More About August Becker’s First Family

As I indicated in my last post, there are some interesting stories about the family of August Henry Becker that we were able to unearth in a variety of ways and places. Much of the information came serendipitously as I moved from source to source, searching for anything to do with the man and/or the surname.

Eileen (my client) recalled that a man had shown up at her home in Edmonton, possibly in the 1930s or ‘40s, claiming to be her father’s son. The man was rushed off by Eileen’s mother and not a word was ever spoken again about the visit or the individual’s claim of a connection to August. We are pretty sure the individual was Robert Becker, August’s youngest son from his first marriage.

In the process of searching for data, I checked the usual sources for August Becker, primarily on Ancestry. We knew he had been born in Pennsylvania, so that bit of information was useful in finding immigration and settlement documents.

The 1911 Canada census listed both August, Nellie and three children – Joseph, Emily and Thelma – living almost next door to the family of Henry Needham, in the Provost area of Eastern Alberta. Two of August’s brothers had also immigrated to Alberta and lived in the area. The article in Early Furrows, mentioned in my last post, had noted that Nellie and August had come to Canada in 1906 to join Nellie’s parents – Henry and Susan Needham – and brothers in homesteading in Eastern Alberta. It also described a fourth Becker child, Robert. By 1921, August and Nellie were in Edmonton, with August working as a photo engraver, which was his first and main occupation. He apparently was not cut out to be a farmer.

Interestingly, a search of Henderson’s Edmonton Directory on the Peel’s Prairie Provinces website found August working as a photo engraver at McDermid Engraving Company, proprietor Mr. F. G. McDermid. August worked there from at least 1919 through 1922. In 1920 Mary Moller joined the firm as a photo retoucher – and so they met! In 1922, August’s daughter Emily also worked at McDermid’s, as a stenographer. We speculate she was a friend of Mary’s at the time as they were of similar age.

Border-crossing information showed that August, along with Mary Moller, his future second wife, had travelled to the US on January 4, 1923. I also found another border crossing document for Nellie Becker, who went to the US on January 8, 1923. She was going to “visit” her father, Henry Needham, in Ohio. Nellie was accompanied by two of her children, Thelma and Robert. Her parents had previously returned to the US in 1921. The address he gave at the time of his trip to the US in 1923 was the same as the one shown in the directories so things were tying together.

By 1923, as we saw on the border crossing forms, it appears August’s marriage had broken up and he was now in love with Mary Moller. Nellie had indicated on the border crossing document that the last person she had visited or been friends with in Canada before she left was one F. G. McDermott. I did not think the similarity of names was a coincidence and she was actually referring to F. G. McDermid of McDermid Engraving. That seemed to tie the individuals even closer.

The censuses, border crossing forms and community history book gave us names of the four children from August’s first marriage along with their birth dates – the 1911 Canada census shows month as well as year – so I searched for them, mainly to see what had happened after they returned to the US. I found Nellie and the children on the 1930 and 1940 US federal censuses, living in Pensylvania.

On further review I discovered Nellie, Emily and Robert, quite by accident, on a 1945 census from Florida, of all places. That set off a whole new investigation which I will discuss in my next post. The 1945 census showed Robert, was married, with one daughter who had been born in Pennsylvania in 1943. Nellie was living with the family as well. Living in the same house was Emily, also now married and with two sons of her own, also born in Pennsylvania. Joseph and Thelma appear to have remained in Pennsylvania.

On Ancestry, I came across August on a private Family Tree. I wrote to the owner of the tree and found she was related to August through one of his sisters. She had a great deal of information about his siblings and I was able to give her more data on August’s life and second family in Canada. Not only did she have the data on family members, she also had photos of them which she kindly shared with us.

 

Photo of the family of August John and Amelia (Herchenbach) Becker, taken at their Mt. Carmel home in Pennsylvania

We believe the family picture was taken about 1925, on the occasion of August’s parents’ 50^th wedding anniversary. Nearly all of August’s brothers and sisters and their children, including his daughter, Emily were shown in the photograph. Eileen was surprised and delighted by this piece of information. She had previously thought, and had possibly been told, that her father had travelled to Pennsylvania in the 1920s for a funeral of one of his parents. She was even more shocked when I showed her that they were both still alive and well on the 1930 census and then came up with copies of the obituaries notices for both of them – her grandfather’s in 1932 and her grandmother’s in 1936 – again kindly given to us by the Ancestry family tree-owner.

