Tangled Roots

by Marcia Talley

  Using the same search criteria, I requested the 1930 census. Josiah and his son Adam, now fifteen years old, were still living on Chelsea Street, but Charlotte – who would have been eighteen at the time – was not listed. Neither was Jane.

  The question of what happened to Jane was answered easily enough. Under ‘marital status’, Josiah was listed as ‘W’ – a widower. Sometime between 1920 and 1930, then, Jane had passed away. I made a note to search for her death certificate.

  But what had happened to Charlotte?

  Using my grandmother’s full name, I did a broader search across the whole US census for 1930. I spent the better part of an hour scrolling through more than seven hundred results spanning the continent from sea to shining sea. I eliminated the Charlotte L. in Nashville (too old), the one in Kansas (dead) and the one in Cleveland who was only a Drew by marriage. Several dozen others seemed promising, but none turned out to be a positive match for my grandmother.

  I sat back in my chair, feeling defeated.

  What next?

  Small town newspapers, I’d found, were a treasure trove of information and, thanks to digitization, almost as easy to read as if strewn across my coffee table. In the halcyon days before Facebook, Twitter and Instagram took over our lives, newspapers reported on town meetings, social events, and land sales; on births, deaths and weddings. You learned who was visiting whom, both in and out of town, and why. Whose sheep had escaped and were roaming freely on the green. Umbrellas lost and pocket watches found. Police reports and personal notices often revealed facts about our ancestors that they’d rather have been kept shrouded in mystery.

  As it turns out, my subscription to Newspapers.com would have been cheap at twice the price. Among the dozens of historic newspapers in rural Vermont, I found the announcement for Charlotte’s wedding, titled Smith-Drew, fairly easily. It had taken place on a day when frocks with ‘pep’ were two dollars ninety-eight at J.C. Penney, a pound of Maxwell House coffee cost thirty-three cents, Miss America smoked Lucky Strike (It’s toasted!) and Rinso was so easy on the hands.

  I shot from my chair and yelled upstairs for my husband. ‘Paul! Come see what I found!’

  His voice, drifting down from the living room, was muffled. ‘I’m watching the game! Can it wait?’

  ‘No, dammit!’ I grabbed my laptop and trundled up to join him.

  According to the Bethel Gazette for Thursday, October 20, 1932:

  All the brilliant tints of autumn in branches of the changing foliage adorned the residence of Mr and Mrs H.H. Westerly for the wedding of their niece, Miss Charlotte Louise Drew of South Royalton, Vermont who was united in marriage Saturday morning to Stephen Henry Smith of Randolph, in the presence of sixteen relatives and intimate friends of the contracting parties.

  At eleven o’clock the bride and groom descended the stairway and entered the parlors, attended by the maid of honor, Miss Ida James of South Royalton and the best man, Charles Keane of Baltimore, a friend of the groom.

  Very lovely was the bride in her wedding gown of white crepe de chine with lace and pearl trimmings. For ornaments she wore a watch, the gift of the groom, and a pearl necklace that had once belonged to her mother, and she carried a beautiful shower bouquet of white carnations. The maid of honor was prettily gowned in pink messaline. Among others in attendance were the groom’s mother, Mrs Jacob Smith of Randolph, and the bride’s grandparents, Mr and Mrs Asa Drew of South Royalton, the former having reached the age of eighty the 29th of August and the latter attaining to fourscore the 29th of September, and being now in the 59th year of their married life.

  After the service came an elegant wedding breakfast in a dining room decorated in pink and green with spruce, sweetpeas and asters.

  I sat in the living room with my laptop on my knees, reading the article to Paul in the plummy tones of an old-time radio announcer. I glanced up from the screen to see if he was paying attention. ‘Small town newspapers are gems. This is like the Rosetta Stone.’

  Paul was half listening to me and half watching the Yankees get trounced by the Orioles on ESPN. ‘In what way?’

  ‘In addition to the birthdays of my Drew great-great-grandparents, I can also calculate the year of their marriage.’

  Paul silently pumped his fist, not to recognize my brilliance but as Mancini homered to center.

