The Day Children: 52 Ancestors 2020 Prompt “Chosen Family”

Two Very Different Choices: Chosen Family

Thankful Day: 1897-1960

Eugene Ingersall Day: 1898-1979

Jessie Florence Day Thiesse: 1902-1963

Sometimes I think I know exactly what I’m going to write as I start work on a blog post, but then as I conduct additional research to confirm my facts, I’ll discover new things that change my perspective on my ancestor’s story, and change my entire approach to the prompt. “Chosen Family” turned out to be one of those times. I thought I’d be writing about three children placed in an orphanage, with the youngest eventually adopted by a relative—her chosen family. But as I researched, I realized there were other choices and other families involved in this story that made it far more complex.

Thankful Day, Eugene Day and Jessie Day are my third cousins twice removed on the Mills/Dane branch of my family tree. The children were born to Eugene Charles Day and his wife, Lucilla Reed in Tuolumne County, California.

The California location in itself is interesting. Eugene was born in Hermon, New York. He was one of five children, and three of his siblings lived out their lives just miles from where they were born. However, for some reason lost to history, Eugene and his sister Jessie Day, the two youngest children in the family, decided to move to the rugged mining area of Tuolumne County, California. Eugene became a miner, investing in quartz and gold mines.

Eugene married a beautiful young woman from Tuolumne, Lucilla Reed, in 1875 when he was only 19 years old; Lucilla was about 16. According to a bio from Eugene’s Findagrave page, “Lucilla Reed was born in in Tuolumne County in August 1859. Her mother Lajuana Weh nah yah, a Native American, was born in Tuolumne County in 1845, and her father, David Millard Reed, was born in New York in 1836.” Eugene and Lucilla’s first child, Thankful Anna (named after Eugene’s mother Thankful Bennet Day), was not born until 1897, twenty-two years after their marriage. Perhaps Lucilla had previous miscarriages or stillbirths, but a twenty year span seems exceptional.

Lucilla Reed Day

Their second child, Eugene Ingersall, was born a year later on the 4^th of July. Their third child, Jesse (or Jessie) Florence Day, was born four years later on March 24, 1902. Tragically, Lucilla died of heart disease just eight weeks later. Eugene was left a widower, with an infant and four- and five-year old children to care for, a difficult proposition for a miner in his 40s who needed to be at the remote mine site for weeks at a time.

Although some family records suggest that Eugene’s ranchero on Yankee Hill was home to several of Lucilla’s tribal members in addition to their own nuclear family, none of Lucilla’s relatives took over caring for the children. The reasons are unclear. Eugene instead chose to place his children in the care of the nuns at the convent orphanage in Grass Valley, California, while he continued to mine for gold. (Coincidentally, the orphanage is the same one I discussed in my previous blog entry, where the unfortunate Reppert children lived a decade later.)

At some point during Eugene’s twenty years in Tuolumne County, his younger sister Jessie must have come out to visit him from New York. While in the area, she met Frank Thisse, a salesman from Lovelock, Nevada, who invested in several mines in Tuolumne County. He eventually became Justice of the Peace in Skidoo, California, now a ghost town in Death Valley National Park. They married and were living in the area when Lucilla died. Jessie and Frank took baby Jessie Day in and raised her for several years—long enough that when they sent her to the orphanage to join her siblings at some point, the little child was registered as Jessie Thisse, as we see on the 1910 census. Little Jessie’s siblings appear on the same census under the surname Day.

Another sort of separation must have taken place as well. Despite the children being only one quarter Native American/Miwok, Thankful and Eugene were identified in many documents as “Indian”. Jessie was identified as “white”. This difference had repercussions.

At some point after the 1910 census, Thankful and Eugene left the orphanage. The circumstances are unknown—did they run away? Did their father reclaim them? Did their mother’s relatives claim them? Did they reach an age that the orphanage expected them to leave and earn a living?

Eugene probably had few happy memories from his time there, as he was seriously injured and expected to die after falling 17 feet from a balcony with several other children on June 15, 1907. He received a skull fracture, and the nuns had sent a letter to his father’s last known location at Sonora, California, asking that he come to his nine-year-old son’s bedside. Presumably Eugene recovered without any lasting effects, for as an adult, he held a responsible position as a railway brakeman for forty years.

