the census, but had run off to another state. And there's Debra Newman, another descendant of my great-great-great-grandfather Stephen D. Reddick. Until a few years ago, Debra didn't know who her actual parents were at all, a victim of the government's shameful practice of separating Native American children from their kin, all in an effort to assimilate them into the white man's culture. She learned, among other facts, that her grandparents were shotgunned to death, and their house was burned to the ground in an effort to cover it up. Just keep that in mind if you think your own ancestors had a few problems that needed sorting out.

The man at the center of my research has merited an entire evolving essay called “Who was John Andrew Rudick?” His claim to fame among descendants hinged upon that seemingly dastardly act: he was a schoolteacher in the tiny town of Big Flat, Arkansas, and shortly before the fall semester began, he got onto his horse, on an errand to purchase some new shoes. He rode out of town, never to return, leaving behind a wife, and eight children between six and seventeen years old. Like an age old story, John soon married a second cousin named Sarah Burrows, and settled into a new life in the three state area near Joplin, Missouri. Schoolteacher, superintendent, Justice of the Peace, farmer and newspaper contributor and editor, John Rudick never looked back.

J. A. Rudick had skills his father did not: he could read and write. Somewhere along the line he adopted the “one D” spelling of the family name, and while many folks had assumed that his ancestors were from the “two D” Ruddick line, better known in the immediate area, it turned out that he was actually from the unrelated “Reddick” line.

We can't completely sort these names out. When a person cannot read or write, their name is spelled however someone else chooses to write it down. John Rudick's mother was named Margaret Mizer. Only one or two generations earlier the name was usually spelled Miser, and before that it was Meisser, and then the original German spelling Meißer. No such evolution is apparent with the Ruddicks, Reddicks and Riddicks. They are different families, although they might have common ancestors, generations in the past.

I found John's father Stephen listed as a Reddick or Ruddick in Arkansas, and back in North Carolina, where he was born, it was spelled Reddick or Riddick. There are census misspellings too, but the “one D” spelling seems unique to John and his brothers, and then to many of their descendents. It was all maddening, and my searches had to involve all variations. Without looking for “Stephen Riddick,” for instance, I never would have located some of Stephen Reddick's military records.

I'm proud to say that I believe I was the first person to figure out the family John Rudick's mother Margaret came from. In 1870, John was a “bound boy” on the Michael Buttram farm, and also listed as a nephew. That meant that Sarah Buttram and John's mother Margaret were sisters. I constructed a hypothetical family on Ancestry.com with daughters named Margaret and Sarah, with their approximate birth years referenced, along with probable locations, and sure enough, the John and Mary Mizer family popped up. It's testimony to the power of the new search tools we all have, coupled with easy access to census and other documents. It's quite amazing that we know anything at all about these people, who were just typical members of their communities.

More Years Up The Tree

In the summer of 2012 I again proudly proclaimed the project to be done, and I could almost hear my dad laughing, from 1500 miles away. I really meant it, of course, but will admit that this very document was called Five Years Up The Family Tree at that time. As the years ran up, I gave up, and stopped putting a number in this essay's title at all.

I knew that work of this sort would never be really complete, and I both hoped for and expected to get more revelations, and a few more stories, too. I hoped beyond hope for those last important photos, but no matter what else was revealed in the coming years, the structure of the thing was complete. The families were well defined, and each had its photo gallery: my parents, grandparents and great-grandparents. Seven little photo albums, with portraits of everyone, linked together by one family tree. There was more: I had also collected lots of information on my eight pairs of great-grandparents and their families, along with photos of many of them. Some of those galleries were larger than those of their own children, and only one of them was empty, and still is for that matter, that of George William Spieth. I also had lineages stretching back a dozen and more generations. Not bad, after those years, but I was getting burned out.

When I first read my mom's cousin Pat Baribeau’s account of the Williams family and their forbears, something struck me: There were little details with the names: occupations, accomplishments, and defeats and tragedies. My old friend Mark Angelos, a professor of history, suggested early on that my websites needed writing and stories, and I’m forever grateful for that suggestion, obvious as it now seems. The photo album became one leg of a tripod, and the names and dates and trees became another. Written accounts are the stabilizing leg which tie it all together as a family history.

Along with “The Fragale Family in Escanaba,” I wrote “Who Was John Andrew Rudick?” Years later, with many revisions, it's still my favorite slice of family research. Then there was “The Crawdad Files,” John Rudick's writings for a local newspaper, and “The Cecil Rudick Letters,” the courtship letters of John's son. There was also a ten generation synopsis called “From Cessna to Spieth.” Much of what remained ended up here, “Up The Tree.”

And then it all went to print. Websites come and go, but I reasoned that paper copies, given enough of them, might last longer, especially those that wound up in a cedar chest somewhere until the right person, years down the road, found it and took it further. The main document ultimately ran over one hundred pages, and with the addition of the other stories it topped two hundred.

I rushed some of the books out after Dad died, wanting them in my mom's hands as her own health rapidly faded, but little bits and pieces of ancestry continued to be found, making those printed copies more and more dated. To be sure, the majority of the changes were minor ones, a date or two here, another sibling there, not really changing the narrative much, but after a few years those little changes numbered into the hundreds. I found myself wishing I could simply call back those documents, and send out replacements. A second edition was printed and sent to my brothers and sisters in 2016. I sent special copies to my cousins, customized for three different families, and no sooner was I done with that, three “new” generations to the Williams line were found, with over a dozen new families. This I could live with, the printed documents falling somewhat short, but still reasonably accurate in what they said. Then came a disaster.

An email from a cousin, Harlan LaRue Van Camp, threw the “Cessna” line into chaos, specifically the ancestry of Susan “Sudie” Cessna, my great-great-grandmother. Her grandfather turned out not to be John C. Walters, who married into the Ashcraft line, but a man named Conrad Walters III. This seemingly minor change resulted in the removal of nine generations of Ashcrafts and related families, thirteen families in all, amounting to the equivalent of a dozen pages of my document gone. How did this happen? Years back, I had taken someone's information seriously enough to write it down, but not seriously enough to thoroughly investigate matters. It failed at the only link I hadn't looked at closely. Yes, there is much more information out there now on the internet compared to years back, but that's no excuse. After all of my preaching about getting it right, I hope you never run into a mistake as large as the one I made.

On the positive side, Conrad Walters III had married into the LaRue line, which added a wealth of families similar to what had been “lost.” While all of the Ashcraft stories were gone (including slave trading and yellow fever), the LaRue's were an amazing addition. John LaRue had a county named for him. His grandson became governor of Kentucky, and his wife was the midwife who delivered Abraham Lincoln!

After more than a decade working on this I will finally admit that it will never be completely over, and I'll just have to call it “mostly, mostly done” from here on.!

Part 2: Stories

There are lots of tales, from sad to humorous, to just plain crazy. Here are some which didn't fit elsewhere.

With many of the families, generations back, we simply don't have any records beyond census, church or courthouse documents. Constructing a time line from this, with no personal stories, always seems to make things look grimmer than they probably were. The happy times just don't make the news.

Some sobering facts: anyone who’s done much looking at tombstones or cemetery records has found a name or two which are not a part of the known family, and closer inspection shows the awful truth - the birth and death dates nearly coinciding. The rates of infant mortality could be astounding a century and more ago. More tragic is the discovery of a mother's death coinciding with the birth of a child. I've found several of those, and suspected a few more.

My great-grandmother Cessna had four brothers, but in the Kentucky cemetery where her parents are buried are two small graves of siblings who lived only two and three years, and an obituary for Mary’s mother says that there were two more who didn’t make it, totaling four out of nine.

The first two children of my great-great-grandparents George and Susan Williams, born in 1889 and 1890, died in 1891, probably of cholera. There are two other families I’ve found which were destroyed by epidemic: one by cholera, the other by yellow fever. My grandfather Hank Spieth had a brother, Phillip, who died very young. And so on.

