Erma Johnson, Don Foutz Wed in Early AM Ceremony

 

 

Don & Erma Foutz, on their wedding day.

 

Details Bring Life to Foutz-Johnson Wedding

Awhile back, I shared the newspaper account of the 1942 bridge card game at which my grandparents, Don and Erma Foutz, announced their engagement and pending early-morning May wedding.

The article from our hometown Dover, Ohio Daily Reporter shared some great details of my grandparents at the time, including their employment, and paired with the engagement card that was in my parents’ possession, was a neat window on who they were as a newly-wedded couple.

But there were — of course — some questions. For instance, cool on them for getting married at Grace Lutheran Church in Dover, where my dad and his brothers were confirmed, and where Grandma worshipped until her death in 2000. But why were they married at 6:45 a.m.?

And was the picture above, which my wife and I featured prominently with those of our other grandparents at our wedding some 60 years later, really from that day, May 9? Could it have been, since Grandma is pictured in a suit, not a gown? And if no gown, was the rest of the ceremony more traditional, or matter-of-fact, hence the unusual time?

Well, we don’t get all the details served up, the way we might in a conversation with them, could we ask. I say might, since memory and company have a way of shading some things, hiding others. But the official record, this time from the crosstown New Philadelphia Daily Times, fills in a lot of blanks. And helps confirm some cool pictures we have from that day as, yes, being genuine wedding-day shots.

Of course, some errors in the account needed some extra research to untangle. See editor’s notes in the excerpt below.

Early Morning Wedding ‘A Pretty Affair’

From Saturday, May 9, 1942:

Spring and early morning combined to make the wedding of Miss Erma Johnson of this city and Mr. Donald Foutz of Dover a pretty affair today. Miss Johnson is the daughter of Mr. and Mrs. C. A. Johnson of New Philadelphia and Mr. Foutz’ parents are Mr. and Mrs. Vance Foutz of Dover.

The two exchanged marriage vows this morning at seven o’clock in Emmanuel Lutheran Church (INCORRECT — Emmanuel was in Phila, but Pastor Ebert presided at Grace Lutheran Church in Dover) in Dover where two large white baskets of Madonna lilies and Star of Bethlehem were grouped at the altar. The Rev. Paul F. Ebert, pastor of the church, officiated for the ceremony, which was performed with Miss Margery Taylor of this city as maid of honor and Mr. Dale Andreas of Dover, best man.

At six-forty-five o’clock, Miss Maxine Renner of Sugarcreek played a recital of organ numbers as a prelude to the marriage service and included in her selections “Ava Maria,” by Schubert; “The Rosary,” by Nevin, and “O Promise Me,” by de Koven. During the ceremony, Miss Renner played “I Love You Truly,” by Bond, and used “The Bridal Chorus,” from Lohengrin as the processional with Mendelssohn’s “Wedding March” as the recessional.

With her smartly tailored brown and beige shepherd checked suit, the bride used dark brown accessories. At the shoulder she had a brown-throated white orchid.

Miss Taylor’s becoming ensemble consisted of a beige suit with aqua and brown accessories. Her shoulder arrangement was of Johanna Hill roses. Miss Renner had a Briarcliff rose corsage.

After the ceremony, members of the bridal party were served breakfast at the Johnson home.

Mr. Foutz and his bride left for a short wedding trip and when they return, will reside for the time being in the Metz Apartments (by the location of Goshen Dairy in Phila today), this city.

 Mrs. Foutz was graduated in 1939 from New Philadelphia high school and is employed in the offices of Greer Steel Company in Dover. She is a member of Mu Chapter, Alpha Pi Sigma Sorority, of Dover.

Mr. Foutz is a graduate of Dover high school, class of 1931 (incorrect – that was his final year of terrorizing Phila on the football field; he graduated in 1932), and is an employee of the Fred P. Potschner Garage in Dover.

Don Foutz, probably on the day of his wedding, May 1942.

Zula Ley: Little-Known Fact #4

A 1918 portrait shows my great-grandmother, Mary Zula Lucrece (Fisher) Ley, and her newborn son, my grandfather Robert Earl Ley Jr.

