Mapping a Migration: Settling - and Clustering - in DC

Last week I introduced Operation DC with a map plotting the basics of my family's (great-grandparents, grandparents, their in-laws) migration to DC - who came, from where, and when. In that post, I also mentioned that I'd been compiling a list of family residences in DC, the goal being to get a better understanding of the neighborhoods in which they live and the institutions they might have interacted with (aside from the ones I already knew about), and hopefully opening the door to more resources.

So, my fun with maps continues, with a map of DC homes (1908-1964) for the Cooper, Shepherd, Petite, Watkins, Reid, Reeves and Ferguson families:

Some notes on the creation of this map:

• Addresses were pulled from City Directories, Deeds, Draft Registration Cards, Newspaper Articles (including obituaries and marriage license application announcements), and Social Security Number applications.
• The map was created using Google's My Maps function
• Each individual, family or married couple (depending on what they were at the time) has their points plotted in a different color, on a different layer of the map
• You can't actually see all the points on the map, because some are stacked on top of each other, as multiple couples lived in the same buildings, sometimes at the same time, sometimes over time

This last note above actually points to the coolest thing about all of this for me: seeing how families clustered together and supported each other through shared housing. Notice the clusters on this map, circled below:

The cluster to the left is a group of homes the Petites lived in, including my great-grandmother Katherine Shepherd's aunt Eleanor (Allen/Ellis) Petite and her son Fred Petite, as well as Katherine herself and her son, my grandfather Louis Shepherd. This is in the Foggy Bottom neighborhood.

The cluster in the center represents homes of the Coopers (my grandmother Elnora's family) as well as the homes their children and spouses (Fergusons, Reeveses, and Shepherds) would move into. This is in the Capitol Hill and Eastern Market neighborhoods.

On the right is a cluster of homes the Reid and Watkins families lived in. My grandfather Louis' second wife Doris was born a Reid; Doris' mother Cornelia was born a Watkins. These homes are roughly in the Capitol Heights, Grant Park, and Capitol View neighborhoods.

(Other markers generally represent either residences when a person or family first arrived in DC, or later homes of children after they married spouses and established themselves in the later half of the roughly 60-year period I'm researching.)

But actually, you need to drill down further to really see the clusters, and because of the stacked data points, a map isn't the best way to see it. So, I created a series of visuals:

Homes Owned by Noah and Nancy (Thomas) Cooper

(I don't have all dates of residence for all families, so you can see that a few of the years are approximate, and my research focus ends in 1964, so even if I have records of residence after that year, they aren't included here.)

This shows the two homes purchased by my great-grandparents in Washington, DC. According to Nancy's obituary, the family migrated up from Georgia in 1934, and city directories show Noah's early DC jobs were as a janitor, so it's notable that they were able to purchase two houses in about 10 years. My guess is that Noah sold his portion of the land inherited from his mother, but I haven't yet researched this.

Eleanor and Katherine, Sticking Together

When my great-grandmother moved to DC, she was just a teenager, maybe 16 years old, and she moved into the household of her maternal aunt Eleanor Petite, Eleanor's husband, Oswald, and their son Frederick. In 1922, Katherine gave birth to my grandfather Louis, while still living with the Petites, and in 1923, Oswald Petite passed away. It was now a household of two women and their sons. Katherine was briefly married in 1927, but within 2 years, she and Louis were back to living with Eleanor and Fred. In all, they shared at least 4 homes together between 1918 and 1933, when Eleanor passed away.

Watkins Neighbors or Housemates?

Meanwhile, my step-great-grandmother Cornelia (Watkins) Reid and her siblings, plus spouses, were living as either neighbors, or perhaps housemates (depending on whether the Blaine Street addresses are actually a case of an information collector getting their info wrong).

This doesn't cover all of the examples of family clustering or house sharing, but I'll end with two of my favorites before your eyes glaze over, if they haven't already:

The Girl and Boy Next Door

On the left is my grandfather Louis Shepherd. On the right, in the household of Noah and Nancy Cooper, is his future wife, Elnora. I've written more about them here.