There are many others who are listed simply as “infant,” or “unknown.” Easily the most tragic case of this was the family of Pierre Docque dit Laviolette, seven generations back, on my mother's side. Pierre had five children with his first wife, who then died at the age of thirty-one. His second wife died a month after the birth of their tenth child. He had one more child by a third wife. What might seem like a large family was definitely not: there were twins, at least one of which died at birth, followed by triplets, two of which died within hours of birth, and the third which may have lived a year. The following two years brought two more births and deaths. Out of sixteen eventual children, only four are absolutely known to have reached adulthood, although that number is hopefully higher.

Next up: orphans. (Okay, I'll admit that most of this concerns only half-orphaned children.) My great-great-grandfather John Andrew Rudick got on his horse one day and left his wife and eight children. Luckily, those kids still had a mother, because if the mother was gone instead of the father, the children were usually sent off to other families, or much worse. John Rudick was probably half-orphaned himself, losing his father just after the Civil War. Two of John’s brothers were then raised by other families, at least one of them on his mother’s side, while John became a “bound boy” with a local farmer, whose wife was another relative of his mother. A fourth child, just an infant, was the only one to stay with his mom.

There weren't “stay at home” fathers back then. One of the Cessna brothers, Joseph, was left with three young daughters when his young wife died of tuberculosis, but those girls were then raised by their grandparents on their mother’s side. When Louis Fragale’s first wife died, their two children were raised by two other families.

There were the children of Peter Young, who was brutally killed in 1882, in a collision between his horse carriage and a train. He had ridden into Kaukauna, Wisconsin to sell a cow, and “as usual with him on such occasions, freely disbursed a few dollars of the money.” He was probably drunk, and Peter never made it home alive. His widow, Catherine, was left with seven children ages sixteen down to two, and she soon married a widower who had nine children of his own. In 1892, no longer residing with her second husband, Catherine was living with four remaining children, two from each family, in filth, without proper food or clothing. She was committed by county authorities to an asylum, where she died a month later, of dropsy, now called edema. The two oldest girls, Catherine’s daughters, were also placed in an asylum. Of the other two children, the girl was adopted, and the boy was probably sent to a public school for dependent children.

Susan Young, an older daughter of Peter and Catherine, was twelve years old when her father died, and twenty-two when her mother died. She had married George Williams three years earlier, in 1889, and as noted above, their first two children were probably victims of cholera. In 1902, she filed for divorce, the court document stating that her husband was "...calling her vile and indecent names and charging her with want of chastity and using other abusive language toward her," and that he "...has been and still is a habitual drunkard; that he has expended all his spare money for strong drink and has come home drunk and intoxicated nearly every week... (and) she has been obliged to work at home without sufficient food... (He also) contracted a venereal disease..." which he claimed to have gotten from her! Two weeks later they signed an agreement to discontinue the divorce action, and she remained with him until his death in 1911. Their youngest son, Roger Williams, was my great-grandfather.

Out on a Limb

Suspicions were raised about the parentage of a family member, often in my experience, the oldest son. One story involved Rob Staller (not his actual name) who, to one emailer, didn’t look quite like his siblings. A family rumor was that Rob was really an Indian! “Ellen,” Rob Staller’s daughter, gave another twist to the story. Whether or nor Rob was a proper Staller, he had been a navy man from 1922 to 1936, when he went AWOL, turning up in Galveston, Texas, and changing his name to Rob Stiller. Rob had a very good friend named (ahem) Frank Dallas, who seems to have been another fugitive. Supposedly, Frank had fled his family and job as a lab assistant at Walter Reed Military Hospital in Washington, D.C., altered his name to Dallas Frank, and also wound up in Galveston. Both Frank and Rob had secret post office boxes.

In the 1940’s, Frank married Ellen’s grandmother, on her mother’s side. The problem seems to be that Rob’s own mother had also married a man named Frank Dallas, as her second husband. Poor Ellen was concerned: It seemed that the same man might have been married to both of her grandmothers, and wrote “There is some sort of family secret that my sib's and I sense but we get no answers to our questions that are posed to elder family members. My guess is this whole Frank Dallas thing.” I replied, more or less, “Wow!” and I never heard from her again. Well, Ellen, there seems to be more to this, and I hope you can ferret it out. While I can’t match the cloak and dagger aspects of your story, and it might form the bones of a good novel, it’s really not as scandalous as you think. I’ve found worse, and I'm more intrigued than anything.

In that story, and the next one, I don't use real names, because the sources have dried up, and I feel unsure. There’s nothing more frustrating than meeting an enthusiastic distant cousin, exchanging tales, getting in on a juicy story line and then being totally cut off. Here, with fictionalized names, is a tale which Charles Dickens himself might have come up with:

I’ll call our protagonist Booker (although I’m tempted to use Oliver Twist, or Pip). His granddaughter I will call Laura, a third cousin to me, who found my website in August, 2010, and spotted her grandfather there. She was overwhelmed to find the connection between him and his great-grandparents. Her mother also viewed the site, and the conversation had begun. Laura sent me a photo of Booker, and I waited to hear from her mom. What I got instead in the next email was a true tale of woe and intrigue, and then I never heard from Laura again!

Booker’s family, like many in the late 1920’s, and into the depression, were poor as church mice. A story was told that the dinner plate was passed to Booker’s father first, since he needed the strength to work, then to the children, and finally, if anything remained, to the mother. Unknown to the father, there was another child on the way, which the family could hardly afford, and Booker’s mother bled to death after an attempt at a home abortion, performed by her and her sister.

Booker was only a toddler at the time, and he was handed off to be raised by his mother’s family. The children of that family, actually his uncles and aunts, were all ten or more years older than Booker, and he grew up treated like a red headed stepchild; he never received gifts for Christmas or his birthday, yet had to watch the others get those things. It seems the only present he did receive each year came through his actual father, from the large garden and estate where he and others in the family worked. Laura remembers that her grandfather “had such a strong emphasis on family and giving and celebrations, and as an adult, I realize that is why.”

In a turnaround, when Booker’s step-father, he called him “Pop,” resided at the farmhouse years later, it was Booker and his wife who lived with him as helpers. Pop’s children wanted to put the old man into a home, but Booker, who Pop had given the nickname “Bobo,” stood in their way. The old man’s children had their eyes on his house, which, the story goes, Pop had left in his will to Booker’s daughter (Laura’s mother). One day, while Booker was gone, they made off with their father, and put him away, location unknown. The will was rewritten, with the farmhouse divided up between them.

After that, the old man would sometimes call Booker, saying "Bobo, come get me. Where are you? Why did you put me here?" but sadly, he wasn't able to say exactly where he was. Laura said the only time she ever saw a tear in her grandfather’s eye was when he told that story, and the story of his childhood. “The sadness in my grandfather had nothing to do with wills or inheritance, it was that Pop died in that retirement home before my grandfather could ever find him. He couldn't bear the thought that Pop thought he put him in there when he swore that he never would.”

This was both the saddest and the most preposterous story that had ever entered my mailbox, and since “Laura” never
responded to further emails, I sometimes thought that the whole thing was a cruel hoax, yet her letter to me seemed authentic and spontaneous. I was forced to conclude that I had accidentally been drawn into a matter too personal, that too much had been blurted out to someone who was actually a complete stranger.

Corporation Tessier dit Lavigne

There was a mystery from my childhood which puzzled me: my mother had cloudy recollection of a claim in her family, a story that an ancestor had been cheated out of one of the most valuable properties in all of Canada, and that his descendants had fought for centuries to right this injustice. In theory, I actually owned a piece of the Basilica of Notre-Dame in the heart of downtown Montreal. It turned out that it was only the land that the Basilica had been built upon which was in question. My mom had been told a story about a poor soldier who had fought bravely for his country, and in place of monetary payment had been given land instead, land which was later unjustly stolen by the Catholic Church.