Tragic Death Tied to Flu Epidemic

When I started this blog, it was to share what’s most interesting to me about genealogy — the way the lives and personalities of our ancestors come to life in the stories we uncover.

At times those stories are tragic. Perhaps none more so than the story of my great-grandmother, Zula (Fisher) Ley.

Posts in the last weeks have shared snippets of her young life — acclaim for her acting in a senior play, notching a finalist finish in a national beauty contest, sneaking off to Wellsburg, W. Va. to marry Great-Grandpa Earl Ley.

These and other portraits show Zula as vital, intelligent, beautiful.

But her life is defined for her descendants by its tragic end, subject of the second post ever in this blog. It was front-page news in neighboring Dover: how the young wife, 24, of a prominent dentist passed away of influenza and pneumonia late on a Sunday night at home in New Philadelphia, Ohio.

An account in the hometown Daily Times, however, also ties Zula’s death to a sudden epidemic that winter.

The Feb. 2, 1920 edition, front page, broadcasts in bold headlines: FLU EPIDEMIC CLAIMS THREE; RED CROSS TAKES UP BATTLE. Whole Families are Reported Ill. Relief is Sought. Three Persons Die Over Weekend.

While influenza is fast enveloping New Philadelphia in a grip that claimed three fatalities Sunday and Monday the Red Cross is preparing to combat the epidemic with nurses.

Mayor E. N. Fair Monday as chairman of the influenza committee of the Red Cross was seeking a nurse for a family where help could not be obtained to take care of the ill.

Whole families are ill with the epidemic, and many patients were reported on the verge of death, Monday.

Young Wife Dies

Mrs. Mary Zula Ley, 24, wife of Dr. Robert E. Ley, Dover dentist, succumbed to influenza-pneumonia at 11:30 p.m. Sunday following ten days’ illness.

The death of Mrs Ley which occurred at the residence on West High street, caused widespread sorrow.

The husband and one son, Robert Earl, aged 16 months, survive.

…

Years later, with more information known about our family history, it is believed the hereditary presence of Factor V Leiden, which causes abnormal clotting of the blood, particularly in veins, may have contributed to Zula’s death.

Reported in neither paper was the stillborn death of her infant daughter, also named Mary on a separate death certificate.

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Zula Ley: Little-Known Fact #1

Great-Grandmother Zula Fisher Ley’s 1913 high school senior class photo and bio from the Clover, New Philadelphia, Ohio.

Zula Fisher Lauded in Theater Role

Hey, hey, and happy 2016 to family and familiars.

Two things that keep me returning to genealogy — no matter the gaps between hits on the blog odometer — are the stories (confirming old ones, uncovering new ones) and the mysteries (solving an old one, unearthing a new one).

This week, by virtue of some spurts of research spawned by arctic temps here in the western outpost of Foutz- and Leydom, I’ve got some new tidbits to share.

Today we visit with a teenage Great-Grandmother Zula Lucrece (Fisher) Ley, circa 1913.

As a New Philadelphia, Ohio, high school senior, Zula was noted in her yearbook entry for her participation in basketball and the senior play. But a (remarkably) lengthy write-up in the Daily Times shared some interesting details of her role.

Subbed after Classmate’s Sister’s Death

“Real stars uncovered in playlet,” the headline reports, and the article goes on for a full, front-page column, then jumps to more on page 5.

Even my indulgent newspaper editors probably would have red-penned me to death were I to have pulled that almost a hundred years later.

We learn more about Zula’s role about 2/3 of the way down. From the Saturday, May 24, 1913 edition:

Miss Zula Fisher deserved much credit. Miss Fisher portrayed the part of Miss Mayne Hensel, leading lady in the junior class play. The part was to have been taken by Miss Martha Swearingen, but on account of the death of Miss Swearingen’s sister she was unable to take part. Miss Fisher was notified only Friday morning that she was to take the part and had only one day to prepare it. If one had not known, it could never had been told as she spoke her lines and acted as though she had been practicing a month.

A nice little nugget, in a story of otherwise merely contemporary value, that shines a little light on Zula’s budding character.