Eileen knew that her paternal grandparents had lived in Pennsylvania after migrating from Germany in 1880. They were part of a very large population of Germans recruited to work in the region’s coal mines. Eileen had found some information in the Mt. Carmel Catholic church records but had never met her grandparents. She had met one aunt who had visited Canada in 1951, but she had never knew much about her father’s other siblings. She thought he might have been cut off from the family following his divorce from Nellie. The family photo demonstrated this was not the case at all.

Eileen was now very curious about her half-brothers and sisters and we set about finding out more about them. In my next post I will detail some of the other surprising things we found out about those half-siblings and cousins.

Wayne Shepheard is a volunteer with the Online Parish Clerk program in England, handling four parishes in Devon, England. He has published a number of articles about various aspects of genealogy and is a past Editor of Chinook, the quarterly journal of the Alberta Family Histories Society. Wayne also provides genealogical consulting services through his business, Family History Facilitated.

Usefulness of Community History Books

A few years ago I was looking for information concerning the father of a client, by the name of August Becker. Eileen (the client) knew he had been married before he met her mother but apparently neither one would ever talk about that marriage while Eileen and her siblings were growing up, or what happened to the union in the end. The parents had been deceased for many years before we started the research – Eileen herself was in her eighties – so we had no one to ask about the situation. She did know that her father had apparently lived in Eastern Alberta at one time so that was a start.

I will have more to say about some of the very interesting stories uncovered about the family in a later post but what I wanted to highlight today was the usefulness of local area history books. I have a couple in my collection for my own family. They were produced in the 1970s and contain the recollections of original settlers and/or their children about the areas where my parents were raised. Many local communities took advantage of government grants back then to assemble the stories and information about the areas and the families. The books provide, in many cases, first-hand accounts of people, places and historical events not available elsewhere. There are many such historical summaries spanning the country, highlighting villages and farming regions in most provinces.

I also have some pages from a similar book titled Portrait and Biographical Album of Washington, Clay and Riley Counties, Kansas, published by Chapman Publishing Co. of Chicago, in 1890. It is part of a large series of similar books put out by Chapman, Biographical Publishing Co., Lake City Publishing Co., Record Publishing Co. and others in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries. Dozens are available to read and download for free at Archive.org (just search for “portrait and biographical”). Most have the description “. . . Portraits & Biographical Sketches of Prominent and Representative Citizens” but also offer historical information about the communities. I found a few similar books that can be read on Open Library and Google Books. I am sure there are many other websites as well where genealogists may access books of interest.

The book with information about Riley County, Kansas contains very interesting information about one of my 2^nd great-granduncles, who was a prominent doctor in Randolph, Riley County, and his parents, my 3^rd great-grandparents. The biography opened up another line of inquiry for information about my ancestors which I had not seen anywhere else.

Anyway, I did a search for a similar book for the Provost region of Alberta and found one available for purchase on Amazon, called Early Furrows: A story of our early pioneers in Provost, Hayter, Bodo, Alberta and surrounding districts, published in 1977 by the local Senior Citizens Club of Provost. Not only did it contain a write up of the first August Becker family, it had a photograph of them as well.

 

Photo of the family of August and Nellie (Needham) Becker, taken on their homestead near Provost, Alberta about 1915 (copied from Early Furrows; photo was provided by Emily (Becker) Henry, second from the left)

Seeing the family for the first time delighted Eileen and set us off on more searches for August’s first family and Eileen’s half-brothers and sisters, whom she never knew or knew about.

The Early Furrows book, along with many others, including my own KIK Country, about the communities of Keoma, Irricana and Kathryn, near Calgary, has since been scanned and can be accessed on the our roots nos racines website which has a wide collection of material on Canadian local histories.

Local area historical publications are always worth looking at. Sometimes recollections of those submitting information are not entirely accurate but they they do provide a great resource written by members of those families who lived in the areas. The information in the books can easily be compared to that found in other data sources.