My family vacationed in Canada while I was in grade school, and seeing that huge church, I Imagined that my share of it was about one brick. It was only a hazy mystery to me, and I shelved it in the back of my mind for years. It later turned out that this was somewhat of a hazy mystery in hundreds of families across North America. To some it was the struggle of David and Goliath re-enacted, to others a conspiracy of powerful world institutions over common folk. But to most it was just a set of unsubstantiated rumors, tied into the hope of a little financial gain. It was only an old tale, and no one seemed to know many of the details. Like the lottery, you played the game with a nod and a wink. It turned out that there was no winning lottery ticket at all.

My mother’s grandmother, Leah Laviolette-Williams was aware of the huge numbers of descendants involved in the legal battles, and said that she hoped to get enough money out of it to buy a television set. Leah grew up in a family where the Rosary was said each night, and her mother's maiden name was Tessier. At one point, family members actually tried to get the famous attorney F. Lee Bailey involved. He declined. My mother recalled an evening when her own mom sat on the edge of the bed and told her that the dream was over.

I had avoided researching the French-Canadian branch of my family for years, partially out of deference to Pat Baribeau, my mother’s cousin, who had tackled the lineages years before. I had other fish to fry, and Pat had done a great job. Another obstacle was that my Ancestry.com account denied me access to Canadian resources, only available with a “world” account. I confess at this point to being a stingy bastard. Eventually, though, the deed had to be done. Once able to access census documents and digitized collections which fleshed out the branch, I found that Pat’s research was nearly spot-on, and I was able to add other dates, events and family members, particularly siblings, to her account. The Laviolette line, for instance, was extended back several generations.

Next, I dug into the ancestral line of Leah Laviolette’s mother, Anastasia Tessier, an early settler from Canada to Escanaba, Michigan. The Tessier line can be traced back seven more generations. The Canadian genealogy is fairly well documented, thanks to the records of the Catholic Church.

Near the top of that line stands perhaps the most remarkable of my ancestors, Urbain Tessier dit Lavigne.

A lot has been written about him, but here I give you only what applies to the three centuries of land claim battles which have followed his death. Urbain was born about 1625 in France, and he arrived in Montreal (then simply an outpost called Ville-Marie) somewhere between 1642 and 1647. In 1648 he was awarded a land grant by the governor, and promptly built a house and started a family there. He was a pit-sawyer and carpenter by profession, but a farmer and Indian fighter by necessity. His heroic exploits in defense of his family and community eventually earned Urbain a further award of land from the government, in addition to more land purchased on his own.

In places on the frontier like Ville-Marie, a rapid increase in population was among the goals of both King and Governor, and one story (unsubstantiated) involves an additional award of land, simply for the patriotic act of fathering a large family. In this regard, Urbain Tessier excelled. In 1648, he married Marie Archambault, then less than thirteen years old. Eventually there were seventeen children born. Most lived into adulthood, and many sons carried on the family name.

I have not researched the exact totals of acres of land which Urbain Tessier accumulated, and I do not know of the exact purchase or grant involving the particular tract which eventually became of such great dispute. As a part of my story, I don’t think these details matter much: we’re talking about a few dozen acres, not whole townships. The property in dispute, in modern downtown Montreal, seems to be around thirty acres.

Some property was spun off to his sons as they married, and some land was also deeded to the Church, the Seminary of Saint-Sulpice. Urbain Tessier dit Lavigne died in 1690, and there was no controversy at that time over the disbursal of his estate. Who could possibly have imagined the eventual value of this land? He would be astounded at what occupies this
land today: The historic Place d’Armes public square, the headquarters for the largest bank in Canada, the Place-des-Congres convention center (built over the Ville-Marie Expressway), the Place d’Armes Metro Station, and of course the gothic revival Basilica of Notre-Dame, one of the largest and most beautiful churches in North America.

Fast forward to 1838, nearly a century and a half later. The Quebec Legislature adopted a bill confirming the title of the land in question to the Sepulcian Order. What had happened? Heirs of Urbain Tessier dit Lavigne had made a lot of noise in the intervening decades, more so as the land in question became increasingly valuable. Sometimes referred to as the “Tessier-Lavigne Land Claim,” the legal action revolved around the idea that the original deed transferring the land to the Church was not outright, but in trust. The hitch? The actual document has not been located to this day. One descendant I know of claimed, according to family lore, that the paperwork was lost at sea, en route to Paris for some sort of verification. That only adds to the undocumented and sometimes crazy family stories. For now, I note that unless that piece of paper turns up, sensible people have to conclude that the case was legally settled in 1838.

About ninety years later, it was again dragged into the courts, and by this time there were hundreds of thousands of descendants. Attempts were made to draw as many of them into the case as possible. Here's an excerpt from a December 8, 1930 article in the Montreal Star. I’ve taken the liberty of editing it a bit, since Richard (on an internet discussion board) called it a “word for word” copy, yet it had many typos and punctuation errors. For all I know the original was in French.

Although inquiries are pouring in from all sides from persons claiming an interest In the billion dollar action by which heirs of Col. Urbain Tessier-Lavigne ask to be declared owners of a block of land situated in and around Place d'Armes square, there are no actual developments in the case, according to the lawyers engaged In the proceedings. From widely-separated parts of the United States and Canada, inquiries have been forwarded to lawyers here recently and in one instance a well known politician from Vermont visited Montreal to learn at first hand the exact status of the case, and the possibility of establishing a claim as one of the heirs.

In come cases the lawyers have been advised of rumors on the street that a settlement had been reached, and figures of from $20,000 to $200,000 have been mentioned as going to each established heir. The rumors, it is stated, are entirely erroneous, and no fresh developments have taken place, although the search is still going forward for a missing document which it is believed would establish the title of the heirs of the long-dead general to the property on which is now located Notre-Dame Church and a large number of business and financial houses In the immediate vicinity.

"It is a pure gamble and nothing else," said A. M. Tanner, K.C., who is representing a group of the heirs when asked this morning as to rumors which have been current for some time. "I have advised my clients that their claim to the property rests entirely on a deed which so far has not been found. We have examined 60,000 deeds in the archives at Montreal, but as yet have found no trace of the document which is absolutely essential in proving title to the estate. As a matter of fact, I fear that some of these people are being exploited by individuals who make it their business to trace genealogies.”

A meeting of interested heirs may be called shortly in order that a report may be made and a clear-cut statement sent out as to the exact situation, Mr. Tanner said. The action he conceived to be necessary, owing to the large number of inquiries from persons who apparently have been deceived by false information as to the value of their claims.

It seems that an American style class-action lawsuit was not possible within the Canadian system, so the “Corporation Tessier dit Lavigne” was formed. For the meager sum of one dollar, any person who could show lineage back to Urbain Tessier could become a stockholder, and would thus share in the expected profits, should the case be won. More shares meant a bigger share of the winnings. Naturally, it's suspected that the “genealogists” employed by the Corporation had a somewhat loose interpretation of proper lineage, and being a shareholder should not be assumed today to be proof of being an actual descendant of Urbain Tessier.

According to Jan Nearing, posting on an internet forum:

The attorneys who perpetuated this scam were able to enjoy a handsome profit throughout the Depression. They brought suit against the Sulpician priests, the Banc-du-Montreal and the Archdiocese.

Well, it obviously was all about getting money out of these organizations, since you couldn't very well tear down the buildings and divide the property amongst the more than 250,000 known descendents who bought into this fiasco.

Long and short is, the wills were deemed properly executed. An attorney who reviewed it for my family laughed at the very premise that there was enough clout, especially when most of the descendents had never set foot in Quebec, to sue the Catholic Church and the largest bank in Canada. No one ever saw any money. There was some activity on this case, though, through the 1970's. The hard-nosed descendents who either were too stubborn to admit defeat or swore that there really was something to this took the case to: a) The World Court, b) The Vatican (twice), c) Her Majesty the Queen (like she's really going to have anything to say...and if she did...could she really make the British Parliament reverse these series of actions for a bunch of French-Canadian descendents 300 years after the fact?…)

From what I understand from a cousin, in case you ever make it up there, stop in at the Rectory. The priests are well versed on the whole story and will give you a "token" (commemorative) coin in reparation if you tell them you're a descendent.