No surprise, then, that she grew into a local teacher well-known and beloved by pupils over the following years. And also sheds light on another surprising tid bit I’ll share Tuesday.

Till then….

Fisher family portrait, circa 1910. Front: Addie May & John W. Kids: Byron, Zula, Clyde, Alverna, Oscar.

 

A Visit with Great Aunt Nellie | Repost

Colt and his great aunt Nellie (Johnson) Fitzgerald at her home in March 2011.

Hugs & Hospitality in the Home of Nellie (Johnson) Fitzgerald

Great Aunt Nellie (Johnson) Fitzgerald passed away Nov. 19 at age 99. This post, from March 2011, recounts a visit.

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I was once a quite enterprising reporter, so I should have known better.

Presented with the chance to spend an afternoon chatting with my Great Aunt Nellie, 94 years young as of last September, I fumbled around with my laptop, spent a good half hour busying my hands consuming trail bologna and deviled eggs and macaroni salad and the like, and utterly failed to pop open a notebook and record our winding conversation with anything more reliable than my own noggin.

Which will have to suffice.

We spent the day chatting in her home, site in the summertime of many a family gathering, afternoons filled with sunshine and pickup softball games and plenty of food and lemonade. There was snow on the ground this time, and a chill in the air. But the atmosphere inside was cozy.

Nellie still lives at home, with some assistance throughout the day, and frequent visits from her son, who lives just up the road a piece. She was also kept company, during our visit, by a former daughter-in-law (I think?) and a great-grandson. So the house was filled with conversation, and I found Nellie to be as delightfully frank, and sweet, and feisty, and fun as I remembered.

My great-grandfather Charles Johnson’s first wife, Leona Miller, died shortly after they were married.

The Tragic Tale of Leona Miller Johnson

Nellie has some trouble getting around these days. She greeted us from her easy chair, and moved about the house with the aid of her “horse” — her walker.

We began our visit by flipping through old photos — everything I had stored up in my Family History Master folder on my computer. She confirmed some of the old relatives I was wondering about, including some beauties of my grandma Erma (Johnson) Foutz as a young teenager (see below), and chuckled at ones of herself shortly after her wedding to DeLoyce Fitzgerald and especially at one of her as a baby, posed with older sibs Leonard and Virginia.

“Oh,” she said (of the photo at the bottom of this post), “I forgot to wear my socks that day!”

Nellie’s house is decorated with scores of old photos and mementos. She was kind enough to have copies made for me of a portrait of my grandmother as a baby, and of my great-great grandparents Palmer (which I featured in yesterday’s post).

In her current bedroom hangs a very unique portrait — that of my great-grandfather (her father) Charles Johnson’s first wife.

Leona Miller and Charles married shortly after Valentine’s Day, 1907. She was 23; he was 20.

According to family lore, and retold by Nellie during our visit, Charles, a coal miner, came home one day, perhaps as early as the week they were married, and found Leona on her hands and knees, scarlet-faced, scrubbing the floor.

As he knelt down to tend to her, Leona collapsed. She died shortly after.

Charles returned to the home of his parents (as noted in the 1910 census), and wouldn’t remarry until 1911, when he wed a girl from nearby Dennison, my great-grandmother, Viola Palmer.

“When you think about it,” I knelt down to murmur in Nellie ear, “it’s a sad story, but without Leona dying, none of us would be here.”

“Oh,” Nellie said, the whisper of a grin on her face, “I don’t know.”

There’s not a lot we know about Leona beyond her fate and the image preserved above. According to the New Philadelphia cemeteries department, she is buried in the same plot as my great-great grandparents Clement and Anna Johnson, but I found no marker to indicate such during my stop at East Avenue/Evergreen the next day.

This picture of my grandma as a very young teenager was taken in 1933, when she was not yet 13. Scribbled on the back: “Camp Birch Creek, F-60, Dillon, Montana. C. 15-1 C.R.R.,” which we’ve determined was a WPA-era camp at which her brother Joe was spending the summer. Joe’s name was also written on this picture.

