A Very Grand Obituary - Maria (Wells) Forder

I went to the Minnesota Historical Society yesterday to look up obituaries.  My g3 grandparents, William and Maria (Wells) Forder, were from Hampshire, England, and immigrated in 1840 to Indiana, and then some time shortly after the 1870 census (probably in the spring of 1871), they migrated to Meeker County, Minnesota, settling in Dassel.

The Historical Society has the Dassel Anchor on microfilm, but the earliest editions they have are from late 1893.  William Forder died in 1891, so I couldn't find an obit for him, but Maria died 29 December 1893, so I was lucky that her obituary appeared just a few issues into the roll of microfilm.

Having just found an obituary last weekend for the first wife of my g2grandfather, Jervis Silliman, I noticed that Harriet (Bartlett) Silliman Rollins Larson's obit was titlted "Mrs. Louis Larson" and that while her ex-husband Jervis's name appeared in the obit, her own first name (never mind her maiden name) did not.  I was expecting something similar for Maria Forder, and therefore almost missed the obituary.

Maria's obituary took a full column and a half to print, and was mostly the text of a tribute read at her funeral by the Past Post Commander of the G.A.R. (Grand Army of the Republic), which took place in the town hall and was conducted by the W.R.C. (Women's Relief Corps)!  Most obits I have read indicate that the funeral service is held in the home.

Here is the full text of her obituary, which appeared in the Dassel Anchor Friday, January 5, 1894.

A Mother of Soldiers

As briefly announced in our last issue, Mrs. Maria Forder died on Friday morning, Dec. 29 1893, at her home in Dassel. The funeral services were held at the town hall the next afternoon, conducted by the W. R. C. No more fitting additional public tribute can be paid to her than the publication of the address read by Past Post Commander J. A. Whitaker.

Mrs. President, ladies of the W. R. C. and comrades of the G. A. R.:

Again you are assembled, clad in the habiliments of mourning, to render a last and loving tribute to the memory of one of your loving sisters, who, ripe in years, loved by all and lamented universally, has heard the whispered come! And has gone to her long rest and great reward. Again the dark bowman has flown into your midst and his cruel arrow has pierced the heart of a considerate, tender and loving mother, a devoted sister and warm friend; again has one who has stood with you around your altar and vowed to relieve the distressed, alleviate the pain and cheer the age enfeebled, disease-stricken veteran, fully, fulfilled that obligation, been relieved from duty and entered into that long, that abiding, blissful rest, that supreme, never ending peace, that is only found by those who consistently, faithfully and continually, do the Master's will while on duty here. Again has one of the links in the chain of your sisterhood been broken; again has that invisible tie, that binds you each to the other so strongly that only death can break it, been broken; again has the golden chord been severed; again has one whom in lie you loved been called from the home where she was the guide, from your ranks where she held a prominent and useful place, and left you lonely and tearfully sad. Your sister lived a blameless, cheerful life; and while she was going among you with warm words of encouragement, filled with loving kindness and sympathetic aid; “God's linger touched her and she slept.” Your assembling today is for the sole purpose of honoring her memory, consoling her weeping family and laying her remains at rest in the silent city of the dead, to await the sounding of the reveille that shall proclaim the end of time and summon the world to the bar of judgment, to receive the reward due for the deeds done in the body.

As part of your services today, you have assigned the writer the duty of preparing for this occasion a memorial sketch of the life of your departed sister. That duty is undertaken in love and performed as well as the time at the disposal of the writer, with the ability at his command, will allow. But oh how far short of performing that duty in a manner worthy of the departed will the writer come. He can but hope to place, with you, his wreath of regret upon her narrow home and, with you, testify to her noble character, her womanly worth and sisterly devotion.

By your words of service and notes of song, you are weaving in her honor a monument more lasting than the shaft of marble. By your attendance here to-day, you not only show your realization of your loss and the affliction of her relatives, but you proclaim to the world, that your band of sisterhood is not a rope of sand, but a tie, so strong, so sacred, that your bereavement is such as to properly place you close by the side of the relatives, who mourn her departure from the home where she was the light—the guiding star. No better, no higher friendship is known to earth than that that is built upon a solemn vow before God of aid, of counsel, of confidence, and friendship. And, aside from the tribute that is due her as a considerate, thoughtful, tender mother and devoted companion, it can be truly said that she was, by reason of her kindness of heart, charity of expression and willingness to sacrifice personal comfort for the purpose of doing something for the benefit of those to whom she was pledged, more and better fitted for that task than any of their surviving sisters. To her no appeal for aid within her means to relieve, was ever turned empty away; to her no sorrowing heart ever sought consolation in vain. Her life was made up of kind deeds and charitable effort.