And, new to me:

Share a House, Share a Life?

Yes, future husband and wife Fred Petite and Annice Gray lived in the same house at different times! Fred's mom Eleanor purchased 813 22nd Street NW from Annice's father and family in 1924. Censuses show the Grays (including Annice) living there at least from 1910-1920.  City Directories show that the Petites didn't move in immediately, but they're living there in 1930, according to that year's Census. By 1936, Fred and Annice are married. I want to know the story there!

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My next steps will involve researching the neighborhoods in which my family lived to see what adds to my understanding of their stories. I'll also be researching the institutions - churches, schools, businesses, etc - with which they were affiliated. This'll take a while, but there will be posts along the way.

And now that I've written this up, I've got a family reunion to head to!

Mapping a Migration: Coopers, Shepherds and Other Relations

In just over a week, I'm headed down to Georgia with my mom for her maternal family's biennial reunion. This year is extra special, because the Cooper-Cummings are gathering in Augusta, GA, and will have the opportunity to see our ancestral land - including land the family used to farm, land the family still owns, and even an old family cemetery. I am very excited!

I love going to these reunions anyway because not only are they a chance for me to meet distant relatives and learn more about family history, they're also a chance for all of my mom's siblings - the Shepherds - to get together and talk about their father's history. All of which means I need to be prepared 1) to ask the right questions to push my research along, and 2) to share what I've found since the last reunion.

All of this has prompted me to start a focused research project that I'm calling Operation DC. Washington, DC is where my grandparents Elnora Cooper and Louis Shepherd met, it's where my grandfather married the only maternal grandmother I was able to know (Doris Reid), where the Coopers migrated from Georgia, where my great-grandmother Katherine Shepherd moved from New Jersey to live with her aunt, and where my mom and her siblings were raised. There's quite a lot of my family history in that city!

For Step 1, I thought I'd focus on the who, what, when, and where of their lives in DC, with an eye towards the "where" especially. I've spent the past week or so recording and organizing every known address I've found from the time the first relative moved to the city until the year the last of my mom's siblings was born (1964). We're talking census records, city directories, deeds, and more!

The first result of that is this map, which is a simple visual of when people arrived in Washington, DC, and from where. It's not necessarily new information, but it's helpful - at least for me - to see it mapped out.



Clicking on a red marker will tell you the family or individual, their starting point, and a little about life at home. Clicking on the green line will tell you when (sometimes approximately) they arrived in DC and what they were up to after they arrived.

A few things:

• The Coopers, Shepherds, and Allens/Ellises are my starting families - I am biologically descended from them, the Coopers through my mother's mother, the Shepherds and Allens/Ellises through my mother's father.
• The Ferguson, Petite, Reeves, and Reid/Watkins families married into the above families.
• With the possible exception of Oswald Petite, everyone came from a farming family and had done some work on a farm or in a farming household.
• Members of each family had arrived in DC by the 1930s, putting them firmly in the Great Migration, which saw millions of African Americans move from the rural South to the urban North (and West and Midwest) during roughly the first half of the 20th Century.

As I continue with Operation DC, I'm looking forward to learning more about their schools, communities, jobs, and all of the other things that made up the context of their daily lives, especially given how different DC must have been from the farming communities where so many of them were raised! This is gonna take a while, but stay tuned as I use maps, timelines, photos and more to dig into these stories.

 And, as always, please share if you know something I don't!

A Sad Farewell for Rose (Allen or Ellis) Sheppard

One of the tough things about genealogy is that sometimes you find out about sad things that happened to people that you care about. Happily, sometimes you find out that things turn out all right in the end, but other times that sad note is the one your research ends on. And even though you may have never met these people personally, you can’t help but imagine what they and the people around them must have felt when tragedy struck.

Such is the case with my great-great-grandmother Rose Anne (Allen) Sheppard, her husband Samuel, and their daughter Katherine.

Possibly an image of Rose, found with Katherine's papers.