A Big Sister’s Take on a Boy’s Grandma

The part of me that deeply misses my grandma Erma since she passed away in 2000, and yearns to be able to visit her again, really felt fulfilled by seeing Aunt Nellie again.

I remember the time I’d seen her before, after the funeral of my grandma’s second husband, Max, hugging Nellie felt a lot like hugging grandma. And yeah, I miss that.

This time around, I was full of questions. Things I wished I had asked Grandma, growing up. Or had paid more attention to her answers.

Nellie confirmed the many addresses in New Phila her family called home over a period of 25 years. These moves were logged in war records, censuses, and the certificates recording three of her brothers’ untimely deaths.

I also wanted to hear about how my grandmother and grandfather met, if she could fill me in. I’d read in the article detailing their marriage announcement that grandma was a secretary in the offices of the steel mill, where my great-grandfather Foutz and two of his sons worked from way back. But my grandpa only joined the mill later on, after he’d spent years as a sales agent for the local Ford dealership.

So, how, I wondered, did a girl from New Phila end up mixing with a boy from crosstown Dover, and one some seven years her senior at that?

“Oh, your grandma got around pretty good in those days,” Nellie quipped.

“Oh, your grandma was beautiful,” one of her visitors gushed. “And a very nice lady.”

How can an enterprising reporter hold up, in the face of comments both sly and complimentary?

Another view of the old Palmer homestead in Scio, Ohio as it appeared in March 2011.

Tracing the Tree Back — Johnson & Palmer Roots

Nellie was keenly interested in some of the stops on my genealogy tour, asking about the state of the Palmer homestead, where her mother grew up and generations of the family farmed before that.

She was more interested, though, in how my parents were doing, and my wife and kids. “They should come and see me,” she said. And who could argue?

The visit ended much too soon. And I felt, not for the first time, that I’d already crammed way too much into three short days. And felt the weight, in leaving, of not knowing how soon my path would wind back her way again.

But in the work of honoring our ancestors, there are still volumes rich with information to mine.

Nellie had shared with her daughter, Sara (who in turn helps spread the word and get the family tree in order on Geni.com and Ancestry.com), the tale of her grandfather, Thomas Johnson, a Civil War mule skinner who died on a march through Mississippi in 1864. And there is limited info to go on past that, but a definite location to dig into — Guernsey County, where the Johnsons seemed to have first set up shop in Ohio.

Other connections of the family to the great conflict between the states include that of Anna (Burkey) Johnson’s father, Joseph Burkey, a soldier in Company B of the 126th regiment of the Ohio Volunteer Infantry. Military records indicate he served from May 1864 through June 1865. I’ve visited his grave and snapped a picture there, but I’d love to hunt down a photo, and more info on his time in the war.

Meanwhile, Sara has traced the Palmer connection back through Harrison County farmfields and beyond, to the Balmers of 16th century Germany. A good, yawning gap of time to gape at, and wonder at all the ancestors — and their stories — in between.

Colt’s Grandma Erma and her older sister Nellie at his high school graduation, in 1994.

A pic of the oldest Johnson kids — Leonard, Nellie and Virginia — about 1916.

Sherman Foutz: Contrasting Obits Still Yield Clues

Second Great-Uncle Sherman S. Foutz

More than One Way to Relate Life and Death

When my wife and I encounter the inevitable errors in daily newspapers — or, beginning our career as reporters, lapse into them ourselves — we often trot out my teasing twist on a saying (from somewhere): “History went and got itself up in a great… big… damn… hur… ray.”

To put it more coarsely, in the course of reporting a story and turning it around on a daily news cycle: shit happens.

Bad enough when this is part of the fluid daily record, working up dispatches on city council meetings and business transactions and arrest warrants and base hits. Somehow, pathetically, worse still when publishing those items submitted by the public for posterity, for the milestone sections of births, graduations, weddings, funerals.

In my first gig as entertainment and features writer for the Sandusky Register, I also manned the Saturday obit desk. And it was impressed upon me — right away — to follow a template, type it up slowly and triple-check my work.

Oh, and when gathering the info yourself, never to trust a single-only, no matter how well-meant, source. “If your mother says she loves you, CHECK IT OUT.” In other words, verify all info.