Thus she lived, passing with the unchanging law of nature, the change of the seasons from the spring time, the summer of life, to the autumn, ripe with the golden fruit of duty well performed and reaching the winter of years happy in spirit, cheerful in manner, loved by all, until the old year was passing away and the dawn of the new was fast approaching.

At that time, when the quivering tones of the bells still echoed dimly in the distance, there fell upon her listening ear, the music of the harpists, who surround the throne of the Almighty. At that time, after a long weary night and just as the morn was at hand, while the words, “Peace on earth, good will to man,” were still heard on all sides and in every home untouched by disease or death, her vision pierced the unknown and she beheld that land, where disease never enters; night never comes; where pain is never felt; where peace—not the transitory, fleeting peace of earth, but that abiding, supreme, blissful, peace that is only vouch-safed the poor in heart and worthy in spirit.

Mrs. Maria Forder, in whose honor these services are held, was born at Hampshire, England, November 15, 1817; she was married to William Forder, who has gone before her to that better land, October 11, 1836, and with him came to America and settled in Salem, Washington county, Indiana, in 1840. She was the mother of 12 children, five of whom were sons. Four of them, went fourth in defence of the flag when treason threatened the life of the nation, and three of them came never back to her embrace, their lives having gone out amid the thunders roar, the dreadful crash and the withering fire of battle.

She was made a member of Colfax W. R. C., April 24, 1891, was elected to the position of chaplain, which she held continuously until her death. She was rarely absent from the meetings and was always a valued advisor in the deliberations of that body.

The time for the completion of these sacred services has arrived. The writer can add not one word that will fittingly portray the beauty of character, the gentleness of disposition, the kindness of heart, of her, whose body lies in yonder narrow home. The sister of the corps have paid her memory all the respect and honor that love and regret can pay; yet they would fain linger near to the form that in life, was so dear; would still look upon the face, that in life, was lighted up with a christian faith and the purpose of a noble soul. They would speak consolingly to the weeping ones of her household, but, alas! Their own eyes are filled with tears, their own hearts are swelled with sadness. They can only say as the body is laid to rest, sister, thy example was of priceless value to us; thy voice will be often and sadly missed at our gatherings; thy memory, we shall keep ever green in our hearts, and the choicest blossoms of springtime shall be laid upon thy bed, as long as we shall live; it shall be our aim to emulate thy virtues, to practice thy precepts, and to so perform life's duties that, when with us the night of life shall end, we may meet thee on the morning of the resurrection, so fitted that we may enjoy thy presence through the endless years of eternity. Until that glad hour, beloved sister, a last, a long, a final, a tearful farewell. Hail and Farewell.

The Case of the Evasive Ancestor

Yesterday, I talked about the path toward finding my great-grandmother (and her mother).  I had finally found a big clue, which was that my great-grandmother's maiden name was probably Silliman, not Stillman, but I still hadn't found her on a census record.

After searching a bit, I discovered my great-great grandfather, J.W. Silliman, was Jervis W. Silliman.

Finally, I found this 1887 Washington Territory census:

Emma Silliman, with her four children: William, Olla, Frank, and Maud

They were at the top of the page, so I looked at the previous page to see if Jervis was there.  I found him at the bottom of a page, but not the previous one in this batch.  He was in a different census book (enumerated two days earlier).  Both Emma and Jervis were enumerated in Spokane Falls, so I am unclear about why he was in a different location.

In 1889, they're all in the household, except the oldest boy, William, who would have been 16.

J.W., Emily, Ollie, Frank, Maud Silliman

Now that I had established Maud's parentage and found that she was in Washington shortly after she was born, I took another look for her on the 1900 census.

I didn't find Emma.  Instead, I found this:

Jervis Silliman, Widowed, and his son Frank.

Emma was dead?  What happened to Maud?  I knew she wasn't dead, because if she were, I wouldn't be here.  So where was she?

I consulted the Washington State Archives Database, looking for Emma's death record.  I couldn't find one, but vital records were spotty in the early days of the state. I tried searching under different last names, and then I tried searching for Maud's marriage record, thinking maybe that would help me figure out who her guardian was.

Searching marriages and the last name Silliman, I found this:

Say WHAT?!?!

The first line links to an image of the marriage certificate.  The highlighted line links to an image of the marriage return, which is much more interesting.

Most of what Emma claims on this form is true.

