Picturing the Past- Another Resource for Genealogists Part I

As you can see, this is the town square of Spencer, Owen County, Indiana sometime in the late 30's or early 40's. (according to the database) I was noodling around again in Ancestry on the "newly added records" section which you find at the bottom of your home page. I found Historical Postcards. Of course I started entering names of places where I had large groups of ancestors right away. This is the best result I found. Spencer is the little town my great great grandmother, Letitia Ellen Johnson, came from.

You get some feeling for Spencer. The classic town square, the storefronts that must date from the 1800's, the memorial (probably a war memorial) in the square. It could be any little town in Texas just as easily. I've been to those little places. I turned it over to see what else I could learn.

What clues were here? Well Lyle and Charles are writing to "Eddie" or Edna in the fall of 1945. The war is over and they are visiting for some reason. The writing style is casual. These are youngish people.  Edna Madison (we think) lives in York, Pennsylvania. So I turned this little mystery over to my friend David Webb. He is a real postcard sleuth. We spent a couple of days going back and forth over this. Was the name really Madison? Could we find her? Were these guys friends? Relatives? Did they have a tie to Spencer? Alas it was, as David put it, a "dry hole". He pointed out that after WWII, the cards are harder to search. More mobility and in this case too few clues.

These folks aren't related to me in any way I know of, I just thought it would be an interesting puzzle to solve. David has a very specific method for researching old postcards and has had a fair bit of success. More about David, his search methods and his website in the next post. Stay tuned.

Lotta May Smith

Lotta May Smith
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Isn't this a sweet picture? This is Lotta May Smith, my great grandmother's younger sister.  Lotta lived her adult life with her sister Clara, a schoolteacher, and neither ever married. My mother once included her and Clara in a short story which gives a pretty accurate picture of the aunts she knew as a child.

"Lotta, as tall and erect as her sister Cora, but already quite gray, looked out at the world through large, dark, anxious eyes. They (Lotta and Clara) seemed to live in a perpetual state of apprehension, nursing imagined slights and disappearing into their room or going off on walks to whisper..."

As a child, all I knew was that Lotta had had a promising musical career cut short and that she had to be institutionalized with some mental illness.  My mom's writing reveals the family story or perhaps my mother's version of it, "She had a magnificent singing voice...She was auditioning for the Metropolitan Opera. When Mama died, Lotta made a vow she'd never sing again - and she never has."

The truth is both sad and perhaps a little different. At the turn of the century she was singing with the Orpheus Quartet and shows up regularly in reviews in the Fitchburg Sentinel. By the 1920 census she was living with her sister and her mother in Worcester, Massachusetts and working as a clerk. By 1930 she was a hairdresser. What turned her from her singing career we'll never know, but by 1920 she was already 30 years old. Had signs of mental illness already begun?  She shows up one more time in the 1940 census living with Clara and doing hair, but by the time I was born in the fifties she was in an nursing home or institution.

Lotta's father George F Smith was from Litchfield, Maine. Her mother, Letitia Ellen Johnson, was from Spencer in Owen County, Indiana. It was researching her mother's line that gave me the first clue to Lotta's real story...or at least part of it. The 1860 census reveals this

1860 Census-Spencer, Owen, Indiana

Elizabeth would be Margaret Elizabeth, Lotta's grandmother. The note on the right gave me pause.
Letitia, Lotta's mother, was only 4 years old. Margaret was only 29. A quick email to a family member revealed that early onset Alzheimers ran in that side of the family.  At only 29 she seems pretty young for Alzheimers, but in those days they wouldn't have know what it was anyway.
The 1880 Census shows that by this time the family couldn't manage.

1880 Census- Indiana State Hospital for the Insane

What a terrible choice her husband would have had to make! I did a little online research on the Indiana State Hospital and found it horrifying. Now I understood what probably happened to Aunt Lotta. Luckily, Lotta's care was more benign and her sister Clara was devoted to her for her entire life.

No one goes into genealogy looking for medical ailments, but this story gives information that might be useful to me or to family members.  It also filled out my picture of Aunt Lotta. It's nice to know a little more about the charming young girl in the photo.