And that’s the story, as I understand it. There are those out there who would disagree. Many were sold some variant of a dream, a personal family fairy-tale about the whole affair, and some just won’t let go of that.

I'm convinced that it would all make a good documentary: Not the actual history laid out above, but the individual family tales told over the decades, from one side of North America to the other. Along with the story as told within my own family, I’ll cite two additional examples, both from the same internet forum. One woman insisted that relatives, crossing the continent with the all-important document in hand, had actually been accosted, and the Catholic priests (boo! hiss!) stole it. Another fellow (I withhold his name to protect him and his kin from the Canadian Illuminati, or other threatening entities), said that it was his own parents who re-opened the case in the 1970’s, but had to give it all up:

I thought it was do (sic) to finances. Then my oldest brother told me in the late 1980's that it was because our family was being watched and followed by persons unknown to us. He was the first to notice this as he had just come home from the Vietnam War. He was a very decorated veteran and dealt with these kinds of things in his line of work in the military. I guess we attracted the wrong kind of attention. My brother said my parents dropped the case out of fear for their family’s safety. They must have really hit a nerve or posed some kind of real threat. Most likely by having the kind of credible documentation necessary to prove their claim.

Unfortunately, I do not have access to any of their documentation or records on the land claim. My oldest brother has them and he isn't going to give me a copy of them because he knows that I want to re-open the case and he doesn't want me to put his family at risk. I know this is true as he was able to obtain a permit to carry a concealed firearm and was carrying a .45 automatic with him then. Primarily because he knew that I wanted to pursue this case to whatever end it took me. But I have little intimate knowledge and details of the case and no documents to speak of…

Back on our side of reality, the whole affair certainly stirred up emotions in my own family. My mother told me that as a child she had been confused that the Catholic Church had treated a man so badly. Remember that she had been told that the man was a poor soldier who had fought bravely for his country, and the Church had taken his land from him.

My great-grandmother Leah was such a devout Catholic that when she realized she was participating in a lawsuit against her own Church, she traveled to Montreal to personally relinquish her share in the Tessier land claim. And as for me, the land in question is perhaps thirty acres in extent, and I am only one of more maybe a million descendants. So if I don’t own a brick of the Basilica, I instead might own a square foot of land in downtown Montreal. If I could actually claim my square foot of land, it might be behind the lectern of the Basilica of Notre-Dame, and from there I could let loose upon the Church for injustices, even crimes, over the centuries. But I see no evidence that the Catholic Church did any wrong to Urbain Tessier dit Lavigne, and I do not really expect to get one thin dime out of the case.

Margaret R. Williams

When I was a kid, she was my “Grandma Williams,” but I later learned that Margaret Williams had been born in Escanaba, Michigan, in 1916, christened Margaret Regina Fragale. Her mother was born in America, a few years after the family arrived from Germany. Margaret’s father was a dockworker who had come to America from southern Italy as a teenager.

Margaret married Brendan Roger Williams, high school football star, a local Escanaba boy. By the time that Brendan entered the Army, they had two children: my mother, Harriet Marie Williams, and her younger brother, Michael Brendan Williams.

There's a hardcover book I used to have, but I gave it to my uncle Mike Williams after mom died. It was titled “His Service Record,” and was maintained by my grandmother. Not any sort of government publication, it was a commercially available book organized so that the friends or loved ones of military personnel could fill in what blanks they desired. Grandma Williams’ entries begin in March of 1944. The record gives us a look into that fateful time, including many details we never might have known. Here’s my synopsis:

On January 2, 1944, Brendan Williams, twenty-seven years old, left his wife, his children and his job at the Bird’s Eye Veneer Company in Escanaba, to join the US Army. Actually, he was drafted, and my mother recalled waving goodbye as the train pulled out of Marquette, Michigan, the new soldiers leaning out of the windows. Mom was about five years old.

Brendan's training as a soldier over the next six months was accompanied by several transfers. First it was to Fort Sheridan, Illinois, then onward to Camp Wolters, Texas. On June 2, half a year after enlistment, he was given eleven days to visit his family, then he was off to Fort Meade, Maryland in late June, and Camp Kilmer in early July, a staging area for troops destined for the European Theater.

On July 18, 1944 Brendan sailed for Europe, arriving in Glasgow, Scotland, on July 31, and proceeding immediately to England. On August 3, he traveled to France on the Swedish ship Bergensfjord, along with about 3500 other soldiers. He spent the next four days in replacement depots, and on August 8, he was sent to the front.

Brendan fought in the Second Armored Division, known far and wide as “Hell on Wheels,” which eventually could have taken Berlin had they not been ordered to hold back. Brendan’s first engagements were at Barenton, France, where they held the sector for five days against the German Seventh Army. Then a sweep across France began, then across the Rhine for two days. They swung north into Belgium fighting a bitter battle at Albert Canal. That was about September 10. They crossed the German border on September 18, and then withdrew for several days. Returning to Germany, Brendan fought for several days on the Siegfried Line, until he was wounded on October 6, 1944.

Little Harriet and Mike were staying with their mother Margaret at their grandparent's house when the devastating letter arrived. It said that Brendan had been wounded, and nothing more. It's hard to imagine the following days, before further news came. According to the book, Brendan was hospitalized at various locations over the next eleven months. He left England on January 5, 1945, arriving in the United States on January 15. His stateside recovery began with a few days at Halloran General Hospital in New York, but by January 19 he was at Schick Hospital in Clinton, Iowa. May 4 found him at the Percy Jones Convalescent Center in Battle Creek, Michigan. He was finally discharged on September 8, 1945.

A mystery: My grandfather Williams was shot during the war - we all knew this - and when I was a little boy I was in awe every time he showed me those round scars, one on each side of his forearm, where a bullet had passed clean through. So why was he hospitalized for nearly a year? Were there injuries or complications which my mother and her brother were never told of?

Private Brendan Roger Williams was awarded the Purple Heart, Good Conduct Ribbon, European African Middle Eastern Theater Ribbon, three Bronze Campaign Stars and the Combat Infantry Badge.

And you might now be wondering: why have I titled this little chapter after my grandmother? Because she’s also a hero to me, having chronicled her husband’s military service, and preserved the records for us to see. Here’s a letter grandpa wrote to her while he was recovering, in its entirety:

March 20, 1945
Hello Sweetheart:

My, I got lots of mail again this morning, and 1 package. There are 5 letters from you that had gone overseas- (one was from August 4th and the others from mid-December. Then there were 3 Christmas cards from my aunt plus a couple old Pay Rays and last but not least a letter from you from March 18th and also one from Coosey Coo. Oh yes, the package too. It was the one Susie had sent & had a lighter and some candy in it. Tell her thanks.

Yesterday I got a letter from Wick. He seems to be getting along fine. However, I suppose I should write and tell my folks this myself, but I’ll let you do it, he’s pretty peeved because my folks haven’t been writing to him hardly at all. So you better tell them to start writing. I can realize how he feels so kindly do that.

Well [Partner?] so now the truth comes (in your letter of the 18th). So you were mad at me for buying that old Model A. Well it was a damn good car & I’ve been kicking my ass ever since I sold it. Not that it was much to look at but it used to get me around. In the years to come maybe I can get another one to hang around in and we can have a real nice car besides. We did have some fun with that old car at that & even then you looked real regal when you would drive it. Sitting way up like the queen you are. I also remember how bad Harriet felt when we got rid of it.

You did right by telling who ever called that you didn’t know anything about what traps I have and not selling any of them. By the way, I didn’t really mean what I said about you had better send me the book an I’d probably read it instead of taking care of you. I was just kidding about that because you come first, last and always. But you can read the book anyway - it will help occupy my mind until you get here.