  I ignored him. ‘Also, reading between the lines here, Charlotte’s mother and father must have passed away by October of ’thirty-two. Stephen’s father, too, or they all would have been attending the wedding.’

  Paul leaned closer to the television, sending positive mojo to Nunez who had just stepped up to the plate. ‘Uh huh.’

  ‘And I picked up a couple of relatives I never knew about.’

  Paul risked a glance my way. ‘You did? Who?’

  ‘An aunt and uncle I’ve never heard of, the Westerlys. I wonder if she’s a Drew or a Smith?’

  ‘I thought you said her name was Westerly.’

  ‘Mr H.H. is the Westerly,’ I explained. ‘Before her marriage, Mrs H.H. must have been either a Drew or a Smith if Charlotte is her niece.’ I paused. ‘My guess is Mrs H.H. is standing in for her late sister, Jane.’ I sighed. ‘Back in the day, a woman lost her identity upon marriage, at least as far as the social columns in newspapers were concerned. I’ll have to do some digging through the census files for Mrs H.H.’s first name.’

  Paul leapt to his feet as Nunez singled to center, sending Joseph sliding into third. ‘Yes! That’s what I’m talking about!’

  ‘You’re hopeless,’ I said. With two players on base, getting my husband’s undivided attention was mission impossible.

  While I jotted down some dates on the back of an old New Yorker magazine, Joseph managed to score on an infield single by Valera, giving the Orioles a safe six-point lead and Paul permission to go for a beer. At the door to the dining room he turned and said, probably as an afterthought, ‘You want anything?’

  ‘Maybe later,’ I said, glancing up from my notes. ‘There’s more to the article, if you’re interested.’

  ‘The anticipation is killing me,’ he said.

  I reached behind me for a pillow and tossed it at his head. ‘You haven’t heard one word I’ve said!’

  Laughing, Paul batted the pillow away. ‘Oh, yes I have.’

  I gave him a hard side-eye.

  ‘There’s one thing I really have to know,’ he said.

  I set my laptop to one side and looked up. ‘Yes?’

  ‘What’s messaline?’

  When Paul returned to the game carrying his beer and a steaming bag of microwave popcorn, I described the fabric to him. ‘Messaline’s a lightweight silk, with a textured finish, like twill. I don’t think they make it any more.’

  I helped myself to a fistful of popcorn. ‘There’s more to the article,’ I said, chewing thoughtfully.

  ‘Read on, Macduff,’ Paul said.

  ‘Very punny, Mr Shakespeare.’ I reached for the laptop. ‘There’s more about fabrics, you’ll be pleased to hear,’ I said, paging forward and continuing to read where I’d left off.

  The bride having donned a traveling gown of green broadcloth with a hat to match, Mr and Mrs Smith left in a cloudburst of confetti for Boston and after November 1st will be at home on the Smith family farm in Randolph. The bride was last year studying nursing in Pierre, South Dakota. For the past month she has been staying with relatives in South Royalton.

  ‘South Dakota?’ I nearly fell off my chair. All that time spent trolling through the census files and the answer was in the newspaper all along. ‘What’s in South Dakota?’

  ‘A school of nursing, I presume,’ Paul said.

  ‘But why go all the way to South Dakota to attend nursing school?’

  ‘Maybe she got a scholarship,’ Paul suggested. ‘Money could have been an issue. Didn’t you say her parents were dead?’

  ‘According to the census, her mother died sometime before 1930, but her father was still alive then.
There could be another reason he didn’t attend the wedding.’ I made a note to check the 1940 census to see if Josiah and his son Adam still appeared, chiding myself for not doing it earlier.

  TWELVE

  Pierre, South Dakota, has a population of 14,000, according to the Pierre Chamber of Commerce. The state capital was described as a friendly community whose ‘tree-lined streets, historic downtown and lush green parks give way to rolling hills and steep bluffs as the county spreads east into the state’s expansive plains’.

  But that was today.

  Back in the thirties, it must have been the wild, wild west, and only George Washington’s carved granite head would have greeted tourists visiting Mount Rushmore. Pierre, then as now, was located in the heart of Sioux Indian territory, not far from the Lower Brule and Rosebud Indian Reservations.

  I had to be on the right track.

