In Good Countenance #12: Minnie (Hammersley) Ley

Minnie (Hammersley) Ley: Vintage Visages

Greetings, family and familiars, on what would have been Grandpa Robert Earl Ley Jr.’s 97th birthday.

Been awhile, but the genealogy train keeps on chugging, with certain dedicated, extended relatives at the controls, making an unexpected stop every now and again. This is a dispatch from Mac and Brad Wilcox, distant cousins through the far-flung Ley line, and proprietors of the site Kin Connection.

Today’s treat? We finally get to pin down — or rather, gaze upon — a great-great-grandmother who remained the only ancestor of that generation for whom I hadn’t discovered a photo. And now we can see her for ourselves. Meet Great-Great-Grandma Minnie Eillene (Hammersley) Ley!

As Mac related in a recent email:

My brother Brad and I have about 3,000 photos and hundreds of documents done so far. Perhaps we are half-way.

We came across the attached photos yesterday that were in a  scrapbook maintained by my great aunt, Mary Ellen Wing (1891-1972).  She was responsible for saving many of the photos and documents that we are all now enjoying.  Mary, who wrote the identifications on these photos,  was the youngest child of Adeline Sperling, who in turn was the youngest child of Abraham and Catherine Sperling.

…

Unfortunately, neither photo was dated, but we have some educated guesses as to the details.

One photo is labeled “Irma- Uncle Chris -Minnie Ley”.  I am reasonably sure that the picture includes Christian Wiand (1844-1934), center; Minnie Eileen Hammersley Ley (1965-1929), at right; and Irma Haines Ley (1900-1945), daughter of Minnie Ley, at left.

I suspect this was taken in the back yard of the Wiand home at the corner of Main and High in Port Washington. The foliage indicates summer, probably mid-1920’s.

The other photo is labeled “Earl + sons + Uncle Chris”.  This photo also includes Christian Wiand and clearly was taken in the front yard of the Wiand house, since the house across the street, at the right edge of the photo, is still there, looking at Google maps.

I presume “Earl” is Robert Earl Ley (1883-1959), at left.  Robert Earl Ley Jr (1918-2008) is holding the baby, and Richard Earl Ley (1927-1933) is next to Christian Wiand. This photo looks like it was taken in spring before the trees leafed out.

One guess as to the baby, which I think is a girl, is Mary Ellen Ley (1931-2011),  daughter of Lester Ley and Daisy Nan Shively. Perhaps this was before/after her Christening, maybe in the Spring of 1932. Perhaps you can confirm this or set me right.

Filling in the Family Foliage

I don’t know about you, but whenever I hear of a trove of forgotten photos, I burn to see what — more importantly, who — is in there.

Mac and brothers, remember, shared the goods on fourth great-grandparents Abraham and Catherine Sperling, as well as the crucial details and a breathtaking glimpse of third Great-Grandmother Hattie (Sperling) Hammersley Wiand. Two crucial discoveries there were the cause of death for Great-Great-Great Grandfather James Hammersley, taken during a tragic accident while working on the Erie Canal; and the story of her second husband, Christian Wiand, a successful Port Washington hardware merchant who grew into more than just a stepfather/stepgrandfather to later generations of Leys. He was truly a member of the family.

These and other photos reveal those gatherings in a way that invites you to step in.

For the first time — for me, anyway — we meet my great-grandfather Earl Ley’s sister, Irma (Ley) Haines, arm in arm with her mother and step-grandfather.

We again visit what I feel Mac has accurately pegged as the front yard of Chris’s place in Port Washington, though the criscrossing sidewalks and hard bricked corner of the place at first suggested to me a church. But maybe that’s the suggestion of the christening playing on my imagination.

I can’t say for certain, though the dates seem to line up right. My first inkling is that Grandpa Robert Earl Ley Jr., youthful in the above photo, could even have been holding his brother Dickie. For that to have been the case, though, we’d be looking at a photo from September 1927 (88 years ago!), and grandpa would be just 9. He looks older to me….

