Moses Dane 52 Ancestors Week 7 Prompt: Love

Moses Dane: 1815-1893 

Second Chance at Love

My third great-uncle, Moses Dane, had a scandalous second chance at love late in life. Moses was born in Vermont in 1815 to David and Sally Randall Dane. The family moved to New York when he was two. Moses met and married Harriet Thomas Dane in Genesee around 1840.

Moses and Harriet moved their young family first to Wisconsin in the mid-1840s, and then to Minnesota. They moved back and forth between the two states a couple of times during the Civil War era. Both Moses and his eldest son David served in the Civil War. Only Moses returned home; David died of disease in an infantry camp in Tennessee.

Moses’ second son, William, married Mary Loraine Stoddard in Wisconsin on November 25, 1866. They had one son, Alan Eloxious Dane, three years later. William died on October 12, 1876 at the young age of thirty, leaving his 28 year old widow and young son in the care of his father and mother, Moses and Harriet.

Harriet died October 17, 1884 at age 67. Moses was nearly 69. Now his household held only his daughter-in-law and his grandson.

Apparently, these two lonely people fell in love. On New Year’s Eve 1885, Moses’ brother, Jerome, rode over to Moses’ Medo, Minnesota home from Jerome’s home near Mankato. Jerome was a jack of all trades, serving variously as a military officer, farmer, postmaster and also, surprisingly, an ordained minister. His ordination was apparently legal enough that he was able to join 70-year-old Moses in marriage to Moses’ 37-year-old daughter-in-law Loraine, who thus became a Dane twice over.

This scandalous occurrence made the local newspaper. It is hard to tell if the in-law relationship or the age difference was more shocking to the readers. 

The happy couple welcomed a son, Charles Stoddard Dane, on October 9, 1888. The proud father was 73 years old at the time! Loraine’s older son Allen (Moses’ grandson) had married and moved out just a month earlier. Less than a year later, Allen had a son of his own, William, named after Allen’s father. Charles would have been little William’s uncle, even though they were only ten months apart in age.

Moses died just shy of his son’s fifth birthday on October 19, 1893. The twice-widowed Loraine remarried four years later and moved to Portland, Oregon with her new husband Aaron Lewis, taking Charles Stoddard Dane with her. She lived until 1927. Charles never married, working as a farm laborer in the Ione, Oregon area. He died at age 67.

Gertrude Surprise Macbeth: 52 Ancestors Week No. 6 "Surprise"

Gertrude E Surprise Macbeth

September 20, 1891-March 10, 1959

About a year ago, I called my mother to ask a quick question about one of her paternal aunts. “Mom, why in the world did your grandparents give your Aunt Gertie the middle name ‘Surprise’?” I laughed. I expected to hear a funny family story—like they were surprised she was a girl, or that she arrived before her due date and took them by surprise. Instead, my mother was shocked. “That can’t be right,” she kept saying. “I never heard that before.”

Gertrude Macbeth was born September 20, 1891 to Walter Macbeth and his 19-year-old wife of eighteen months, Lucy May Dane Macbeth. Gertrude, or Gertie as she was known to her siblings, was the oldest of six children (the fifth child was my grandfather Ivan Macbeth).

According to Ancestry’s transcriptions of both Gertrude’s birth record and baptism record, she was named Gertrude Surprise Macbeth or Gertie Surprise Macbeth.

No other records I have found include this middle name or the middle initial “s”. Gertrude apparently used the middle initial “E” on most official documents once she was an adult, but I have yet to discover what the “E” stood for. 

photo fr. lavoiser1

Gertrude married James Laird on June 1, 1905. Like her mother, she was an eighteen-year-old bride. She and James, a farmer and sometimes teamster, had eleven children over a twenty year period. They spent their lives in Blue Earth County, Minnesota, and Gertie died on March 10, 1959 at age 67. Her headstone reads “Gertrude E Laird”. 

Photo from lavoiser1

I can speculate that her middle name was mis-transcribed before the data was uploaded to Ancestry—that the person who wrote the original certificates had poor handwriting, and some name beginning with the letter “e” was misinterpreted as “surprise”. It rather stretches credulity that two separate records could produce the same error, but anything is possible.

I will have to order a copy of the actual birth record from Minnesota to settle the question once and for all, even though I love the name “Gertrude Surprise” and long to just leave it that way in the family tree.

I hope that Gertrude will surprise me yet again. Perhaps the actual birth records will clearly read “Gerturde Surprise Macbeth” and my speculation over her parents’ intent and meaning can continue.

Ragnhild Severson: 52 Weeks Prompt 4 "I'd Like to Meet..."

Ragnhild Severson

February 2, 1848-February 3, 1933

Of all my ancestors, I think I would most like to meet my paternal great-grandmother, Ragnhild Severson.

Regrettably, I know less about Ragnhild than many of my other ancestors. I have no photos of her. I have no memorabilia linked to her. Everyone who actually knew her was dead before I was born, so I don’t even have family stories about her. All that remains that I can actually touch is her headstone.

I have discovered so little about her early life. I know she was born in Norway in 1848, but I have been unable to identify her parents or her birthplace. I don’t even know her maiden name. I hope as I learn more about Norwegian records and patronymics, I’ll be able to trace her family and determine if any of the several possible parents listed in distant relatives’ Ancestry trees are the correct ones.

Even the spelling of her married name, Severson, is in doubt. On assorted records, including census, birth records, church records, and her son’s World War I draft card, the surname was variously spelled Siverson, Syvertson, Syverson and Severson. The family headstones at Linden Church Cemetery in Brown County vary in spelling as well.