Rose is one of those people for whom I wish I had more records. Between state and federal census records, I’ve been able to find out about her life in 1905, 1910, and 1915. The 1913 Salem, NJ Farm Directory gives me a little detail as well. Between them, they tell me that she was the wife of a farm laborer in Salem County, New Jersey. Given that the major local crops were corn and potatoes – Salem produced 939,775 bushels of corn, 1,303,088 of white potatoes, and 459,592 of sweet potatoes in 1910 – Samuel probably came home exhausted from back-breaking labor. Rose herself sometimes did housework “out,” meaning as a domestic, which is not surprising given the types of jobs available for black women in her era. Overall, the family was probably poor but not destitute – they never owned their own home or farm, according to the records, but they did own a Bell telephone in 1913, and Samuel always seemed to be employed.

They probably also valued education; while the 1905 NJ Census says that neither Samuel nor Rose could read or write, both the 1910 Federal Census and 1915 NJ Census say they can. They either already knew how in 1905 and the information was incorrect, or they put in the effort and learned. And Katherine was in school when she was 7 and when she was 12.

Rose had been born somewhere in Virginia, but how, when or why she arrived in New Jersey, I do not know. We don’t have her birth certificate. Records suggest that she married Samuel around 1905, but we don’t have their marriage record either. The records are pointing more and more firmly towards her having had at least 2 sisters and 1 brother; one sister, Bertha, was close by, also in Salem County, and another, Eleanor, wasn’t too far away, in Washington, DC. But, we can’t find the siblings living together in 1900, nor have I found any vital or census records of their parents – they exist as ghosts on their daughters’ paperwork at this point. And Rose herself was proving difficult to find after 1915. By 1920, her daughter Katherine had moved to Washington, DC.

So what had happened? Two guesses came to mind: 1) She had died sometime soon after 1915, or 2) She and Samuel had separated or gotten divorced, and perhaps she had remarried. Sadly, my first guess was true.

On July 26, 1916, this notice appeared in the local newspaper, the Salem Standard and Jerseyman:

 

From the Salem County Historical Society clippings file.

As you can see, Rose passed away on July 16, 1916, when she was just 34 years old. What happened? This is where it gets heartbreaking. Here is a copy of her Certificate of Death:

Note: This document gives her parents' surname as Ellis. Other documents suggest her maiden name was Allen.

Rose was 7 months pregnant when she died. In fact complications from her pregnancy may have led to her death. For two weeks before she died, she had been attended to by a doctor due to uremia, who noted that Rose had albuminuria. According to the National Kidney Foundation, albuminuria is when you have too much protein in your urine; it generally signals that your kidneys are damaged. The condition is linked to kidney disease, diabetes, high blood pressure, and also smoking.  

Uremia, according to WebMD, is “a serious complication of chronic kidney disease and acute kidney injury…It occurs when urea and other waste products build up in the body because the kidneys are unable to eliminate them. These substances can become poisonous (toxic) to the body if they reach high levels.”  Unfortunately, pregnancy puts an increased strain on the kidneys; if Rose’s kidneys had been struggling along due to diabetes or hypertension, her pregnancy may have been the thing that pushed them over the edge.

Some of the symptoms she might have experienced include: nausea, vomiting, loss of appetite, weight loss, confusion, seizures, abnormal bleeding, and shortness of breath. How horrible for Rose to have experienced any of this! How horrible for Samuel and Katherine to have witnessed her going through this, especially with Katherine being 12 or 13 at the time. Imagine them worrying about their wife and mother and about the baby she was carrying, and then having to bury them both.

Rose’s death certificate says that she was laid to rest in the cemetery of Mt. Pisgah, an African Methodist Episcopal Church in Salem. While other headstones do exist, there is no tombstone for Rose, and no formal records of interments at the cemetery.

What happens next for the family? In September of 1918, Samuel registers for the “Old Man’s Draft” for World War I. Luckily, the war ends on November 11th that same year; no records yet found suggest he was called to serve. As for Katherine, a handwritten note among family papers states that she moved to Washington, DC on Christmas Eve. She would live there for at least the next 22 years, most of that time with her aunt Eleanor. But why did she leave her father behind, or why did he send her away? Did he think she would be better off with his wife’s family? Was their relationship strained by sadness (or something else)? We may never know. We do know she kept up with her cousins in Salem, the Kilsons, and that her son, my grandfather Louis, knew and told stories about them to his children. But what about Samuel, Louis’s grandfather, Katherine’s dad, and my great-great-grandfather? I’ve got a record request out – if we’re lucky, we’ll learn more soon.