  Armed with the information I’d learned from the Bethel Gazette, I called up the 1930 US census data. This time, I limited the search to ‘South Dakota’ and ‘Charlotte Drew’. When I studied the search results, I saw immediately why I’d missed Charlotte in my earlier, much broader attempt to find her. When the census taker knocked at the door back in April of 1930, whoever answered his questions had given Grandmother’s name as ‘Lottie’.

  I’d never known my grandmother to use that nickname. Grandfather always called her ‘Buttercup’ after the heroine in his favorite Gilbert and Sullivan operetta, H.M.S. Pinafore. ‘Lottie’ was definitely my grandmother though – the age was correct, as was her place of birth, Vermont. In 1930, Lottie Drew had been living with seven other ‘boarders’ at a house on North Huron Avenue. Her occupation: student.

  The census also answered another question – how Charlotte happened to find herself in South Dakota.

  Another boarder in the house on North Huron was Charles Keene, her future husband’s good friend, the one he’d chosen for best man at his wedding. Charles’s occupation? Doctor. One other doctor, two nurses, a stenographer and a drayman also shared the house, which was headed by Bertha Lumley, age fifty-one. With all that medical horsepower close at hand, where better to be struck by a car in Pierre, South Dakota, I mused, than the middle of North Huron Avenue?

  If proximity were any guarantee, Charles Keene was a likely candidate for my biological grandfather. I imagined a smart, ambitious Native American lad, the first of his family to attend medical school, returning home to care for his people after completing training at a university back East.

  A search of online yearbooks put the kibosh on that theory. Charles Jameson Keene had been a graduate of Johns Hopkins University, class of 1926, transferring from Middlebury College in Vermont in 1922, majoring in Pre-Med. His picture in the Hullabaloo for that year showed a blond, blue-eyed poster child for a Finnish health spa, his curls marcelled into a swirl on top of his head, like a cone from a soft-serve ice cream machine. Chuck also ran track his first two years and had been a member of the Musical Club.

  I’d peppered my research with periodic updates to Paul, who finally gave up on the ball game, switched off the television and perched on the ottoman next to my feet.

  ‘“Chuck” had some great loves,’ I read aloud from the yearbook entry, ‘but not for girls. They are for vases, flowers and paintings, in fact for anything old and interesting.’

  ‘I’m old and interesting.’ I studied my husband over the tops of my reading glasses. ‘He would have loved me.’

  Paul snorted. ‘Sounds like your good friend Chuck might have been gay.’

  I gave him a soft kick in the thigh.

  Chuck’s craving for old things was illustrated by the mention that he’d recently purchased a second-hand flivver and, reportedly, broken all speed records in Towson over the summer. ‘However,’ the entry continued, ‘it is hard to imagine Chuck dissecting a “stiff” or, worse still, performing an operation on an honest to goodness human being.’

  ‘Joy riding around town in an old Model T Ford?’ I said. ‘I think I would have loved this dude.’

  Doctors and nurses had to be working somewhere nearby, I reasoned. Almost reluctantly, I clicked away from Chuck’s colorful yearbook entry and brought up Google. A search for hospitals in present-day Pierre came up with only one, now owned by Avera, a health care conglomerate with more than 300 locations in South Dakota, North Dakota, Nebraska, Minnesota and Iowa. Before it became part of a sprawling, for-profit enterprise, though, the hospital had been simply called St Mary’s.

  I navigated to the Avera St Mary’s website and clicked on the ‘history’ tab. Back in 1882, I read, a doctor named D.W. Robinson who planned to practice medicine out in California, found himself stranded at the end of the railroad line in Pierre. Out of funds, he began to support himself by caring for patients in the old Park Hotel there, operating on kitchen tables, ironing boards and even the floors.

  In 1899, ten years after South Dakota became a state, five Benedictine Sisters took over the old Park Hotel. It had been deserted for several years by then, the only guests being animals and birds, and was so filthy from critters and river sand that the Sisters couldn’t even determine the color of the woodwork. Their intention was to clean it up for use as a school, but the city fathers convinced them that health care was an even greater need than a school. The Sisters immediately changed their plans, opening a hospital and a training school for nurses. Mary Woods was the first white baby born in the hospital on December 9, 1899 and the first operation was performed a little more than a month later on a proper operating table donated by the aforementioned Dr Robinson.