The only other photo I’ve seen of Dickie is the portrait below. So, if Mac is correct, this is another glimpse of father and sons, as well as a young relative. If the occasion is, indeed, Mary Ellen Ley’s christening in 1931 (I didn’t even have Mary Ellen in my working tree), then grandpa would be about 12-13, and Dickie around 4, which seems to fit the little boy in the photo.

So, still some gaps to fill in. But we’ve bridged a crucial gap missing from the collection of ancestral faces on our tree. Hello, dear Great-Great Grandmother Minnie Ley.

Richard “Dickie” Ley aboard a bicycle, early 1930s.

Postcards from Port Washington | Ley Family History

Wallsafe from Curtis Wiand’s Port Washington, Ohio hardware store.

 

Port Washington Detritus: Family Artifacts Online

“Port Washington enjoys the enviable distinction of being one of the prettiest and most picturesque villages in the state….”

So begins a newspaper advertorial of June 1901, taken from the pages of the Uhrichsville, Ohio News Democrat, describing the home of our Ley ancestors. Maybe the description doesn’t jibe with the quaint, cloistered cluster of homes and stores we know more than a century later, lightyears after the town’s peak as bustling canal port. But consider it a record of what life was like for our great-great-great-grandparents and their families then.

With commendable zeal, her citizens have realized the beauty of the town’s delightful situation and have made neat improvements, commensurate with its natural facilities.

The town strikingly resembles in appearance the much admired villas of northern Georgia whose attractiveness is well known to northern tourists.

Well-kept lawns, smooth-shaven as a priest, spacious streets, an artistic arrangement of shade trees, some attention to floriculture and landscape gardening — all attest the love of the beautiful in the towns-people.

Environed by an excellent farming country, the business interests of the town have largely kept pace with its needs, but not to that extreme limit which excludes sociability and cleverness, which are distinguished features of the place –qualities which are better appreciated by those who have witnessed amid the incessant hum of machinery and dust of unceasing toil, the hopeless surrender of domestic pleasures to the all absorbing whirl of business.

Properly speaking, Port Washington presents a just mean between the extremes of these towns which are as dead as John T. Brush’s classification rules and those which are oblivious to all save insatiable greed for lucre.

The recent census shows the town’s population to be about 600. …

Trippy, right? And all a well-typed online search away to the curious and family-minded of 2015.

In the past few days, our latest newsletter installments have (re?)introduced us to our Sperling and Hammersley ancestors, neighbors and family to the Leys in bygone days of Port Washington.

For the pictures most recently shared of Abraham and Catherine Sperling, and Great-great-great Grandmother Harriet (Sperling) Hammersley Wiand, mother of Minnie (Hammersley) Ley (wife to Charles Ley), we have fellow genealogy sleuths at Kin-Connection to thank. They mined the best source of all — family records, photos, documents and memories.

But some of the additional ways we’ve filled in the blanks the last week — about the tragic death of Third-Great-Grandpa James Hammersley, and the remarriage of Hattie to hardware merchant Curtis Wiand — came from one of the central tenets of my original genealogy dare in summer 2008: that to dig up generations worth of stories on your ancestors, in today’s information-in-an-instant age, you need only a curious mind, tireless fingers and a hardy internet connection.

What a wealth of stuff there is online.

To conclude our series on the Port Washington Sperlings, Hammersleys, Wiands and Leys, here’s a few more tidbits a broad bandwidth away.

 

Town Life in Port Washington, Ohio, c. 1900

Hattie’s second husband, Christian Wiand, and their descendants through Curtis V. Wiand, kept up for many decades the hardware store in Port Washington he established shortly after their marriage. The above safe from that store — amazingly – was offered at auction three years back (2012) in South Dakota and sold for $50.

Similar to the ruby glass once gifted to Lizzie Foutz, there are countless family trinkets circulating out there. Kinda makes you want to watch the auction circuit, eh?