As of now, the first reliable records I have found are from the late 1860s after she emigrated to the United States with her husband, Ove Severson, and their infant daughter, also named Ragnhild. She was quite young when she arrived in America, possibly only 19 or 20. Her husband was several years older, but still so young to brave crossing the ocean with their tiny baby to land in a foreign country where they had no other family members for support.

The family passed through Wisconsin just long enough for the birth of their second child, Siver, in 1869. By 1872 they had moved to Brown County, Minnesota, where they homesteaded in Linden Township. Their second daughter, Regina (my grandmother) was born there in March, 1872, and a second son, Ole, was born in 1873, apparently dying just a year later.  Young Siver also died in early childhood. Over the next nine years, Ragnhild and Ove had four more children. The last child, another son named Siver in honor of his lost older brother, was born in January 1882.

Shockingly, Ove was dead just months later, killed at age 41 in a farming accident. According to unsubstantiated family lore, he was crushed by a horse.  Regina was left a widow with an infant and five surviving children, approximate ages 3, 5, 7, 10 and 14. The two oldest were girls. I can imagine how desperate she must have felt. How could she prove up the homestead, run the farm and feed her children? The everyday “women’s work” of the era was physically punishing and exhausting, and now she had Ove’s work as well.

Many women in similar circumstances remarried as quickly as possible, needing a man to help run the farm. Ragnhild chose to never remarry. I long to ask her why she made that decision. Somehow, she managed to run the farm. I don’t know if neighbors stepped up to help, or if she hired workers, or if she and her children somehow managed on their own. However she accomplished it, she kept control of her land and provided for her family. My brother turned up records from the 1890s that list farmers who founded the local creamery and grain cooperatives. There were dozens of men listed, and one woman, Ragnhild. She was a pioneer in every sense of the word.

Eventually, her oldest son Ole became her partner in the farming operation, with the remaining children marrying or moving away. In her old age, Ragnhild and Ole sold the farm and moved into the nearby small town of Hanska, where she lived until her death at 85 years of age. By that point, she had outlived five of her eight children, and several of her grandchildren.

She must have been an amazing woman—probably more determined and strong than soft and loving. Life in nineteenth century America was far from easy under the best of circumstances, and her life brought challenge after challenge and loss after loss. But she survived. She persisted. She didn’t let her gender limit her. She would have been a fascinating person to talk to, to listen to, and to learn from.

Deliverance Dane: 52 Ancestors Week 5 Prompt "The Library"

Deliverance Heaseltine Dane

March 25, 1651-June 15, 1735

            I remember spotting Katherine Howe’s novel, The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane, on the New Books shelf at my local library several years ago. The combination of the intriguing title and evocative cover illustration appealed to me. The novel moves back and forth between the lives of a modern day Harvard graduate student and a seventeenth century wife caught up in the Salem Witch Trials. While I never actually read the book, the alliterative name of the Salem area character stayed with me.

Imagine my surprise as I researched my Dane family line and discovered that Deliverance Dane was a real person, the wife of my 8^th great uncle, Nathaniel Dane. Nathaniel’s father, my 8^th great-grandfather Reverend Francis Dane, was a minister in Andover Massachusetts, a neighboring town to Salem. He expressed doubt about the witch trials roiling Salem in 1692, leading the witch hunters and accusers to turn on him and his entire extended family. Although some of the accusers named him during their examinations as a possible witch, Francis was never formally accused of witchcraft. However, two of his daughters, Elizabeth and Abigail, and his daughter-in-law Deliverance, along with several of his grandchildren, were accused, questioned and imprisoned. Elizabeth and Deliverance were eventually acquitted. However, Abigail was convicted and sentenced to hang; she only escaped death when her sentence was postponed due to her pregnancy. By the time she delivered her son, the Salem witch madness had run its course and she was freed.

The real Deliverance Dane was born to Robert Haseltine and Anna Wood Haseltine on March 25, 1651 in Essex County, Massachusetts. According to one Rowley Massachusetts pioneer history, her parents were the first settlers to marry in the community in 1639.  Her surname was variously spelled Hazeltine, Heaseltine, and Haseltine in local records.

Deliverance was 21 when she married 27 year-old Nathaniel Dane on December 12, 1672. By the time of the witch trials, the couple had six children: Nathaniel and Francis, who died before their first birthdays, and Hannah, Daniel, Mary and Deliverance, the oldest of whom was 16 when her mother was swept up in the witchcraft trials. Nathaniel and Deliverance had one more daughter after the witch trials, Abigail. Despite the trauma the false charges from their neighbors must have caused, they continued to live in Andover for the rest of their lives.

Nathaniel died in 1725, leaving his widow in the care of their son, Daniel. He was apparently a successful farmer and businessman, leaving his four daughters thirty five pounds each in money in his will, a substantial amount for the time period. Probate records listed a surprising amount of land, livestock, fields and personal possessions at his death, that was to be divided between his widow Deliverance and their son. Deliverance lived another ten years, dying in Andover June 15, 1735 at age 81.  

The fictional version of Deliverance is apparently quite different than the real woman. In the novel she had but one child at the time of the witch trials, and she was a practicing witch. The author appears to have been entranced by Deliverance’s charming Puritan name, but fictionalized everything else. There is, of course, no evidence that any of the poor women and men charged with witchcraft during the Salem trials actually practiced any sort of magic or witchcraft; the entire episode seems to have been a case of mass hysteria.

Now that I know more about my ancestor-by-marriage, Deliverance Dane, I will have to head back to the library and check out Katherine Howe’s novel once again. It should prove to be interesting to compare the two Deliverances, and to learn more about life in 17^th century colonial Massachusetts.