Tag Archives: Guy Anderson

Dorcas Middaugh Brink, 12 Children, 6 Living

DORCAS MIDDAUGH (1826-1904)

HERstory

EDITED September, 2024, with additional family information.

It would be great to be able to tell some new stories about Dorcas Middaugh Brink, my great-great grandmother. However, I already told you the major stories of that family when I wrote about Abraham Brink (1828).

That’s the story of women in history isn’t it? I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry when I saw a major newspaper’s coverage of the historic event that took place in Philadelphia yesterday (August, 2016). The headline read “With Nomination, Clinton Makes History“. Under the headline they published a huge photo of former President Bill Clinton. So the historic even was the nomination of a former president? Nah, it was that other Clinton–the WOMAN, Hillary Clinton. Oh, yeah, women make history, too.

Sorry Dorcas. My bad, as they say in the 21st century. I should have told the story of the birth of twelve children and the loss of six children, the growth of an Ohio farm and the perspective of my great-grandmother’s family from your viewpoint instead of from that of your husband, Abraham. But things being what they are, I have more information on him. So here’s what I know about you grandma.

A Woman’s Life

Dorcas Middaugh was born to Jedidiah Middaugh and Ann Coddington Middaugh in Danby Township, Tompkins County, New York on May 2, 1826. Danby was and is a small town south of Ithaca New York, not far north of the Pennsylvania border. Her father had been born in New Jersey, but her parents settled in New York when they married. Her family had Dutch roots on both sides, and it must have been a big change to leave the close Dutch community of what had been New Amsterdam for life in Ohio.

Dorcas had an older brother, and as she was growing up, at least two more brothers were added to the family. Sometime after 1840, the family moved to Holmes County, Ohio, where she met and married Abraham Brink. She was 18 years old when they married.

Her mother- and father-in-law, as well as her own father and mother lived nearby when she was a young bride, and as her children grew up, the families remained close.

1846. Her first child, Jedidiah, named for her father, was born before she was twenty.

1847. Elias, the 2nd child, died as an infant. Dorcas was still young, and although infant deaths were not uncommon, that loss had to be difficult. But she had a toddler to tend to, and soon was pregnant again.

1849. The first girl in the family got the pretty name Celestia.

1850. Another daughter,Sarah, joined the first two.

1852. Although records are contradictory about Katherine’s birth year, I believe 1852 is the actual date, since other dates conflict with birth dates of siblings. In 1860, her parents said she was 6 years old, and it is highly likely that they would mistake the age of a child under ten.

1854. The pattern of a girl every two years continued with the birth of Selestra .

1856. My great-grandmother Mary Viola Brink added to this household of mostly little girls. So many heads of hair to brush! How many braids to twist! How many ribbons! Seven year old Celestia and six-year-old Sarah were old enough to start helping with cooking and chores, and Jedidiah no doubt helped his father, but five small children were still a handful, creating laundry, a need for sewing and cooking more each year.

1860. Abe probably was relieved to see another boy born—another potential farm hand.

1862. The family greeted another boy, Jacob.

1864. In July a little girl was born and lived just long enough to get the name Alice. Dorcas was 38 years old, and had given birth to twelve children, and two of them had died in infancy.

1865. But the year of 1865 was to bring the kind of grief that a woman cannot imagine surviving. Beginning in March, some disease swept through the family and took the lives of 3- year-old- Jacob, 6-year-old Celestra, and 11-year-old Selestia. When those small bodies had been buried in the Wolf Creek Cemetery, and Abe and Dorcas perhaps thought the worst was over, teenager Moses, 15, died in May. Dorcas had lost half of the children she had delivered, most of them in the terrible Spring of 1865.

(I have been unable to find information about what specific epidemic or illness might have affected the Brink family.)

She had thirty-three years ahead of her of housekeeping as children grew, married, moved out, brought home grandchildren. Thirty-three more years with husband Abe before he died in 1898. A 54-year marriage was quite an accomplishment.

To fill in more details of Dorcas’ life —marriages of the oldest, and the birth of grandchildren–please read Abraham Brink Takes Root in Ohio.

After Abraham

When Abraham died in 1898, Dorcas went to live with her daughter Mary V. Brink, the widow of Joseph Anderson, in a nearby township in Holmes County, Ohio. My grandfather Guy Anderson and his bride Lillis shared the farmhouse with his mother, Mary. Since I knew my grandfather Guy (whose 2nd wife was my grandmother) and he lived for a couple of years in the same house with HIS grandmother, Dorcas, I feel a connection to Dorcas Middaugh Brink.