Last nite I went to a U.S.O. show they had at the Red Cross. It was quite good & I passed about an hour off. Tonite they have a movie at the [Post?] Theater “Molly and Me” I think is the name of it. It’s a comedy, and while it probably won’t be too good I think I’ll go anyway.

Well Sweetheart I guess I’ll say Bye Bye for now. With all my love to you and the children,

Brendan

A slice of everyday life, made special because grandma saved it. A couple of the decorations from grandpa’s uniform, a few letters from a lonely soldier, a few dozen dates and places recorded. This chapter is as much about Margaret Williams as it is about her husband, and on page thirty-six of the service record, under the heading “Outside of the Family What happened Back Home: On this page keep a record of all interesting and important social and community events,” I found this:

Margie kept on delivering the yeast to the bakery. Social events, Ha! Ha! Had dinner at the Ludington with Mr. & Mrs. Huebner. Breezy Point with Toots. [These are probably sarcastic references to upper-class Escanaba.]

What the hell did I do? Lived with Ma & Pa, took care of Harriet & Michael. They kept me going, lonely as I was. So was He lonely & knowing his life as it was, what had I to complain about. Not a damned thing. I loved him and I was faithful to him and to God. We were both faithful. Brendan is faithful to his Country, God & me.

We believe in this war because we know Hitler is a monster and Mussolini is no better. How strange now that I am half German & half Italian! But I am really American. Now I do not belong to “Der Deutchland”, Hitler doesn’t bother me - But Mussolini does.

Ten empty pages, and nearly three decades later, she added this:

March 12, 1974

I found this book while rummaging through old forgotten things. I tried to keep this record thirty years ago at the age of twenty-seven. Now I am fifty-seven! The most unusual part of this service record is, I believe, the many blank pages. Yet it speaks loud and clear telling a complete story in so few words.

Page 7 - All true. [personal history] Page 8 - Visitor from Outside - Me. Page 9 [training, travel, battle and convalescent information] Bravery, courage, a fast story which could have well left me a War Widow with two small children, never even knowing Mary & Brendan Jr. Page 41 - Brendan R. Williams was my own choice, but I know there were many others: the small guys carrying the M1 Rifle. Not the great Generals: Eisenhower, MacArthur, Patton (any of the rest.) They paraded and gave their commands in the Atlantic and Pacific, and that’s all - they never did one bit of fighting! Pompous bas___ds all.

Did we believe in this World War? Yes we did. Hitler was a mad man. He brought destruction on so many countries at such cost it was right to try and stop him. This was a horrible war not just on one or two countries - on almost all parts of the Globe.

Have I ever believed in the Vietnam War? The answer is No. I would have sent Michael and Brendan to Canada,
Sweden, any place to escape it. Do I believe in Amnesty? Yes I do. Do I believe a man should be executed as Private Slovik was? An army deserter? No! This poor man obviously couldn’t help what he did.

I hope to God we never have another Major War because it would have to come from super powers - namely Russia or China. They could blow us off the face of the Earth, or we could do like wise, and it could well be the end of our world. If it were to come I would want just one thing. No flags flying, no bands playing, only all of us, our entire families - Harriet, Michael, Mary, Brendan, all the Grand children in one room - together. Perhaps we could recite the Rosary.

Margaret R. Williams

It is a side of my grandmother I never knew. As for her reference to Page 41, that page is titled “War Heroes: Place names pictures and items concerning persons who became famous through deeds of heroism,” and while there was room for thirty-five entries on that page, Grandma Williams only listed one war hero: Brendan R. Williams.

German Chocolate

One of my fondest childhood memories was that every year, a few weeks before Christmas, a small box would be delivered to our house, and it came all the way from Germany. Everything about it was exotic to me, even the plain wrapping paper. My sister Marge was born in Germany while dad was in the army, and her godparents were sending her a complete set of silverware, spread out over what became twenty years. There were always large bars of chocolate included, Marge thinks three or so, I seem to remember more. What a great good thing: I knew that until Marge had the complete set of silverware, there would be German Chocolate every Christmas!
In early 1958, Ron Spieth and Harriet Williams got married while dad was stationed at Fort Leonard Wood, in Missouri, and by autumn, I was born in a little one story hospital in town. We lived in a tiny trailer in Waynesville. By spring of 1959 we were all in Heidelberg, Germany. Dad went first, on the Army's timetable, and Mom and I spent a little time in Escanaba. Grandma and grandpa Williams had hatched a plan: mom and I would stay stateside, and all of the money saved would be a great boon when dad came back. Of course dad was furious, and soon we were booked for Germany. On March 2, we flew from Milwaukee to New York, and one week later we boarded the SS Ryndam, bound for Europe. A train ride from Rotterdam to Heidelberg got the family back together.

Dad lived on the Army base before we arrived, and was good friends with a guy named Bill Dunnick. They both worked in an ongoing military postwar survey of Germany. Their weapons were surveying transits and drawing tables. Dad's best army story took place in a drafting room. It seems that the the survey was flawed in the most basic of ways, but a lot of time and work had been invested up to that point. One day a General arrived, and grilled the Corporal in charge, and a few others. Each man defended the survey and proposed some vague plan to put it right. The General was pissed, and pointed to my dad, at a drawing table in the front row, and asked what he thought. Dad replied, more or less, that he thought the entire project had to be shit-canned, and started over from scratch. I don't know how much trouble dad got into there, but the General huffed out of the room, muttering about finally getting an honest opinion.

For a few weeks we lived in a rented bedroom with a family named Stassen, and things had to change. Mom told me it was a combination of the tight quarters and a demonic little girl in the family. Bill Dunnick and his wife had rented an apartment off base, but they were already moving to a cheaper place: same house, two floors down. 43 Kant Strasse, to be precise, on land which dropped off away from the street, so the basement apartment had windows toward the back. The Spieth family took the upper floor. It was two army buddies and their new families, with an older landlord couple living between them.

The landlord couple were Waldemar Hellweg and his wife Maria, nee Maier. I learned these names only recently: mom and dad had always just called them Mama and Papa. Even mom, who had an excellent memory for the old times, could not recall their actual names. The Hellwegs became good friends, looking after me, and later my infant sister Marge, as though we were family. Their son Horst Hellweg and his wife Lisl were also close friends.

Mom and dad seem to have had the best landlords on earth, and they managed a few little trips away from both me, and the Army, to the Alps, and to Paris. They had bought an old Rolls-Royce to get around Heidelberg, but I'm not certain that they used that car outside of town. Dad later said that they had looked into bringing the Rolls back to the states, but the costs were prohibitive, much of it having to do with having to replace all of the window glass to make it legal.

The Dunnicks lived in Milwaukee when I was young, and once or twice our families got together, the adults playing cards at the dining room table, while their miscreant son, my age, actually cheated at Chutes and Ladders. Funny how that's all I personally remember about the Dunnicks.

As for memorabilia brought back from Germany, there was the wonderful photo album mom kept, where some of these facts came from. I've got the little lederhosen outfit they crammed me into every once in a while back then, propped me up, and somehow got a few cute smiles out of me for the camera. There was dad's bayonet, which became a familiar tool for pulling dandelions. And there was the Hofbrauhaus mug which dad lifted during a trip to Munich, possibly with Bill. Dad said that a bouncer chased them several blocks before giving up.

All of my life I had assumed that Marge's German godparents were Mama and Papa. Then I learned that Papa died in July of 1960, when I was nearly two years old, my sister Marge only seven months old. Mama died the following year, but by then, we Spieths were back in America. Yes, they could still have been Marge's godparents, but then who had been sending the chocolate to us?

