The Clark Family & Las Vegas, Nevada

It is so exciting to be in Las Vegas for the first time, participating in the National Genealogical Society's Family History Conference. I am looking forward to seeing the lights of "The Strip," and to networking with friends from all over the country.

But coming here has even more meaning for me because of a distant family connection to this area. William Andrew Clark and his younger brother, J. Ross Clark, were instrumental in the construction of the San Pedro, Los Angeles & Salt Lake Railroad that was routed through Las Vegas just after 1900, and it was that railroad that history books say caused this town to boom. In fact, Clark County - where Las Vegas is located - was named for William A. Clark, the older brother who also became a United States senator (albeit amid the scandal of alleged purchased votes).

My family connection is this: J. Ross Clark married Miriam Evans, my great-great-grandmother's first cousin. Miriam's mother was born Margaret Holmes, the daughter of John and Margaret (Brown) Holmes of Guernsey County, Ohio. She married Zenas Evans. William Holmes, my third great-grandfather, was Margaret (Holmes) Evans's brother. My branch of the family moved to Washington County, Pennsylvania, after William Holmes's death.

Years later, the family story goes, when Miriam (Evans) Clark came back to Pennsylvania from her home in California to visit her cousins, she was stricken by the impoverished lives that they lived as coal miners. J. Ross and Miriam were very well-to-do because of his investments with his brother in railroads and copper mines, so Miriam was able to set up a regular schedule of sending money to her relatives back in Pennsylvania. My father's first cousin, Roy Bane, remembers his father and grandmother receiving Miriam's checks:

--> "My dad would receive around $1000 every quarter when I was young. This was ¼ of what Grandma Bane would get. It was divided four ways after her death. This was 1950’s money. It was a lot!! Others got checks besides Grandma. Lot of money came back to PA from Miriam!!”[i]

Roy recounted that Miriam came back to Pennsylvania in her own train car, and what a spectacle that was for the people of that area to witness.

Ella Harriett Clark

J. Ross and Miriam (Evans) Clark had two children, Ella, born about 1881, and Walter Miller Clark, born about 1884. The story of their son, Walter, is a tragic one. He and his wife went on a delayed honeymoon to England in 1912 and booked passage for their return trip to the United States on the R.M.S. Titanic. Walter's wife, Virginia, was saved in lifeboat no. 4, but Walter was lost when the ship sank. The photograph at the left is Ella Harriett Clark, the daughter of J. Ross and Miriam. It was among the family pictures owned by my great-grandmother, Ella's third cousin. I also inherited a tattered old book with its cover missing, The Titanic and Other Great Sea Disasters, published in 1912, that includes the name of Walter Miller Clark.

The legacy of this Clark family is intertwined with the West, from Montana, where J. Ross and Miriam were married and the Clark brothers made part of their fortune in copper; to Los Angeles, where J. Ross and Miriam later lived and an ornate mausoleum to the memory of their son, Walter, stands in Hollywood Forever Cemetery; to here in Las Vegas, where the Clark brothers' railroad sparked exponential growth, turning an outpost in the desert into the magnificent city that exists today.

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[i] Roy Bane email message to Dawne Slater-Putt with the subject “RE: Family HistoryArticle from Roy Bane,” dated 29 June 2011; copy in the family files of Dawne Slater-Putt.

Family Connections: Elwood/Ellwood-Holmes, Washington County, PA & Guernsey County, OH

I am fascinated by the way the lives of our ancestors and their neighbors and associates were intertwined. What a thrill it is to dig through the layers of information in the various records and uncover a previously unsuspected family connection!

My ancestor Eliza Ellwood was married twice. She lived with her first husband, William Holmes, in Millwood Township, Guernsey County, Ohio. They had five children. Of these, Mary Ellen Holmes, the oldest, apparently had a son, William P. Holmes, although I have found no evidence that she ever married. By 1870, Mary Ellen's mother, Eliza, had been married a second time to Daniel K. Hall and either was widowed or divorced. Eliza Hall was living with her second-oldest daughter, Nancy Ann Bane, and her husband, James Henry Bane, in East Bethlehem Township, Washington County, Pennsylvania. Enumerated on that census two households away were Eliza's daughter, Mary "Homes" and her small son, William. (Relationships weren't stated on this early census, of course; this knowledge is from additional research.)

