In the census…..
In the last few years of my Grandma Betty’s life she began to tell me stories. Once while waiting for our meal to be served she got a distant look on her face and she began to weave a story I had yet to hear before.
What I had heard was that either both or one of Grandma’s parents had been married before. I did not have the facts so I never really thought about it.
Grandma’s story started with her father’s (Harrison Richmond Keele) first wife and how she past away. Grandma’s tale involved some bad men who kidnapped her and ultimately took her life.
Grandma left out many details but she would have heard the story second hand. I suspect one of her siblings told her. Grandma was the youngest girl child and was practically raised by her older siblings.
Grandma continued on. When her father married her mother he had a son. He was the oldest sibling and he was around for awhile but then was sent away. As I sat listening, I really was curious, I had never heard of this Lewis / Louis that she talked about. I later asked my mother and she said she had never heard of heard of him.
I tucked this information in my memory until I was building my grandma’s branch of the family tree. I added a sibling but all I had to go one was a name. After a while nothing came up so again this Lewis / Louis was set aside.
I began building Harrison Richmond Keele and Florence Lidia Hinkley’s bio. I had their names and dates and before long I was growing their branches. Once in a while I would look at the bio of Lewis / Louis and wonder about him. How / why was he “banned’ from the family.
I could not keep ignoring the big elephant in the room. I needed to figure out who he was. I began to pull census records for the state of Kansas. I started with a guess as to his age. The oldest of Grandma’s siblings was Ardice, born 1907. My search turned up the 1910 census that shows an H. L. Keele living with a Benjamin and Alice Kerns. There was also a Benjamin H. and Jesse Kerns listed in the house. Lewis / Louis was listed as a grandson to the head of the house.
I admit I was confused because I had never heard the Kerns name before. While I could not say for sure that this was the Lewis / Louis, I made note of the child’s age as 6. Now I had to find out who the Kerns family was and find the link to Harrison Keele to prove H.L. Keele as his son and my Grandma Betty’s oldest sibling.
At this point I still did not have proof of a first spouse so I was beginning to question that story until I hit upon the 1905 Kansas State Census. This was the first time that I found any information linking one of my great grandparents to another spouse.
The census listed H.R. Keele married to a Louise Keele with a H.L. Keele 8 months old. There it was I had Lewis on paper tied to Harrison and now I had the first name of his wife.
I assumed that her maiden name was Kerns as the 1910 census listed Lewis / Louis living with his grandparents Benjamin and Alice Kerns. Yet I could find nothing on a Louise Kerns. This was yet another mystery on top of the three or four I was tracking down related to Lewis / Louis.
After some sleuthing I found documentation that shows Alice having been left a widow before she met Benjamin. Her first husband last name was Williams. I then started to search for Louise Williams.
Up to this point the research did not show any other spouses so I assumed that Harrison and Florence had to have been married around 1906 as Artist was born in 1907. Then I found yet another census this one provided me some more unknown information. Lewis was not the oldest. There was a baby girl named Lorraine that lived just 2 short years.
I also found that Ardice was also Harrison and Louise’s daughter. Finding the marriage record of Harrison and Florence that puts the year at 1910 I have been able to narrow down Louise’s death between 1907 and 1910. At this point when it comes to Louise I have hit a brick wall.
For Lewis / Louis I first found him in 1910 at the age of 6 living with his grandparents Benjamin and Alice Kerns. He next appears in 1915 living with Harrison and Florence. In 1920 at the age of 15 he was an earned boy in a soap plant living with Harrison and Florence and in 1930 he still lived at home but worked as a salesman at a magazine company. By 1940 he was divorced and living in a boarding house in Grand Bend Kansas.
So much happened to Lewis / Louis in this short amount of time. So far I do not know if he was sent away or left of his own accord. Grandma would have been 13 years old in 1940. Even at that age she may have been sheltered from the truth or she may have read into adult things.
I have a page of questions still to be answered however as my first big “mystery” in my genealogy quest I am happy with how far I have come. I have been able to document one family member and discovered a few more.