While it's true that Emma was widowed, that was when she was married to Thomas Plews.  Since we know Jervis is still alive and kicking in 1900, and this marriage return was filled out in 1898, and we know that this will be her THIRD marriage, not her second, we can see that she was lying to the state, not to mention William Griffin, her future husband, a farmer and MINISTER.

At last, I found Maud on the 1900 census:

There she is, listed as Maud Griffin, Step Daughter to William Parter Griffin

What I haven't figured out yet is this:

For some reason, I forgot to specify I was searching for death records for W P Griffin, and instead searched on marriage records.  "Lilliman" is a typo.  It turns out the two records for 1901/02 are another marriage return and certificate for Emma and William.  It appears the two of them got married again in 1901.  I don't know why.  I emailed Lincoln County asking if they have divorce records from that time period, wondering if perhaps Emma had been caught in her lie, a divorce was obtained, and then a "real" marriage took place, but I haven't heard back from them, so I don't know yet.

Persistence Pays

While my mother's family has been fairly easy to track down, particularly those people in the past 150 years, my dad's family has been a challenge.

Part of what has made my mother's family fairly easy to trace is that we had so much to go on from the start. Plus we had names like Fink, Rood and Bogenrief to help us out.  My dad doesn't  know much about his family (or didn't before I started down this road), and on top of that we had fairly generic surnames like Richardson and Miller to work with. 

The first record I found (and it was easy) was the 1930 census of my grandparents, Anna Zora Miller and Floyd Richardson and their first son, my Uncle Floyd ("Junior").

Zora was only 16 when she married Floyd

 I was fascinated to see that my grandmother's mother had been born in Minnesota, where I live now.  Other than my brother, who has since moved back to Michigan, I hadn't known that any of my family had ever lived in Minnesota.

After finding out the names of Zora's parents, I found the 1910 census.

My great-grandparents William H. and Maude E Miller. Anna Z is my grandmother, age 1 yr 1 month.

As you can see, there are several neighbors named Miller, but it doesn't appear that they are siblings, as their fathers were born in different states (or countries!)  The census adds a level of certainty that my great-grandmother Maud was born in Minnesota.

I emailed my dad and asked if he knew Maud's maiden name.  He thought it might be Stillman.  The census showed Maud was 34 in 1910, so that meant she was born in 1875 or 1876.  I searched the 1880 census and found several Stillman families, but none that had a daughter the right age.  I looked for her on the 1900 census, when she would have still been living at home, and couldn't find her there, either.  I also couldn't find the Millers in the 1920 or 1930 census.  Very frustrating!

After searching his memory for a while, my dad was able to come up with the names of his mother's siblings, but had no idea what their birth order was.  Still, I could not find William and Maud Miller, so I started searching on the kids names.  Eventually, I hit pay dirt.

My grandmother's father was going by his middle name, Harry, which explains why I had trouble finding him.  Maude, it seems, is still 34 years old, ten years after the previous census, which explains why I couldn't find her with her original estimated birth year.

With this information, I had an easier time finding the 1930 census record.

Maud and Harry with their youngest children

At this point, I could see the age on the first census record had to be wrong.  In 1930, Maud is listed as 44 years old, and her youngest child is 3 years old.  The record says she married at age 18.  It makes far more sense that she was producing children from age 19-40 rather than 29-50.  I was fairly sure by then that Maud's birth year was 1885/86, not 1875/76.  This actually made searching for census records more problematic, because she was born after the 1880 census.  I was not able to find her on the 1885 Minnesota census, either. 

I decided to work forward, instead, and find the death records for Harry and Maud.  My dad thought Harry must have died when my father was young or before he was born, because his grandmother (Maud) came to live with them.  I could find no SS death index record and no California death index, either.  The California index begins in 1940, so my guess is that Harry died some time between 1930 and 1940.  That left finding Maud's death index record.  My dad wasn't sure when she died, but my mother remembered meeting her, so she had to have died some time after my parents graduated from high school.  I searched in two year increments and still came up with nothing.

Finally, my dad sent me an email saying he thought I was looking for her under the wrong last name.  Some years after his Grandpa Harry died,  Grandma Maud had married again, to a man named Earl Abbott.

This proved very interesting for a couple of reasons.  First, I found her death record immediately, but I also found her mother's maiden name.  Forder.  Next, because I can't let a shaking leaf just sit there unattended, I discovered I could follow Earl back through census records very easily.  And what I found was that he and Maude were both born in Minnesota, both migrated to Washington state at some point (he when he was just a few years old), and they even lived in the same county when they were both young and newly married to their first spouses.  When they married each other, they were both living in Northern California.