Grants are available in Canada from many provincial departments and other organizations to support the activities of local communities, including the assembly and publication of history books. In Western Canada, these websites might be investigated:

Alberta      http://culture.alberta.ca/

British Columbia http://aabc.ca/resources/grants-and-funding/

Manitoba http://www.gov.mb.ca/chc/grants/heritage_grants.html

Saskatchewan http://heritagesask.ca/resources/grant-db

Government of Canada http://www.pch.gc.ca/eng/1267799042836

Next up: more about those elusive Becker family members Eileen learned about and some of the surprises she had when stories she was told turned out to be not exactly truthful.

Wayne Shepheard is a volunteer with the Online Parish Clerk program, handling four parishes in Devon, England. He has published a number of articles about various aspects of genealogy and is a past Editor of Chinook, the quarterly journal of the Alberta Family Histories Society. Wayne also provides genealogical consulting services through his business, Family History Facilitated.

Passenger List Confusion

I have posted before about passenger lists and the difficulty in finding people. Recently I was looking for information for a friend whose grandfather had come to Canada from Romania in the early part of the 20^th century. From other family information, including a personal biography written by this individual, we had a birth date and the year he immigrated. As with many cases, especially for non-English speaking people, the record of his name was inconsistent.

Trifu Samoila was born on November 10, 1887, in a little town named Uzdin, a few miles north of Belgrade. The town is presently located in Serbia, formerly part of Yugoslavia. That corner of the country is also a place where many families are of Romanian descent. That was the case for the Samoila family. So, on many documents, there is a mixture of nationality and origin.

 

Part of the outgoing passenger record for the ship, Lake Simcoe, which sailed from Liverpool, England to St. John, New Brunswick on March 4, 1903, showing the Samaila family (copyright-holder The National Archives; image downloaded October 27, 2014 from Ancestry)

Part of the incoming passenger record for the ship, Lake Simcoe, which arrived at St. John, New Brunswick on March 14, 1903, showing the Samaila family (copyright-holder Library and Archives Canada; image downloaded September 18, 2014 from Ancestry)

The ship passenger list shows the family of Roumanian (Romanian) origin. They were en route to Regina, Saskatchewan, which seemed to confirm this was the right family. Later documents, including Trifu’s marriage record and the 1916 Canada census, show his birthplace as Hungary. His Canadian naturalization certificate says his birthplace was “Serb-Croat-Slovakia” and his nationality as Hungarian. Uzdin was, in fact, part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire until 1918. Just to add to the confusion, the family’s surname has been spelled and/or transcribed differently on many records on both continents.

Anyway, both passenger lists show adults Jan/Yan, age 46, and Iconio/Iconia (age 40) Samaila and children, Trifu (11), Adam (10), Totia (4-5) and George (3). On the face of it, this is a nice, neat family. The problem is that it is actually members of two families. Jan, later called John, and Iconia had two sons, Adam and Totia (Joseph). Trifu and George were their nephews, sons of John’s brother, Peter, who had immigrated earlier in 1903. The age of 11 shown for Trifu was not accurate as he would have been closer to 16 years of age. No other immigration documents have been found so we cannot determine why he was recorded much younger than he actually was.

Given all of the other information we have about the family and most of the facts shown on the passenger lists, we have no doubt that they represent the right families. Without the additional data, however, perhaps especially Trifu’s own biography, these passenger lists might only have served to confuse or misdirect a family history researcher.

There are genealogical lessons to be learned, or at least reminded of with this example:

1.      Assemble and compare every kind of information you can about an individual.

2.      All types of records can and often do contain errors or mistakes, whether accidental, intentional or through carelessness.

3.      Question everything. An individual’s own recollections may be faulty especially in what they think they know about other family members and their ancestors.

4.      Be aware of different spellings of names and especially of transcriptions on public websites.

Wayne Shepheard is a volunteer with the Online Parish Clerk program, handling four parishes in Devon, England. He has published a number of articles about various aspects of genealogy and is a past Editor of Chinook, the quarterly journal of the Alberta Family Histories Society. Wayne also provides genealogical consulting services through his business, Family History Facilitated.