In 1900, when the census report was filed, Dorcas reported that she was a widow, had 12 children, but only six were living.

Lillis and Dorcas’ grandson, Leonard Guy Anderson (my maternal grandfather) had a daughter in 1901 (My aunt Rhema Anderson Fair) and a son in 1903. Lillis died of complications from childbirth in 1903.

In March of 1904, when she was 78 years old, Dorcas died and was buried in Wolf Creek Cemetery in Holmes County, near her husband Abe, and the six children she had laid to rest. Continue reading →

Harriette Anderson Kaser: Wrangles the Praying Pony and Houses

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Harriette Anderson (Kaser): 1906-2003

Many little girls pray for a pony. My mother had a pony that prayed.

Paul and Harriette Kaser 1983 (Around the time she recorded these memories.

It is the stories that Harriette Anderson Kaser left behind that help us visualize what life was like in her grandmother’s time, her mother’s time, and in the early 20th century when she was a girl, driving a pony cart.

Seeing a small town in Ohio today, it is sometimes hard to imagine barns in the back yard of houses in the middle of town and milk cows that were taken to pasture every day. But even though my mother eventually flew on an airplane, her life started in the age of transportation by horse (or pony) .

Doc Stout, Harriette and Bill Anderson

In that 1909 picture, my mother is nearly three years old, and is seated on her grandfather “Doc” Stout’s lap. She was born on August 15, 1906 and the picture was probably taken in May, 1909. Since she was a tiny tot in 1909, I will let her memoirs, recorded in 1980, speak for her. (To see the house she lived in when the family picture was taken, sitting on her grandfather’s lap, take a look at this article and the house in the background of the 1909 photograph.)

But another house, in Killbuck, Ohio, was the one that she thought of as home. Front Street with grocery stores and the post office and other essentials, ran between the Killbuck Creek bridge and her family’s church, the Church of Christ, on the east edge of the village. The Stout home stood on Main Street, just one block from the main shopping street. The main road to Millersburg, the county seat, ran down Main Street, and the nicest houses in town were built along Main Street.

Here’s an earlier image of that house in town, when her own mother (Vera Stout) was a small girl.

Dr. William Stout and family in front of family home, circa 1885. Doc Stout, Vera, Will, Maude, and Hattie.

Grandpa [Stout] had done quite well…so much so that he was able to accumulate enough to build his home and he was quite proud of that house. This home became later our family home–I mean Guy and Vera Anderson’s family home. We all still thought of this place as home, always. The fact is, I was born in that place.

Mother [Vera Anderson] had come from their home in the country [ the house where the 1909 picture was taken] and so I was born at my grandfather and grandmother’s house in Killbuck, so the house is special to me.

You can see the dirt street in front of this house in 1885. The streets were still dirt in the early 1900s, and there were far more horses than cars on the streets, so the streets were a play place for the children.

Grandmother [Harriette Morgan Stout] would rush to close our windows at daybreak. The windows were always open at night in the summertime, but she would have to close them during the day when the horses and buggies would go down through town and the dust would start flying.

When Guy and Vera Anderson moved into the big old Stout house (about 1911) a barn stood behind the house, along with the original summer kitchen and other small outbuildings, including an outhouse. In other words, it was not any more “citified” than the farm house they had lived in since they were married in 1904. When they first moved in, the house did not have indoor plumbing, and Guy installed the first bathrooms.

The family kept a milk cow in the barn and little Harriette sometimes drove the cow out to pasture, over the bridge across Killbuck Creek and back home in the evening. But her prized possession was Wrangles, the pony.

Zane Grey filming Riders of the Purple Sage

Daddy Guy (my grandfather) was a big fan of Zane Grey, and they named the pony after a Zane Gray story that mother said was called “The Wrangler.” [I can’t find a book by that name, but Riders of the Purple Sage, Grey’s breakout book and very popular western was published in 1912, and like most of his books, it does have wranglers in it.]

The pony had been beaten by the man who owned him previously, so if you walked up behind the pony where he couldn’t see you, he’d spook and run away. Otherwise, he was gentle and obedient. The children (Harriette, Bill and baby brother Herbert) even taught him stunts, including “roll over,” and pray.