Christian’s family had first established themselves in Carroll County, Ohio, before residing in Clay Township, where he and Hattie were eventually married. A nice paragraph on the family can be found — through the wonder of Google Books search — eminently accessible, online.

 

Through free and paid archives, newspaper records paint a vivid portrait of the day. The gushing advertorial that begins this post actually appeared in different guises through a number of editions in the years around the turn of the 19th to 20th centuries.

Rolling back a couple years, we find a Port Washington where Great-great-great Grandfather Augustus Ley’s dry goods store also thrives. Unfortunately — and serving as a lesson of online research — the scanned copies available in newspapers.com as well as ancestry.com have the same big blot in the bottom corner of page 11 of the Nov. 30 1899 edition, marring what is undoubtedly a description of Ley’s store, leaving us to decipher:

… & Co. are located on…

…are. They are good

… (ca)rry a full line of the

…. (goo)ds, groceries, etc.

… have a fine trade and pay the highest prices for produce, etc.

… F.H. Powell’s (undoubtedly related to us through Hattie Powell, Augustus’s wife — yes, another Hattie) general store is in the storeroom formerly occupied by A. Ley. He is a hustling young merchant and is doing a thriving business. He also has a millinery department in connection with his store.

But elsewhere on the page, we check in with Christian Wiand, c. 1899:

C. Wiand, the hardware merchant, keeps a complete line of hardware, tinware, cutlery, stoves, etc. He also has a nice lot of buggies and wagons on hand and carries a good line of cigars in connection. He is located on the Public Square.

By 1901, Augustus Ley has died, but his descendants are continuing their profitable trade along with their Wiand neighbors, as related in the June 11, 1901 edition of The News Democrat:

C. Wiand conducts the hardware store and has a very complete stock. Mr. Wiand is a gentleman of genial manner, apt business qualities and is thoroughly conversant with the public policies of the day. His son, Curtiss, who is employed with him, is a pleasing business man, held in high regard by all who know him.

…

Lewis Ley (son of Augustus), the gentlemanly traveling representative of Dies, Fertig & Co., is a resident of this place. Mr. Ley’s father, recently deceased, was a pioneer business man here, and all of the family are held in high esteem.

Flipping forward through the archival pages, to April 26, 1906 in The Daily Times of New Philadelphia, we read of the devastating San Francisco earthquake, and how relief efforts have hit home:

All of those who wish to show their sympathy to the people of San Francisco who are in need can place their money in the little tin box at Christian Wiand’s hardware store.

News accounts of the day are filed with notes on who’s coming, who’s going, who’s visiting whom, sometimes reprinted from previous editions. And that holds true in 1930, same as ever, when the Oct. 30 edition of The Daily Times records a 1920 visit of Christian Wiand and wife to their daughter, Minnie, in New Philadelphia. By then, sadly, both mother and daughter have passed away. But print marches on.

Some of the advertorials on Port Washington and other ancestral stomping grounds would close with train tables, departure and arrival times and the rates to get you across a country that, from these descriptions, is bright and full of life and beckons to us through time. If only it were as simple as punching a ticket and climbing aboard….

Port Washington, Ohio street scene, circa 1870s. Courtesy of Chuck Schneider, a descendant of the carriage shop owner.

 

 

 

 

For the Record: Hattie Wiand 1922 Obit

Great-Great-Great-Grandmother Harriet (Sperling) Hammersley Wiand

Harriet (Sperling) Hammersley Wiand: 1843-1922

Rounding out a week of Ley genealogy posts, we again return to the Sperlings and Hammersleys, ancestors of Great-Great Grandmother Minnie (Hammersley) Ley.

Thanks to the generous genius genealogists at Kin-Connection.com, we’ve managed to get our first glimpse of the “vintage visages” we’ve been missing from our family record. Namely, fourth-great-grandparents Abraham and Catherine Sperling, and today, their third daughter, my great-great-great-grandmother, Harriet “Hattie” Hammersley Wiand.