Well, leave it to life to allow shit to keep happenin’.

And we encounter these maxims time and again in genealogy, too. The yeoman volunteers who pore over countless census pages of centuries-old script, deciphering names that do not belong to their family tree, and doing so… erratically. Over-zealous neophyte researchers who, in their breathless haste, mistakenly prune a branch here, graft an alien trunk there, yielding cascading crops of ill-gotten family fruit. Or those who trot out a sweet, but still quite often dead wrong reasoning: because grandma said.

Remember? “If your mother says she loves you, CHECK IT OUT.”

Newspapers are wonderful troves of info. And certainly, they have been indispensable in helping to decipher what it is our case study on genealogy in my family: untangling the life, death and descendants of my great-grandfather Vance Cleveland Foutz’s oldest brother, Sherman Foutz.

When I first looked into Sherman’s story, starting in 2008 and documenting for the first time in 2010 in this blog, we had far more questions than answers. Slowly, painstakingly, we made the necessary connections, in the public record and in person with distant relatives, to fill in many missing pieces. By last year, and a series of posts tracing the family’s life in Pennsylvania through several newspaper articles, we’d put the wraps on many a mystery.

One useful tool: not just settling for one clipping of a newspaper article, but combing through related editions in the dozens of active newspapers in the early part of the 20th century. Just like in the maxim for checking out what your darling, single source says, relying on multiple versions of a milestone event can assemble a full, richer composite of the life and times you’re researching. Once, of course, you weed out the red herrings.

On Sherman Foutz’s life, I started with the yellowed clipping reporting his death that my great-grandfather had kept for nearly 55 years before his own passing. Due to the hands which cut into the newspaper, there was no month, day or year, no attributed publication. That data was to be gained from other sources — the gravestone, the death record from Denver, Colo. Curiously, though, one mystery was brought about by a simple omission — this first obituary, which I later identified as from the Harrisburg Telegraph, listed his wife, Elizabeth, and daughter, Grace, but no mention of his son, Oscar; daughter-in-law, Florence; or local grandsons.

A few years and a paid subscription to newspapers.com later, I dug up a death announcement, published the day after Sherman’s death, also in the Telegraph, which yields additional clues: age at death, address in Harrisburg, a sketch of his career with the Knights of the Maccabees and recent job change, and — voila! — mention of Oscar and his son’s address… in Arizona!

The other day, not looking for any info on Sherman, but still trying to trace more on Oscar, who doesn’t pop up again for us until his mother’s death in 1945, I found a curious third obituary. This one published in the Harrisburg Daily Independent, also on the day after Sherman died. From that Tuesday, April 6, 1915 edition:

William (sic) S. Foutz Prominent Maccabee Succumbs From Long Illness

Word was received here of the death of William (sic) S. Foutz, 135 North Summit street, who died near Denver, Col., yesterday where he had been ill for some time. He was 47 years of age. For seventeen years he was deputy and organizer of the Maccabees of the World.

For the past year Mr. Foutz was unable to attend to any business and on January 1 he left for Colorado. He is survived by his wife and daughter, Grace, of this city, and a son, Oscar, of Arizona. No arrangements for the funeral have been made, but interment will be made at Bowerstown (sic), Ohio.

So, some significant errors in the printed record here, most notably Sherman’s renaming and the misspelling of his hometown of Bowerston. But had I stumbled upon this article first, perhaps through some creative searching of the archives, I would have still gotten the tid bit on Oscar’s western location, and some additional details on how his work had suffered from his illness. No update on his change in career — for all we know, he still could have been working for the Maccabees, according to this record — and thus, I view with skepticism the specific “seventeen years” summation of his duties. But between the sources, we get a richer picture, provided we’ve done a bit more gathering of wool and smoothing out the rough parts.

“If your mother says she loves you, CHECK IT OUT.”

April 1915 obituary for Sherman Foutz lists only his wife and daughter as survivors. From the Harrisburg Telegraph.

Son Oscar Foutz is listed as a survivor — and living in Arizona — in Sherman Foutz’s 1915 death announcement.