He’d get down on his knees like he was saying his prayers and put his head down. We just had him doing everything, but if you ever walked up back of him, look out. HIs heels went up in the air and he took off.

One time, Mother [Vera Anderson] bought a new rug and gave Grandma [Hattie Morgan] the old rug for her porch. They rolled it up and put it in back of the pony buggy, and I was going to drive the pony down to Grandma’s which was just a block from where we lived. Well, they must have put the rug across the seat and instead of going around and petting Wrangles and getting in the buggy, which would have been all right, I jumped up on top of the rug, and Wrangles took off.

Across the street was a row of trees beside a big porch, and a car parked next to the trees. Wrangles took off between a row of trees and the car, and when he went in there the buggy was wider than the space between the trees and the car.

You could not hold him, he just went right straight out of his harness and left me and the buggy sitting right in there between the tree and the car. Well, Dad came over to find out if I was hurt. I was scared to death, but I wasn’t hurt, and he said, “Now what you’ve got to do, you’ve got to get right on Wrangles and ride.”

Well, Wrangles just went trotting on down to the barn and went right in his stall and there he was, waiting for us. Dad and I went down to the barn and I immediately got on his back and rode him. He never ran off with me afterwards.

Finally our Dad decided we were too big for ponies and he sold him to another Lowe family in town that had some children. We all cried. Everyone was crying. We were great big grown up kids, but we cried when we lost the pony Wrangles. He was beautiful.

THEN AND NOW

I have fond memories of the Stout/Anderson house, also, as my mother and father and I lived there with Grandma Vera for short periods. The barn was gone by the time I can remember the house. After a piece of the barn’s roof fell down and hit one of my cousins, the barn was finally torn down.

The newspaper article tells about my grandmother’s sale of the house in 1960, when she was 79 years old. This is the way I remember the house in the 1940s and 50s. Grandma Vera had enclosed the porches on the first and second stories and some of the ornate trim was gone.

This is what the house would have looked like when it housed the Anderson Restaurant, which you see in the banner at the top of the page.

Stout-Anderson house newspaper article

The Stout/Anderson home on Main Street in Killbuck, built in the early 1880’s was first moved around the corner in the 1960s to make room for a new grocery store parking lot. Decades later it was demolished.

The old Stout farm, which became the Anderson farm, and the home of Bill and Sarah Anderson, was located on the old Route 62 where there was a “dead-man’s curve” in the road as you left the Killbuck Valley. The Stouts never lived on the farm, but used it for income. However, there was a cabin where the family spent time. The land is now a wildlife preserve with a sportsman’s club on the property.

NOTES:

“Harriette Anderson Kaser’s Memories of Killbuck, Ohio in the late 1800’s and early 1900’s” were transcribed from an audiotape recorded in the home of P. W. Kaser, Fresno, California about 1980. Paul William Kaser, her son, made the transcription. Vera Marie Kaser Badertscher made slight edits.

Added material was taken from other notes of conversations with Harriette, and from a Holmes County Hub (undated) newspaper article about the Stout home and a Wooster Daily Record article dated Thursday, December 15, 1960.

Birth, wedding and death dates, locations and occupations come from family Bible records, personal knowledge, and census and other official data.

A recorded conversation with Herbert Guy Anderson made in his home in St. Petersburg Florida in 2008 added some details.

Family photographs are in the author’s possession.
This has been a weekly post in the 52 Ancestors/52 Weeks Project started by Amy Johnson Crow at “No Story too Small.” Check out her weekly recap showing the list of participants for some ripping good stories.

Errett Allison: Double Cousin

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Errett Allison (1885-1952)

Trying to figure out cousin relationships makes me feel like I’m tripping over my shoelaces.

That is why I may mention a cousin peripherally when I’m talking about an aunt or uncle or great aunt or great uncle, or to explain some remote relationship, but mostly I let somebody else worry about whether a cousin is a first cousin twice removed or a second cousin once removed, or not removed at all, and if so, removed from what???

Cousin Relationship Chart, borrowed from the Family History 4U website.

I’m making an exception for Errett Allison, whom Ancestry.com defines as a first cousin two times removed (although I think our relationship is even more complicated than that). He just seems like a great guy–a hard working, handsome youth and who led an interesting and varied life, although like many farm boys of his time, he only finished 8th grade.