Harriet was fourth of Abraham and Catherine’s 10 children. Some were born in New Jersey, where Abraham and Catherine met and lived before moving to Ohio, probably around 1838. We think their second child, daughter Anna, was born in Port Washington, and The History of Tuscarawas County, 1884, credits the family as being among the first to settle in the Ohio town about 10 miles south of where I grew up.

Harriet married fellow Port Washington resident James Hammersley on March 29, 1863. He was a Civil War soldier and son of Andrew Hammersley and Catherine Stocker. Now… it has been close to 7 years since I have fully examined the foliage on this section of the tree, but in 2008 I had petty reliably — if quickly, in a competitive frenzy with my wife’s cousin — traced the Stockers back to my 10th great-grandfather in 1600’s Switzerland. At the time, I may have even thought Catherine Stocker’s mother, Mary Ann Stophlet, was born in 1895 in Gnadenhutten — about as early Ohio as you can get, and Moravian to the core.

Now, it seems more likely that Mary Ann Stophlet and Christian Stocker met and married in Northampton, Penna., as this excerpt on their son, Christian, from Tuscarawas County biographical sketches relates:

CAPE CHRISTIAN STOCKER, farmer. P. O. Lock 17, was born in Salem Township December 13, 1817. son of Christian and Mary (Stophlet) Stocker, who emigrated from Northampton County. Penn., to Salem Township, this county, in 1816. Christian was there raised on a farm. and received his education in the common schools. He was married, in 1840, to Harriet Houghtling, of Bradford County, Penn. She was born June 9, 1822. They have not been blessed with children, but have raised three boys and three girls, four of where are now married. The two now living at the home of Mr. Stocker are the children of one of the girls be raised. Mr. and Mrs. Stocker were formerly members of a Regular Baptist congregation, until that organization perished, and Mrs. Stocker is at present a member of the Moravian Church. Mr. Stocker has resided in Clay Township since 1841. He has held various township offices, and for sixteen years, from 1851 to 1867. was a captain on the Ohio Canal.

Whatever James’ family origins, the Hammersleys and Stockers and Sperlings were well established and well acquainted in their Ohio hamlet. Hattie and James had three children together. Henry, born 1864, died that year; Minnie, born 1865; and Myra Bell, born 1869. Tragically, James would not live to see his youngest child’s second year. Historical records indicate he died at 27 in Cleveland, Ohio.

The cause of James’s death had been a mystery (to me, anyway) since I first started recording this branch of the tree in 2008. But some sleuthing this weekend has turned up a tragic report from the Fremont, Ohio Weekly Journal of July 2, 1869:

Capt. James Hammersley, of the canal boat Mazeppa, after a hard days work loading his boat at Cleveland, on last Friday, lay down upon a beam on the lock to rest, fell asleep, and soon after rolled off into the canal, his head striking against some stones in the fall. He was supposed to have been killed by these injuries, as he did not rise to the surface. His body was subsequently recovered, and a frightful cut found near the right temple, as well as several smaller cuts on the right side of his face. He belonged at Port Washington, Tuscarawas County, and leaves a wife and two children.

Hammersley siblings Maria, Hattie and Anna, with Anna’s husband, William Riley, circa 1898.

Hattie Hammersley Remarries

A widowed mother of two at 25, Hattie didn’t look far or long to find love again.

In November 1871 she married Christian Wiand, a native of Carroll County, Ohio, then living in Uhrichsville. The couple returned to Port Washington, making their home at the north corner of Main and High streets.

Christian ran a hardware store for more than 50 years, eventually passing the business on to his son with Hattie, Curtis Wiand, who would follow the husband of his half-sister, (my great-great-grandmother Minnie (Hammersley) Ley), into politics, serving as Tuscarawas County Commissioner to Charles Ley’s county treasurer role (though much later).

Hattie passed away in 1922 at age 78, just 7 years before her daughter, Minnie, died at a young 62 following a fall and fractured hip. Chris would outlive her by 12 years, dying in 1934 at age 89.

Read Hattie’s full obituary here.