I emailed my dad.  It's weird how they lived in the same places their whole lives.  I wonder if their families knew each other in Minnesota and Washington? I mused.

My dad emailed back.  They were cousins!

This is the point where I sigh and think, Why didn't he just tell me that to start with?! But I've realized that it often takes presenting my parents with a detail before they remember something important, especially when those details are something they last heard or thought about 50 or 60 years ago.

Knowing they were cousins, and knowing Maud's mother's maiden name, I thought I might be able to find out who my g2grandmother (Maud's mother) was, and then work forward in time to find my great-grandmother in Minnesota. Through his death record index, I discovered Earl's mother's maiden name was also Forder, so I knew Earl and Maud's mothers were sisters.  From census records and other Ancestry family trees, I could see Earl's mother was Charlotte Forder and that she was born in Indiana, just as Maud said her mother had been.

Soon I found the entire Forder clan in Indiana, headed by William and Maria (Wells), immigrants from England.  Their ten children were born between 1838 and 1862.  The five oldest were boys: William, James, Albert, Robert, and Milton.  The five youngest were girls: Emily (or Emma), Mary, Charlotte, Susan Alice, and Anna, born between 1849 and 1862. One of those five girls was my great-great grandmother and all were within the appropriate age range to make any of them possible.  The only question was, which one was she?

Until the 1870 census, William and Maria Wells were in Indiana, but in 1880 they are living in Meeker County, MN.  Since I knew my great grandmother had been born in Minnesota around 1885, I could assume my great-great grandmother had moved to Minnesota with her parents.

I began looking for marriage records of the five sisters.


Emma, the oldest, was born in 1849.  In 1871, she married a widower with two children, Thomas Plews, in Indiana.  I couldn't find them on any census record after that.


Mary, born 1851, married William Hutchins in Minnesota in 1873 in Meeker, MN.  Mary and William had five boys and eventually migrated to Spokane, WA where they lived together until William died in 1921.  Mary could not be Maud's mother.  The Forder family must have moved some time after 1871, when Emma married Thomas Plews, but before Mary's 1873 marriage.


Charlotte, born 1855 married Francis Abbott in 1874 in Meeker, MN.  They had 8 boys and girls.  They migrated to Spokane, WA and then by 1910 had moved to Arizona.  Their son Earl married Rosealga Silsdorff in Washington in 1903, eventually migrating to northern California.  After Earl's wife died, he married Maud, his first cousin (my great grandmother).  Charlotte could not be Maud's mother.
 
Susan Alice was born in 1858 and married John Johnson in 1876 in...you guessed it...Meeker County, MN.  They had four boys and migrated to Washington where they lived until at least 1930. Alice could not be Maud's mother.


The youngest Forder was Anna, born in 1862. In 1884, Anna gave birth to twin girls, Ellen ("Nellie") and May.  She was not married.  Eight years later, she married Winfield Clark, but soon divorced him.  In 1905 she was living in Minneapolis with her daughters in an apartment not more than 8 blocks from my first Minneapolis apartment.  She and her daughters continued living in Minneapolis for years.  Anna was not Maud's mother.


At this point, it looked like the only sister who could be Maud's mother was Emma, who had vanished. Since Maud's maiden name was supposedly Stillman, not Plews, Emma's husband must have died and then she remarried.  Based on the migratory and marriage habits of the rest of the Forder family, it looked like they had all moved to Minnesota a year or two after the 1870 census. Since I couldn't find Emma and Thomas Plews on any census, I decided to look for anyone named Plews in Minnesota.  I found no one on the 1880 census, but I did find an 1885 Minnesota state census record.

Could this be them?

Maud isn't on this record, but she was born in 1885 or 1886, so that doesn't eliminate this family.  The main thing I noticed was the name of the parents, which was Silliman.  It wasn't Stillman, but it's close.  Second, there is evidence that the wife has been married before, since there are two boys with the last name Plews.  Also, I notice that J.W. Silliman was born in New York, while M.E. Silliman was born in Indiana, birth places that Maud lists for her parents on every census record.  I was slightly thrown by the initial M for Emma, but the middle initial was E, so I was hopeful.

When I searched the Minnesota marriage index, I found them.  J.W. Silliman and Emma "Clews" (likely a typo) had married in McLeod County (the county south of Meeker) in 1878.  That fits within the gap between the Plews children and Frank Silliman.

I still hadn't found Maud.
 (To be continued...)