His mother was Ada Brink Allison, sister of my great-grandmother Mary Brink Anderson and also of Sarah Jane Brink Anderson, another great-grand aunt. I talked a bit about the Dutch Aunts and my great-grandmother–descended from Brink and Middaugh–in my discussion of Mary Brink Anderson. (I’m sure that Dutch aunts are not stern and lecturing like Dutch Uncles!)

At any rate that means that my great-great-grandfather is Errett’s grandfather.

Okay so far.

Errett Allison, 1909. Detail from Guy and Vera Anderson family picture

I don’t recall ever meeting Errett Allison when I was growing up in Killbuck, Ohio, but I did hear him mentioned and mother pointed him out in the big Anderson/Stout family picture. All she said, however, was that he was my grandfather’s (Leonard Guy Anderson’s) cousin, and that Errett and his wife worked on Guy’s farm. He looks very young and handsome with that square jaw and straight gaze in the picture. Errett and his second wife, Aletia (Leta), both 23 in May 1909, had only been married a year when this picture was taken.

Aletia (Leta) Larimore Allison (1909)

Although the couple looks touchingly young in this family picture, he had been married before, and experienced the grief of losing a wife. In 1904, when Errett was only 19, he married Zelpha Lisle, who was 17. In early April 1906, Zelpha gave birth to Amy Ada Allison, but days later Zelpha died of “childbed fever.”

Zelpha was the grand daughter of my great-grand aunt, Margaret Anderson Lisle, so that is why I say I am related to Errett–and their daughter Amy Ada in more than one way. Ancestry says Zelpha would be my 2nd cousin once removed. (the reverse of the cousin relationship with Errett) It also says that Amy Ada would be 2nd cousin one time removed, and I’m not going to get a headache by trying to figure that out.

After Guy Anderson moved off the farm and tried his hand on business in Killbuck, Errett went on to many different jobs. He and Aletia had three children between 1912 and 1915–Bernice Eloise, William Elton and Gordon Basil. In 1917 when Errett filled out his WWI draft registration card, he was working as a carpenter for the Pennsylvania Railroad. They probably had moved directly to Millersburg, Ohio from the farm, because in 1920 they are living on Clay Street in the county seat.

One of the things that people who lived through the Great Depression could take great pride in was being able to work through those lean years. My father never tired of saying that he was never without work–even though it might have been temporary and lowly labor during those years. My mother also was proud of the fact that her teaching salary sustained her parents and brothers when the men had a hard time getting work.

Errett was another of those hard working people willing to do anything to make ends meet. According to memories by a descendant, Errett worked at various jobs, including as a dog catcher during the depression.

“Also in the rubber plant in Millersburg, was a carpenter. dog warden during the depression, and was the only one in the family with a job.”

In 1930, Errett is still working as a carpenter, but now building houses rather than working for the railroad, and the family has moved to a different house. They move again, this time to Washington Street in Millersburg, by 1935. An interesting career change by 1940 has him working as a deputy sheriff for Holmes County, probably a political appointment.

I don’t know when the stint as a deputy sheriff started, but by 1942, when my cousin filled out the draft registration form for WWII, he had a job with Republic Steel in Massilon Ohio, which involved a commute from Millersburg.

Errett Allison, game warden. 1940s. Photo added to Ancestry.com by Patricia Willison

According to notes by the same descendant quoted above, Errett Allison worked as a game warden from the late forties until he died in 1952. I’m guessing that was his favorite job of all, because his descendant writes: “Loved fox hunting , fishing, dogs, played baseball until in his 40’s.” And judging by the photographs, he maintained that square jaw all his life.

This is the last person I will feature from the large Anderson family picture. Next week, I will recap all of the people in that picture, and then we will move on to another branch of the tree.

Notes:
Information about Errett Allison comes from from death records, obituaries, census records, draft registrations and marriage records obtained from Ancestry.com; and from the recorded recollections and photo albums of my mother, Harriette V. Anderson Kaser (1906-2003). I am grateful for the sharing of stories and photos by descendants of Errett Allison and for the website from which I borrowed the cousin chart. (Click on the image to see more explanation of cousin relationships.)

This has been a weekly post in the 52 Ancestors/52 Weeks Project started by Amy Johnson Crow at “No Story too Small.” Check out her weekly recap showing the list of participants for some ripping good stories.

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