Mary was living in the household of John C. Moore and his apparent wife, Susannah. Coincidentally - or not? - also in the Moore household was 9-year-old John Elwood. Did John Elwood have a family connection to Mary Ellen Holmes, whose mother was an Elwood/Ellwood? Did he have a family connection to the Moores, with whom he was living? Did Mary Ellen Holmes have a family connection to the Moores? The answer is, perhaps.

Further research uncovered a first marriage for Susannah, née Susannah Cecelia Beall, to a John Elwood. The younger John, John Lawrence, apparently was their son and therefore John C. Moore's step-son. So John Elwood did have a family connection to the Moores.

If the first husband of Susannah Moore were the brother of Eliza (Elwood) Holmes Hall, then in 1870, Mary Ellen Holmes and her young son were living in the household of her aunt by marriage.  In 1880, Mary Ellen was living in the household of Frank Hastings and working as a servant. But her son, William, remained in the household of the Moores and was identified as John Moore's adopted son. Perhaps these associations were simply the result of a close-knit neighborhood, but perhaps there was a family tie.

Eliza Elwood was born circa 1822 and John Elwood, first husband of Susannah Cecelia Beall, was born circa 1828, both in Ohio. They were contemporaries. In 1850, John was living in the household of a William Elwood, who was old enough to have been his father. Eliza was already married to her first husband, William Holmes. However, one piece of contradictory evidence exists - a biography in a county history of a son of William Elwood by his second marriage names Williams's children from both marriages and does not include reference to Eliza or John. But more research remains to be done before this question can be put to rest.

Great-Grandma Jessie's "Boyfriend"

I shared three photos on Facebook last week and did a shot-out to some family members for help identifying them. These were from my mom's collection of photos and since her pictures are mixed together in one box, I wasn't sure to which side of her family - or my father's - they might belong.

I didn't get any positive identifications from my experiment on Facebook, but I had breakfast with my mom at the end of the week and when I showed her these particular pictures, she was able to give me positive IDs for the people in two of them and a possible identification for the young Air Force man in the third.

(Yes, my mom is alive and well, and yes, the straightest line between two points might have been to ask her since they were her photographs in the first place. But I happened to be working with those pictures earlier in the week and Facebook was right there and I was impatient. I also thought that getting them identified via Facebook would make an awesome blog post, either for The Genealogy Center blog or for this fledgling one.)

One of the photos is of my Grandma Laura (Bane) Slater's first cousin, Clara (Bennett) Rine, and her now late husband, Albert, and their son and his dog. Another - the Air Force fellow - might be Norman Fordyce, the son of my Great-Grandmother Jessie Krinn's half-brother, Albert Charles Fordyce, and his wife, Emma. The third is a picture of my Great Grandma Jessie Krinn, taken some 16 years after the death of her husband, George, and she is standing next to a man in the photo who looks to be about her age. I recognized Jessie from other pictures, but I wasn't sure who the man was. I speculated that it might be her half-brother, Albert Charles. Mom has another photo I was sure was taken the same day (because Jessie was wearing the same dress and shoes and the background was similar) of Jessie and all of her children. I thought maybe it was a family get-together because out of town relatives had come for a visit.

But Mom immediately said, "Oh, that's Mr. Green, my grandma's boyfriend." What??!! Boyfriend? Oh, my. This opens up a whole new avenue of research ...

Hello!

I am considering creating a blog to share some of my family history discoveries. Some of these might be "teaching moments" from which which other genealogists can learn. But many of them will be simply cool things that I find about my own families, or even about strangers' families during the course of my job as a Genealogy Reference Librarian in The Genealogy Center of the Allen County Public Library.

One of the first things that I need to learn is how to change to my time zone ... It is not 9:02 a.m. ...