  The enterprise thrived. By the time Charlotte and Charles arrived in Pierre nearly thirty years later, the hospital had been accredited and a new facility was being built with one hundred beds.

  ‘No wonder they needed doctors and nurses,’ Paul said. ‘They were expanding.’

  I smiled. ‘Imagine how a staunch Congregationalist like Charlotte must have chafed under the yoke of the Benedictine Brides of Christ. I’m old enough to remember when John F. Kennedy, a Catholic, was running for president. “We can’t have a mackerel snapper occupying the White House!” Grandmother would rant. “He’ll answer to the Pope, not the American people!” What she’d say about the far-right religious wingnuts who seem to be calling the shots in politics these days I can only imagine.’

  It seemed clear that an invitation from Charles Keene had drawn Charlotte to a professional training opportunity in South Dakota, almost two thousand miles from her home. I wondered if she had grown homesick out on the Great Plains, so far away from the lush, Green Mountain state.

  Nowadays Charlotte would have texted: School sux. Send $$. Had she written letters to her father and little brother back home?

  A hundred years before her great-great-grandchildren’s every move would be chronicled on Facebook and Instagram, had Charlotte kept a diary?

  A search of the storage facility mentioned by my father just moved closer to the top of my To-Do list.

  ‘Do you know what happened to Charles after he attended your grandparents’ wedding?’ Paul asked.

  ‘Not yet, but stay tuned.’

  A search of Fold3, the military database, turned up Charles’s World War Two draft registration card. According to the Cuyahoga County draft board, Charles was working as a surgeon in Cleveland, Ohio, had blond hair and blue eyes, was five foot ten inches tall, weighed one hundred and eighty pounds and had a slight scar on his forehead. ‘After the attack on Pearl Harbor in December of 1941,’ I reported, ‘Charles shows up on Navy muster rolls as a Lieutenant in the Medical Corps. He must have been deployed somewhere in the Pacific theater.’

  ‘How do you know that?’

  ‘He’s got a fleet post office address in San Francisco,’ I said. ‘If they’d shipped him out to Europe, it would be FPO New York.’

  Paul squeezed my big toe. ‘I’m going for more wine. Refill?’

  ‘You bet,’ I said, handing over my empty glass.

  While Paul
was fetching the wine, I logged on to the newspaper database and searched Ohio newspapers for Charles’s name. A short obituary in the Cleveland Plain Dealer provided chilling details: Lieutenant Charles Keene had been killed in action on Tarawa, November 23, 1943, when the field hospital where he was operating was hit by enemy fire.

  On FindAGrave.com, I found an image of Chuck’s tombstone at Greenmount Cemetery in Burlington, Vermont. I stared at it for a long time, thinking about my grandmother’s friend, feeling desperately sad that his, and so many other young lives, had been cut short by war. I didn’t realize until tears dripped onto my keyboard that I’d started to cry.

  Paul appeared at my elbow, holding a glass of wine in each hand. ‘What’s wrong, sweetie?’

  ‘He died,’ I sniffed.

  Paul’s eyebrows shot up. ‘Who died?’

  ‘Charles Keene, my grandfather’s best man.’

  Paul set the wine glasses down on the end table. ‘Hannah, he would almost certainly be dead by now anyway.’

  ‘I know, but I wish I had known him, is all. He was only thirty-eight years old when he was killed.’

  Paul sat on the ottoman, looked into my face and swiped an errant tear away with his thumb. ‘You’re very good at this, you know.’

  I swallowed hard. ‘Good at what? Weeping at the drop of a hat?’

  ‘Research.’

  ‘Just shut up and get me a tissue,’ I snuffled.

  ‘How about a pizza?’ Paul asked when he returned. ‘I don’t think either of us feels like cooking.’

  I snatched a tissue from the box he held out to me and blew my nose. ‘With mushrooms?’

  ‘With whatever toppings you want.’

  ‘I don’t want to go out. Let’s have it delivered.’

  Paul picked up the wine glasses and handed one to me. ‘Your wish is my command.’