Below, check out a picture of Hattie and Chris’s house in Port Washington as it appeared in 1880, and how it appears today, via Google maps. Thanks again to Mac Wilcox and his family at Kin-Connection for the fine pics.

Wiand Residence, Port Washington, 1880

Wiand House, Port Washington, 2013

Hattie Sperling Hammersley, second from right, and her siblings.

In Good Countenance #11, Catherine Sperling

Fourth-great-grandmother Catherine (Voorhees) Sperling

Catherine (Voorhees) Sperling

The other day, we caught a rare glimpse of Great-great-great-great Grandfather Abraham Sperling, thanks to some distant relatives who’ve shared their research on Kin-Connection.com.

Today we meet the other (better?) half of this 19th-Century Port Washington, Ohio power couple, wife Catherine Sperling.

Catherine Voorhees married Abraham Sperling back in New Brunswick, NJ, where she bore their first of 10 children, eldest daughter Maria, in 1834. But by 1838 they were settled in Port Washington, Ohio, where they were among the first to call the eventual Ohio-Erie Canal hotspot home.

They are parents to Third Great-Grandmother Hattie Hammersley — whose obituary I’ll share tomorrow — and grandparents to Minnie Eillene (Hammersley) Ley, wife of Charles Ley.

Abraham led a bustling life, working as cobbler, butcher, auctioneer and serving as soldier during the Civil War, but he succumbed to death in his mid-60’s. The May 11, 1876 edition of The Ohio Democrat reports in its Port Washington dispatch: “The death record in our community for the last week has been quite unusual. … Mr. Abraham Sperling, after a long siege of suffering, died of dropsy on last Wednesday evening.”

Catherine outlived Abraham by 17 years. She ran the household in Port Washington as late as 1880, according to the federal census, and is still listed as a resident there in the pensioner record of 1890, three years before her death.

Abraham and Catherine are buried in the old section of Union Cemetery, Port Washington.

Fourth great-grandparents Abraham and Catherine Sperling are buried in Old Union Cemetery, Port Washington, Ohio.

 

In Good Countenance #10: Abraham Sperling

Fourth Great-Grandfather Abraham Sperling

 

Abraham Sperling | Ley Family History

It’s been a few years since I’ve had the chance to tromp around the old family stomping grounds in Tuscarawas County and come face to face with haunts of ancestors close and far-flung. Distant Foutz cousin Dawn James and I like to refer to this practice as “full-contact genealogy.”

I dunno, there’s something a bit more tangible than juggling JPEGs and squinting at old clippings or the botched transcriptions of barely coherent hobbyist genealogists when you go foraging through cemeteries that seem as if they haven’t seen visitors in the last year. But then you see recently-laid flowers on the headstones of relatives from extended branches of the tree and it’s an arm-tingling, goosebumpity feeling: the blood that runs through you still runs through this place, too. And will, long after you move away and longer still, when your bones repose in some similar hillside.

One of my dispatches from a visit home in 2013 saw me sharing the stories of fourth great-grandparents Abraham and Catherine Sperling, who found their way to Port Washington, Ohio from New Jersey in the middle part of the 1800’s. He was a shoemaker, butcher, auctioneer and soldier (in his 50’s during the Civil War!), among other occupations, and she bore him 10 children, 8 of whom survived into adulthood.

Their fourth child (and third daughter) was Harriet “Hattie” Sperling, who went on to marry James Hammersley and was mother to Minnie Eillene, whom members of our Ley family may know better as Minnie Ley, wife of great-great grandpa Charles.

I’ll share more in a couple days about Hattie, who remained a devout member of the Moravian Church and remained in Port Washington even after the young death of James in 1869. For now, feast your eyes on the “vintage visage” of Abraham, courtesy of Mike Parker’s tree on Ancestry.com and curated by Mac Wilcox and his genealogist-sleuth brothers at kin-connection.com. Props for their excellent work and generosity — looking forward to see what more they turn up!

 

Another pic of fourth-great-grandfather Abraham Sperling, not dated.