Sunday, April 9, 2017

Update: Lillie and Nellie Campbell

Sometimes, the tiniest of clues can lead to a breakthrough.

Just before Christmas, I received an email from someone who came across this blog while going about her own research. She offered to help me fill in some gaps after the holidays, and even though she only told me that she was the widow of the grandson of Lillie May Campbell, that one fact - that Lillie grew up and married - was enough to open up a whole treasure trove of records on Ancestry. Even before hearing back from my new distant cousin, I was able to add about two dozen missing descendants of James Callin to the tree!

Of course, some of those records only raised more questions; if I didn't have someone to ask, I would have no way of answering them myself. So thank you to Barbara for reaching out to me!

As it happens, I have been able to update two families based on what I've learned, so here we go:

Lillie May Campbell (1871–1946)

Lillie was the eldest daughter and the second child of Harrison M Campbell (1837–1924) and Catherine Hoot (1846–1930), the subjects of the post The Campbells Take Missouri (originally posted in January 2015). The only information I had about Lillie in that post was based on her 1800 U.S. Census record, which gave her name and age: "Lillian, age 9."

At 16 years of age, on 27 December 1887, Lillie married George G Weaver (1858–1918) in Morgan county, Missouri. George was a farmer who was born in Fort Scott, Kansas, before the Civil War, and they settled in Haw Creek, Missouri, where they began their family.

They had a son, Roy, in 1893, followed by their daughters Edith, in 1896, and Gladys, in 1900. Sadly, Gladys died at age four in 1904. Eight years later, they had another little boy, Frank.

Both George and Roy died in 1918. George suffered from heart and kidney failure, likely from untreated kidney disease. He was only 59.

Lillie's parents, Harrison and Kate Campbell, are known to have moved to Oregon in 1919, where Lillie's sister, Mary Hodges, had moved with her family about ten years prior. Lillie seems to have decided to move with them, bringing her two surviving children to Oregon with her, only to lose young Frank in 1921.

Lillie married again before 1930, this time to a doctor named George Thomas Darland (1857–1935) whose first wife had died in 1924. He cared for her in Hillsboro until his death in 1935, and then she moved to be closer to her children and grandchildren in Beaverton. She was living with the Cady family in 1940, and died in Washington county in 1946.

     I. Roy R Weaver (1893–1918) grew up in Haw Creek, Missouri, and was farming there in 1918, when he registered for the World War I draft. He died in 1918, and was buried in Verasailles Cemetery in Morgan county, near his father.

     II. Edith Vivian Weaver (1896–1960) also grew up on the farm in Haw Creek, and served as a nurse overseas during World War I. After the war, she moved with her mother and grandparents to Beaverton, Oregon, where she married  Willis Lawrence Cady (1896–1961) on 7 November 1923. Willis's grandfather, Alonzo B. Cady, was the 1st mayor of Beaverton in 1893; his father also was mayor and built the first brick building in Beaverton, which is still standing.

       A. Maxine Elizabeth Cady (1925–2011) attended Beaverton Schools and University of Oregon (Gamma Phi Beta) graduating from the School of Music. In 1946 she married "the boy I fell in love with in the 2nd grade", Bob Barnes. A piano prodigy, Maxine taught piano lessons, and organized the first high school choir at Bethel Congregational Church, becoming Director of Music and Organist in 1955. In 1956 she began teaching music in the Beaverton School District. There she was famous for her elaborate mini Broadway musicals. In 1973, she was awarded Teacher of the Year honors. As a teacher, director and musician Maxine was admired, respected and loved by her peers, but especially by her students.

Following the passing of her husband, Maxine started a new adventure as real estate broker. After her second career, Maxine directed and played for the Way Off Broadway Singers that toured local Senior Centers. During this time she became a companion of Earl Bolliger, a friend since Beaverton High days; they happily shared life's journey until Earl's passing in 2006.

Maxine is survived by her son, three daughters, 11 grandchildren and 5 great grandchildren.

       B. David Lawrence Cady (1928–2008) was born June 5, 1928, in Portland, Oregon. David was reared in Beaverton and was a 1946 graduate of Beaverton High School. He served in the Army from 1951 to 1952 during the Korean conflict. In 1959 he graduated from the University of Oregon with a bachelor's degree.

He was a CPA, with his own practice in Gladstone. He retired in 2004. He was a member of Beaverton and West Linn Lions clubs, a charter member of South Park Unitarian Fellowship of West Linn, and served Friends of Clackamas Community College for 20 years.

He and his wife lived in West Linn for 46 years before moving back to retire in Beaverton in 2004. She survives him, along with their son and daughter, and two grandchildren.