According to mom It was Horst and Lisl Hellweg sending those packages, and Marge's godparents in Germany were Lisl Hellweg and Tom Manny, possibly an army buddy. Marge's official godparents were her aunt and uncle, Mary and Mike Williams. Mom told me that Horst and Lisl didn't quite understand the idea that Lisl was to be a “proxy” godparent to Marge, and for what it's worth, I'm not sure that the Church would have understood either. Marge always considered The Hellwegs to be her actual godparents, and it took her baby book to set the record strait.

I don't recall any back and forth over the years between the Hellwegs and the Spieths. Were there letters in the boxes with the chocolate? I can't remember. Did mom and dad write back? I don't know. It's kind of sad, since I had often wished for mom and dad to make a return trip to Germany. I only learned of the existence of Horst and Lisl Hellweg in 2013, and I regret never meeting them. They sent that box to America every December for years, to people they really did not know.

For the record: Dear Horst and Lisl Hellweg: thanks for the chocolate. It was always the best!

Part 3: Letters

We're witnessing the death of the traditional photo album, and now I realize that the traditional letter (in an envelope) is following that same path to extinction. I could rant again about organization and backing up of data, but the fact is that most modern correspondence is fated to being lost forever to those of us who it could one day be important to. Most people never really organized their photos or letters when I was young, so nothing really changes.

Do you have a box of letters from the past, from cousins, grandparents, friends or lovers? The folks born and living in the past century will often say yes. People born more recently will not. Reading cursive writing might soon become a specialized skill, but the real issue is that there will be no actual “writing” involved at all, only typing, and rarely will anyone press the “print” button. Future generations are unlikely to receive packages of old yellowed pages to study, as I have had the enjoyment of doing.

The weak side of my family genealogy was always my father’s side, and while huge gaps were filled in with dozens of photographs, in 2011, the gallery of dad’s parents still seemed a bit empty to me. The gallery of his mother’s mother, the Rudick gallery, was almost nonexistent, and that of the Cessnas (next level up) wasn’t much better. Lillian and Peggy, Old Ladies to the rescue, simultaneously brought that Cessna gallery to life. These seeming coincidences are more common than you would think, and a third cousin emerged to help finish the task, only a week or two later.

Kevin Bourdon is the youngest son of my grandmother Spieth’s sister Vera. Dorothy and Vera Rudick, along with their brother Walter, were the children of Cecil Rudick and Mary Alice Cessna, and until recently, I didn’t have a decent photo of three of the five, much less enough material to make a photo gallery. Frankly, I hadn’t had much hope for that corner of the tree, because all I knew was that Vera had sons, not daughters, and I’ve already made known my opinion of who keeps the family photos. I was happily wrong in this case, and Kevin has provided dozens of valuable images. Thanks to him, the Rudicks in Detroit have an album on my website, and my father’s family album was also strengthened. I thought that Kevin would have something to contribute to the Cessna bunch too, but his mother Vera Mae’s Cessna pictures have turned out to be a collection of mysteries, to be solved at some other time. (I am doomed to never really finish this!)

A Letter to Walter Coombs Cessna from a Mysterious Young Woman

Valence 26 September 16[?]

My dear uncle and guardian. With deep sentiment I inform you that my dear father has been died after his painful illness consequence of the wounds received. I am left without any support but yours and that from the honorable Chaplain our protector who tell me I will as soon you will sent him the money wanted, trusting so and in your discrete protection I hope to leave happy with you since nobody in the world but you.

I entreat you not abandon me for I trust in our good God who will protect us. I keep in my breast a letter that my father moments before of die delivered me for which I delivery you in person.

I ask to Mr. Marti if he receive any letter from you addressed to my death father to deliver me for I am answer you.

I have the pleasure to send you my photo that you may know me before start to your house in Company of Mr. Marti.

I send you my everlasting affection and I remain your desolated niece,
Mary Prieto

The letter is beautifully handwritten, and addressed to W.C. Cessna, 2105 Delaware St., Muskogee, Oklahoma, U.S.A. I can’t find any place for this woman in the Cessna family. Perhaps she’s using a loose definition of the word “Uncle,” perhaps she’s writing from Valencia, Spain. The photo is on a postcard, and stamped on its back is “TARJETA POSTAL - UNION UNIVERSAL DE CORREOS.” It’s addressed: to my dear uncle.

I've tried and tried to fit Mary Prieto into the Cessna clan; the obvious mother in this possible tryst would be one of Walter's three sisters, Ella, Mollie or Sallie. The whole story seems so improbable to me that I'll relate a theory presented by my friend Al Wallisch: this is probably a variant of the classic “Spanish Prisoner” scam.

He may not have responded or sent "Her" money. Just receiving a picture of a pretty girl in the mail may have been a little kick for a guy of a certain age. Either way, this could cause him problems with his family. Although single or widowed older men were prime targets of the Spanish Prisoner scam, claiming to be a lost relative could also be part of the set-up.

The modern Nigerian scam is the Spanish Prisoner adapted for email. The goal of SP was to get someone to send money by mail and later by Western Union. Before the telegraph was invented, the ultimate scam would persuade the mark to empty his bank accounts and travel to Spain (or Cuba, Mexico, wherever) in hopes of meeting up with the poor damsel in distress. The mark invariably ended up lost and broke in a foreign city and couldn't speak Spanish to explain himself. A furtive note under his hotel room door would lead him to a series of drop boxes and a blind exchange of "ransom" money for the girl or her poor sick papi. Once the money was gone, the last note would lead the mark through a maze of backstreets, far away from the fellows who were counting his money. Confidence trick.

Was Walter Cessna mortified by this, or did he just get a good chuckle out of it? We only know that he kept that letter!!

Letters from Walter Cessna Rudick to his Parents and Grandfather

Walter Cessna Rudick was my grandmother’s older brother. Thanks to Kevin Bourdon, I not only had my first good photo of him, I had many, and he had become another familiar face to me. Walter had died young, of complications from the thyroid disease which ran in his family. Vera had suffered from it, and Mary Rudick, her mother, was doubtless the source. Walter’s variety killed him, though, and I had been told that he had died on the operating table.

I received another package of photos from Kevin one day, ones which would more or less complete the Rudick gallery, and after I had thumbed through them, I found a small stack of documents which Kevin had included, things from his mother’s possessions, things which my great-grandmother Rudick had saved.

First was a 1925 letter from Walter, then thirteen, to his mother and grandfather, away in Kentucky. In its entirety:

Dear Mama and Grandpa:

Will write to you this morning a few lines, as I have nothing to do. If it is Saturday I don’t carry out the ashes any more. Mr. Byrne won’t give me more than 50 cents so I quit him. Papa told me not to work for that.

It is still awful cold up here. Uncle Joe said it was warm enough down there to go in your shirt sleeves. How is Vera Mae? I hope she is all right. How is Grandpa? Mrs. Holmburg sends her very best regards. When are you coming back? Dorothy is all right. We are all lonesome for you and Vera Mae to come back. Bring Grandpa too. I want to see him. I am awful sorry Grandma died. Well I will close for this time. Write soon, from your loving Walter.

Next was a wedding invitation sent to the Rudicks from his fiancé’s parents, the event to occur August 4th, 1934. Accompanying this was another letter to the parents, obviously sent only days before the event:

Dear folks,

Thought I would drop you a line to let you know that we arrived safely and had a nice trip on the way down. I would have written sooner but I have been so busy that it just skipped my mind.

I went golfing this morning with Mabel. Had an awfully nice time. The air and climate are sure great down here.

You want to be sure and have uncle Joe come down with you for we have arranged for a place for him. Also there will be a lot of children here, so if you want to bring Vera Mae, it’s all right. I want Papa to come also. You and Papa have had the front room reserved for you at Mabel’s home. You both will enjoy the trip and have a lot of fun too.

Howard and Grace will pick you up and bring you back all O.K.
Well I had better sign off now and mail this letter and one to Grandpa.

Will see you Saturday,

Love, Walter. Kiss Vera Mae for me.

P.S. I think Dorothy is married. I may be wrong, but I don’t think so. Walter.