Eugene and Thankful apparently returned to the ranchero where they were born, living with their mother’s relatives. They received official recognition as tribal members, and Thankful actually served as the secretary for the Miwok tribe when they received federal recognition as the “Tuolumne Band of Me-wuk Indians from the Tuolumne Rancheria” in 1937. 

When they married, they chose Native American spouses. Eugene married a Miwok woman named Pearl Thompson. The couple had twelve children. They lived in Tuolumne their entire lives, with Eugene working for the railroad. He served in the military in World War I and was head of the local American Legion Post. In addition, he served as the Indian Agent at the Tuolumne Rancheria in the 1930s. Census records identify Eugene and his children as “Indian”.

Me-wuk member farming on the Tuolumne Rancheria in 1920s

Thankful first married Daniel B. Wilson in 1919, with whom she had four children. He worked in the oil industry, and they lived in Santa Barbara and Los Angeles. He was from an Arizona tribe. After his death, she married Frederick Geisdorff, and moved back to the Me-Wuk Rancheria. Thankful and Frederick had one son, Robert, in 1927. She became involved in tribal affairs as well, serving as an officer in the tribal government during the 1930s. Census records also list her and her children as “Indian”.

The descendants of Eugene and Thankful remain active with the tribe. Photos from recent Me-wuk celebrations feature Wilson, Geisdorff and Day adults and children.

Acorn Festival at Tuolumne Rancheria, with four Wilson and Day descendants

Their little sister Jessie’s story is far different. She remained in the orphanage until at least 1914, for she appears in a Grass Valley news article as a musical performer in a concert at the orphanage. It isn’t clear when she left; her Aunt Jessie Thisse and husband Frank moved back to Frank’s hometown of Lovelock Nevada at some point after 1910. By 1919, Jessie is living with them and attending high school in Lovelock. She played on the basketball team and performed in the school opera in 1920, and is identified as the Thisses’ daughter in news articles and the 1920 census. It is unclear if the couple ever formally adopted her, however. When her aunt Jessie Thisse died in 1929, Jessie Day is listed as her niece in the obituary. Interestingly, the only other survivor listed is another niece from New York—no mention of Thankful or Eugene.

Jessie married a high school classmate shortly after graduation. Andrew Johnson was a mechanic, and the couple had five children before Andrew’s untimely death at age 50 in 1954. Census records identify Jessie and her children as white; no reference is made to her Miwok heritage.

Jessie then married a much younger man, Howard Lamp. She also died quite young, at age 61, after what was described in the obituary as “a long illness”.

It appears that once Thankful, Eugene and Jessie’s mother died, the children took two very different paths in life. Thankful and Eugene chose to identify with their mother’s Native American half of the family, despite only being one quarter Miwok. They appear to have had some sort of limited relationship with their father after they left the orphanage, for young Eugene was listed as the contact person on his father’s death certificate. However, neither of them appears to have had any relationship with their little sister. Their obituaries and Findagrave biographies say that their parents had only two children; they don’t even seem to recognize that she existed.

Jessie does not appear to have had any relationship with Thankful or Eugene, or with her mother’s relatives. It is unclear how often she or the Thisses saw her father, either. The Thisses had some mining business connections with Eugene, so there must have been some contact. Jessie never seemed to claim her Native American heritage. Her aunt and uncle, who became her adoptive parents, however informally, seem to have kept her at a remove from her mother’s people. She grew up as a white person, far from the Tuolumne Rancheria. Once she relocated to Frank Thisse’s hometown of Lovelock, she left her previous identity as Jessie Day behind.

So all three of these children chose their family. Thankful and Eugene chose their Miwok relatives as their true family of the heart. Jessie chose her white aunt and uncle as her family of the heart. It is unfortunate that the choices the children made meant that they never formed a close sibling relationship. Is this a story of “passing” as white? Were the Thisses embarrassed by Eugene’s choice to marry a half-Miwok woman? Did Jessie deliberately hide part of her heritage? Did her siblings deny her existence because they were angry with her choice to pass as white? We will never know.