     III. Gladys M Weaver (1900–1904) died at age four, and was buried in Versailles Cemetery, where her father and older brother would eventually join her.

     IV. Frank E Weaver (1912–1921) was only nine years old when he died from pneumonia after suffering a case of measles. He died in Forest Grove, Oregon, and he was buried in the Forest View Cemetery there.

There you have the update for Lillie - but in the process of digging for those records, I learned more about her sister, who we only knew as "Ella, age 3," from the 1880 Census! We also solved the mystery of the "Deronshire Campbell" who appeared in the 1920 Census as a grandson of Harrison and Kate. 

 Nellie Viola Campbell (1877–1967)

Nellie was the fourth child, and third daughter, of Harrison and Catherine (Hoot) Campbell. She was born 13 April 1877 in Tipton, Morgan county, Missouri. She married a man called Earl C De Avonshire in Morgan county on 31 July 1907, and moved with him to Indianapolis, Indiana, where their son, Campbell De Avonshire was born in 1908.

Piecing together conflicting clues from the records to get a picture of what happened to Nellie and Earl was difficult, but they were living in Ohio when their second son, Wellington, was born in 1911. Their daughter, Lucille, was born back in Tipton, Missouri, in 1913, but Earl's World War I draft registration card showed they were living in Akron, Ohio, in 1918. This record also gave his name as "Edward Clinton Deavonshire" and I might have ignored it as a different person if it hadn't listed his nearest relative as Mrs. Nellie De Avonshire.

(I don't know whether "Edward Clinton" was his given name and "Earl" an actual title of nobility, or if "Earl" was a nickname. One of his daughter's marriage records says he was born in England, but another says he was born in Virginia; and two other records place his origin in Ohio.))

Nellie and Earl seem to have parted by 1920; Nellie and Wellington appeared in the Census in Washington county, Oregon, near the other transplanted members of the Campbell family. Campbell De Avonshire showed up in that Census living with his grandparents, Harrison and Catherine, in their Forest Grove, Oregon, home - but it mistakenly lists his aunt Frances as his mother. (And calls him "Deronshire Campbell.") Earl shows up (as Edward C) in 1930 in Libertyville, Illinois, running a restaurant with a new wife.

Nellie married again about 1927. Her new husband was the recently widowed Jacob H Shearer (1855–1940). She lost Jacob just two years before Campbell died; and later, in 1949, she married
William Oscar McConnahay (1878–1969), who survived her by two years.

     I. Campbell De Avonshire (1908–1942) was born in Indianapolis, and came with his mother and her family to Oregon around 1919. In 1930, at age 22, he was a patient resident at the Oregon State Hospital for the Insane. He died in 1942, and was buried in the Forest View cemetery in Forest Grove.

     II. Wellington De Avonshire (1911–1930) was born in Ohio, and he was living with his mother in the home of his step-father, Jacob Shearer, in Forest Grove in 1930 when he died at only 19 years of age.

     III. Lucille Frances De Avonshire (1913–1992) was born in Missouri, and lived with her mother and brother Wellington in 1930. She married Russell W Craine (1906-1966) on 31 January 1932 in Vancouver, Washington; they were together for about eight years. She was married again, this time to Fredrick Melvin Graham (1920–1993) on the day after the Pearl Harbor attacks, 8 December 1941, in Vancouver. They lived in Portland.

Based on the obituaries for Lucille and her last husband, Howard Verne Busch (1914–1993), whom she married on 5 July 1952 in Vancouver, they were survived by three daughters, but it isn't clear whether they were his daughters from a previous marriage, or hers. Regardless, Lucille and Howard are buried together in Mountain View Memorial Gardens, Forest Grove, Oregon.

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I've been lying low the past several months, working on bringing the revised Callin Family History to publication. The computer I was using was not powerful enough to produce the manuscript using Family Tree Maker, and when I upgraded to a newer computer, I was not able to download and install Family Tree Maker, despite having paid extra for that feature in 2014, when I bought FTM in the first place.

Since the new company making FTM wants me to pay $40 for an upgrade, and is charging $80 for the new version, I decided to migrate over to RootsMagic. I've been following Randy Seaver's blog for a while, and he writes about his experiences with various software experiments, and with RootsMagic - click here for an example. The price was right, and the features similar.

While I'm learning and churning, I will probably not be posting with any regularity. If anyone is interested in sending in a guest post, I'd be happy to post that!

And, as always, if you're related to anyone in this post (or any of the previous 137!), please drop me a note at callintad at gmail dot com. Descendants of James Callin are invited to join the Callin Family History Facebook group. And I'm always up to something on Twitter.

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