It's fun, the things you can learn from a short letter. First, the letter was written near Lima, Ohio, and sent to Detroit, about 140 miles away. Was the weather so different that Lima constituted a different “climate?” And what family dramas could explain Walter having to ask his own father to attend his wedding, or to drop that little bombshell at the end: Folks, um, your daughter has eloped....…(That's my grandmother, by the way.)

There was a typed page from Walter’s church, detailing his short life and his untimely death. Hospitalized for several days, he underwent an operation and seemed to be pulling through, when things took a wrong turn and he died during an emergency blood transfusion. That was Easter morning, one day short of his thirty-first birthday.

This was all very matter of fact, and I glumly realized that not only did I now have photos of Walter, but I now knew his complete name, those of his wife and her parents, and the exact dates of his birth, marriage and death. In short, I knew all I needed to know about him for my project. But the last thing Walter‘s nephew Kevin included in the package was likely the saddest document I’ve ever held in my hand. It was a sixty-nine year old Hallmark card: a birthday card for a birthday Walter never saw. The front showed a pheasant in flight, with a hunting dog looking on, and was captioned “A Birthday Message for a Fine Son.” Some things never change, like that caption and the eight line Hallmark poem inside. What was painful to read was the note penciled below:

Darling Walter
Why was my boy taken from me?
Today is 26 of April, your birthday
Oh how I love you.
Mama

Saved inside the card was a poem, handwritten in pencil by Walter Cessna Rudick to his mother Mary Alice Rudick, on May 13, 1928, when he was sixteen years old:

Times will come and times will go
And the wind will blow its blast
And the wandering one will welcome again
His home and his mother at last

This essay was originally titled “Five Years up the Family Tree,” and ended on that sad note. A year later, Kevin Bourdon forwarded a final treasure trove of letters to me, which his mother Vera Rudick-Bourdon had saved for decades. The Mary Prieto letter was among them. At one point, Vera had told my aunt Noreen that she had burned the letters, but thankfully it was not so. I was amazed that I now even had these in my possession.

Any discomfort in transcribing these personal correspondences of my grandparents and great-grandparents, and even a great-great-grandfather, was soon replaced by fascination. Only a few years ago, I had not even known that most of these people existed, and now I had been drawn into their everyday lives.

Letters from Cecil Rudick, to his Future Wife, Mary Alice Cessna

There are dozens of letters and notes, written between July of 1910 and April of 1911. Most are in pencil, but occasionally in ink. The brown, sometimes fragile, parchment proved to be a challenge in transcription, but Cecil’s handwriting at last became familiar to me. The locale is Gore, Oklahoma, a town with a little over 300 people, twenty-five miles outside of the booming city of Muskogee. It was sweet and carefree at first:

Miss Alice c/o Ollie

Kind Alice :- Say, would you and Sam go down to Mr. Tom Johnson’s with Ollie and I? There isn’t anything doing tonight, and Mrs. Johnson asked us to come. Said she would show us a nice time.

Lovingly Yours, Cecil

Another note:

Miss Alice Cessna

Kind Friend :- Would like very much to call for the Show tonight, i. e. if you would like to go. They are going to show in a Moving Picture Design the destruction of Pompeii by volcanic eruption of the Vesuvius.

Waiting your reply, Cecil

Cecil’s wry humor:

Dear Alice :- would you be pleased to have such a specimen of humanity as myself call this afternoon?
Most Lovingly, Cecil

Toward November, things take a more serious turn, as this excerpt shows:

Dear, I wish something that [ ] my mind would not. I some times wonder if you are only trifling with my affections. Then I know you are not, or I believe it at least.

I will be at your home tomorrow night or in the P.M. if I decide to leave. I would rather leave here in a casket as to go live, for I feel like I was leaving the truest lover I ever had. One of our charming writers says the greatest blessing a girl can receive is the ingenious devotions of a young man’s heart. Dearest, you have mine with out a doubt.

Christmas, 1910, found Cecil crushed and confused to hear that Mary Alice was seen in town wearing another guy’s ring. It’s hard to interpret the letters, since none of Miss Cessna’s letters in reply have survived. The crisis of the ring was soon replaced by one of getting the parent’s consent to marry. Apparently, popping the question had been a formality on the way to the real test. By early January, we read:

It is indeed a sad thing to think about the happening of yesterday Eve. Dear I know you love me and I know I love you more than any one on earth and I think it would be a sin for them to refuse. If they had any grounds for refusing it would be different. It is mature for them to not want you to marry, you being the only girl. I’m sure you are the jewel of their house, but you are the idol of my heart.

On January 18:

I had a real nice time in Muskogee. I wonder what that was you had to tell me. I’ll bet you didn’t give them that note Sun. Eve. Dear, I was so sorry for you Sun. Eve. If I had known that they would never give their consent I would never come back to Gore.

On February 9:

It is with pleasure that I endeavor to address you tonight. Haven’t any thing else to be doing, as my work is over for the day. I had much rather see you than to be trying to scribble to you, for scribble is all I can do. Saw you this Eve and you would not as much as speak to me, or even look at me. Don’t you feel a little bit bad or ashamed to treat the one that loves you more than any one else could in such a way as that? Can’t help but study about how near I came losing my little girl. What does the School Madam have to say about you not quitting me?…

Say, tell your Mama to take a good look at your photo, for I’m going to take it away Sat. night. She can look at you all the time and I can’t. She can just either give me the picture or the girl, just which ever she prefers. I’d prefer the latter.

There were letters where Cecil tried to explain away a ride in a buggy with a woman named Mrs. Hibbs, and a time when he walked a woman named Beulah home in the rain. Small town gossip apparently spread quickly in Gore, Oklahoma.

Then on March 30 we read:

You don’t know how bad I feel this AM to see the tears steal down your cheeks. I have kept company with several girls and I guess they loved me, or some of them. Their claims proved it, but I didn’t love them. I told them I did, which I acknowledge I ought not to have done. But Dearest, I tell you that I love you from the depth of my heart. I would not be untrue to you for the world.

The final letter, dated April 6, 1911, begins with “Farewell” written across the top, and I present it here in its entirety:

Kind Friend: - Just thought I would write you a few lines this Eve. Saw you up in town a few moments ago and Dear, you seem so different from what you always do. Didn’t seem like your self at all and imagine what could be wrong.

Would be so glad to see you tonight. I would tell you a few things. Dear, I can’t understand you; sometimes you seem one way and again [two?]. This couldn’t be possible. I don’t reckon that you are only trifling with my feelings. I’m going to stay here until next Monday Morn, and if there isn’t something done I will take my departure from Gore, never to see the place again.

If you are still in the notion of marrying, I will tell the old folks that I have treated them with all respect due them and they have treated me very nice, and if they will continue to do so I will do them the same way. But if they object without any cause what ever, I will treat things in such a way that they will get fully rewarded.

I’m afraid, Dear, you don’t exactly understand what you say. It is indeed a hard problem to solve. I came very near asking your papa last night. I would not care half so bad to ask them, but any time I say any thing about it you approach me with a shake of the head and a laugh, as though you are opposed to me saying one word to them. Darling, I hate to write you in this way, but I don’t reckon the truth will hurt anyone. If you would stay with me when I ask them, it would be quite a consolation to me. But Dear, if I was to start to ask them, you would hide your face and disappear.

I will possibly be over tomorrow night. What did Edith have her mouth stuck out at me about this Eve? Wouldn’t even speak to me. If she don’t like me I’m sure there isn’t any love lost.

Now Dear, if any statement I have made in this letter is wrong, they stand for your correction, and I beg your pardon for making them. Well, I’ll say no more.

The letter appears to be signed “I Love you Cecil Rudick RSVP,“ but that line is across the fold of the page, and parts of the paper have disintegrated.

We are left hanging, but of course we know the eventual outcome. Cecil did not get on that train, never to return to Gore, and his vague threat to fully reward the old folk’s doubts about him was never realized. It turns out that Cecil had applied for a marriage license three days before writing that letter.

I’ve read an entry in a sort of diary Mary Alice kept, no more than a list of dates and places, and her entry for April 11 had them visiting a graveyard, then spending the evening at home. She's added the word “wonderful” to the entry, which stands out. There is no other comment like that in the preceding months. I can only suppose that within a few days before April 11, Walter Cessna and his wife Susan gave their consent for Cecil Rudick to marry their daughter. Perhaps it was on April 11 itself, since Mary Alice described that night as wonderful. Cecil and Mary Alice were married the next day, on Wednesday, April 12, 1911, in Gore Oklahoma. Their first child was born just over a year later, in Gore, Oklahoma, and they named him Walter Cessna Rudick, after his grandfather.

Letters from Walter Coombs Cessna to Daughter Mary Alice, and her Husband, Cecil

In 1912, Cecil and Mary Alice Rudick were living about 100 miles from Gore, in Bartlesville, Oklahoma, where Cecil was working. Old man Cessna gives medical advice across two letters, as Mary Alice seems to be stricken with rheumatism. One treatment involves a trip to nearby Claremore, Oklahoma, where the “radium water” is recommended for many ailments.

Sometime before 1915, the Cessna family returned to Kentucky, Mary Alice, Cecil and Walter Rudick too. Cecil and Mary Alice’s second child(my grandmother Dorothy Bonita Rudick) was born in Kentucky in 1915. A third child, named Cecil Rudick, lived only three days. A letter from Walter Cessna to Cecil:

Coon Hollow, Ky. 1-24-1918

Dear Cecil. Your card received last night. Was sure surprised to learn of the baby’s death, but the little fellow is better off. You and Mary Alice don’t grieve, but prepare to meet him in heaven where there is no trouble sickness and death.

I hope this will find Mary Alice getting along all right; have her to take care of herself and not take cold. We will look for Walter and Dorothy to come with their Grandma when she comes. Larue and I are well.

Love to all, Father

In 1925, Susan Cessna died, just under 70 years old. Three years later, Walter Cessna traveled to California, possibly on business. His son Sam eventually settled there, but . After all, he was a horse trader by profession. Whether Sam lived there in ‘28 is unknown.

Pomona, Cal. Feby. 10, 1928

My dear children. We all arrived safe this morning at 6 o’clock. We stood the trip fine, also our horses. We have our horses at the fairground, and it sure is a nice place. All the hilles near by are like the wheat fields in Ky. the

first of May, though north of us the snow capt hilles, from us 18 to 40 miles 4 to 5 thousand feet high, are the most beautiful sight I ever saw.

So later on will write more when I wrested up. Now, write me as soon as you get this. Send by air mail so I will no how all is. I will send you a telegram this evening, also this letter by air mail.

Love to one and all, Father

Letters from Walter and Dorothy Rudick to their Grandparents, Walter and Sudie Cessna

The oldest few notes from young Walter say simply “Papa Come Home” or some version of it. Cecil seems to be working up in Louisville, while his family is living with the grandparents in Coon Hollow.

The other letters are cute, and deal mostly with childish things. Walter is intent to have a pony, for instance, mentioned in more than one letter, and he mentions a dog down in central Kentucky in two letters.

Detroit Mich. Mar 26, 1922

Dear grand and grand ma, how are you all today? April the 26th is my birthday. So inted of buying me a pony, you can send the money that a nice pony would cost. I have a bank book and a bank that they gave with with it. I have my money in America State bank. So I think if I get the money I will buy me a viline and take lessons, or I
might take piano lessons. With some of the money I will buy a wagon and a cowboy suit. So I will do something with the rest of the money. Write soon.

From your grandson, Walter Rudick, 1283 Beniteau Ave. Detroit Michigan. XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

When Dorothy was nine years old, she was hospitalized with Rheumatic Fever. A letter sent from Children’s Hospital, Detroit, Michigan:

Detroit, Mich. Dec. 30, 1924 [document damaged, with pieces of paper missing]

Dear grandma [and grand] pa How are you? [Hope] you are well. I got a lot of dolls. Uncle Howerd is [over] to see me to. I wish you were hear so you could come to see me tonit. Make Walter mad because he cannot come to see me to. Little Vera Mey want’s to come but cannot.

I have 21 Dolls. How is Grand pa. Hope he is well. If I am well. When uncle Howerd comes back, mama and all of us will come back with him. I have a little boy at each side of me and a little girl in back when I first came he[re], but now there are a boy there. I wish I was home. Well I gest I will have to close with lov from your grand Dawter Dorothy. XXXXXXXXX OOOOOOOOO XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

A Letter from Walter Ronald Spieth to his Mother

There are no revelations here: dad’s letters, like those of his mother, uncle and grandfather, are simple reminders of family. My grandmother, Dorothy Rudick-Spieth, saved the little bits of her son’s lives which the youngsters would never have saved on their own. My mom did the same thing, and after the children had left the nest, albums appeared, loaded with school report cards, class photos, newspaper clippings - the stuff which moms are proud of in their kids.

My Grandma Spieth divided up her “archives,” making albums for her three boys, and dad's portion is what I have come into possession of. It’s not very much, really, which makes it even more special: we have a complete set of school report cards, a small and precious bunch of photographs, and my dad’s portion of the letters to his mom, written while she was quarantined with tuberculosis for a year and a half, in a Detroit sanitarium. For a year and a half, dad and his brothers had no mother at home. It was right at the end of World War II, and at one point Dorothy’s three sons gathered below their mother’s window and sang The Star Spangled Banner to her.

Dad was about nine years old. There are sixteen letters, and here is a typical one:

Dere mother

How are you? I hope you are fine. I had a swell time Thanksgiving day. Mr. and Mrs. [Robitele?] were here. We ate our supper and dad wrot you a letter and went to play pinochle. Then I wrot you this letter. I have finishest my tie rack. I do not know what my next thing will be, and we will not go to school till Monday.

I love you very much and here are some kisses XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

I miss you very much
Ronnie Walter Spieth

And I miss my father, Walter Ronald Spieth, and my mom too. Both passed away while I was writing this. I don’t remember writing letters to my mom and dad, except for a few juvenile pleas for some gift or permission, in exchange for inflated promises of angelic behavior. Unlike my father and mother, or my great-uncle Walter, or my grandmother Dorothy, I was never separated in any serious way from either of my parents, until now.

A Letter from Me

These letters are the most valuable and personal clues I have toward truly understanding the past; they contain the feelings which give genuine life to the facts. This “Up the Tree” essay is in part a letter of advice, my personal instruction manual, to anyone who would take a similar journey. It's also a letter of warning: this stuff can be highly addictive. Enter at your own risk!

We tend to be older when we become interested in our ancestry, and as a result, many of our best sources are gone, or nearly so. It's a cruel twist, but true. My sincerest advice: talk to your relatives, near or far, and do it now.

Often, over these years, mom would remind me of how her mother would have known this or that, or how her grandmother would have recognized someone in an old photo. She also would tell me how much those folks would have been amazed at the facts coming to light, things which even they didn’t know. Now, I find myself wishing I could run back the clock and talk with those geezers and biddies from my childhood. They were only uninteresting old people to me then. As I later realized their value in my life, I found that they had been taken from me before I could know them and learn from them.

Genealogy related documents are appearing by the millions on the internet, at an ever increasing rate. The odds of finding out about someone in your family tree have also been growing. I'm in awe imagining what the future will bring. Get started: type a name, then press that enter key. I was lucky to be able to penetrate the past along so many paths, although it was neither fast nor easy. My obstacles and successes will be different from yours, but along the way some of the pieces of the puzzle will fall into place, and you will learn more about yourself.

I hope you meet as many fine and interesting people along the way as I did - new and distant cousins, or companions of new and distant cousins. The world is getting smaller before our eyes, and a big family is coming together.

Mike Spieth
2019