And hopefully his story, though of course it inevitably ends, has a happier ending than that of his wife Rose. May they both rest in peace.

Katherine Jane Sheppard/Shepherd: A Timeline

Many of my posts here on KINterested so far have touched on the life of my maternal great-grandmother, Katherine Jane Sheppard/ Shepherd (my mother’s father’s mother). However, I haven’t given a full outline of her life yet! This post is meant to correct that. 

Mystery Monday Update 2: Women, Who Art Ye?

This time last week I was planning a series of quick trips down to South Jersey to dig deeper into my Shepherd/Kilson research. These are the families that I am related to through my mother’s father, Louis Shepherd, and my goal was to continue chipping away at the mystery of how exactly his mother, my great-grandmother Katherine Shepherd, was related to the Kilsons. You can read my original Mystery Monday post here and an update here. Long story short, Katherine’s mother was one of three women - Rose Sheppard, Bertha Kilson and Eleanor Petite - who were probably sisters, but there wasn’t much solid evidence of this at the beginning of this journey.

Well, good news! I found another piece of the puzzle! Here is the obituary for Bertha Kilson’s daughter, Eleanor, published in the October 25, 1968 edition of the Salem Standard and Jerseyman:

Mystery Monday: Women, Who Art Ye?!

Update: I've made progress on this mystery! Click here and here for details.

So, there are these three women. They all have the same maiden name. They are all from the same state. Their parents’ names are eerily similar. And they all appear connected to one woman in my family tree. But I don’t know how – or even if – they are related to each other!

The line of the Social Security Number Application my Great-Grandmother Katherine completed listing her mother's name.

Let’s start with the clear connection: my Great-Grandmother Katherine Shepherd. Her mother’s name is Rose Anne (or Rose Anna or Roseanne or Rosa Anne) Shepherd. But what is her maiden name, according to several records Katherine and others completed? Rose Allen. And where is she from, according to the 1910 Census and other records? Virginia, as are both of her parents.

1910 Census (Salem, New Jersey) for Samuel, Rose and Katherine Shepherd.

Katherine has a “cousin” (we don’t know yet if it’s a biological cousin or a play cousin, precisely because of this mystery) named Eleanor Kilson. They both grew up in Salem, New Jersey and they appear pretty close – in Katherine’s apartment after her death were several pictures of herself with Eleanor, plus lots of papers and photos of Eleanor’s brothers and sister. Eleanor’s mother’s name is Bertha Kilson. What does her marriage certificate say her maiden name is? Bertha Allen. And that she’s from Orange County, Virginia.

1912 Marriage Certificate for Bertha Allen and Waymon Kilson

Katherine moves to Washington, DC between 1918 and 1920, and into the household of Oswald Petite and his wife, Eleanor Petite. And what is this Eleanor's maiden name, according to her marriage license? Eleanor Allen.

Segment of 1912 Marriage License App, License and Return for Oswald Petite and Eleanor Allen

In the 1920 Census, Katherine is listed as Oswald’s niece (he’s the Head of Household). In the 1930 Census, after Oswald has passed and Eleanor is Head of Household, Katherine is listed as Eleanor’s cousin, and Katherine’s son, my grandfather Louis, is listed as Eleanor’s nephew. The 1920 and 1930 Censuses both list where each person and their parents are from. Eleanor (and both parents) are from Virginia. Katherine’s mother is from Virginia.

1920 Census showing Eleanor Petite and Katherine Shepherd's birthplaces and those of parents

1930 Census showing same as above

Oh, and that thing about their parents’ names? Records suggest that Rose’s are Jannis Ellis and Robert Ellis, that Bertha’s are Roberta Allen and Robert Allen, and that Eleanor’s mother is Elenor Ellis. And, just for kicks, there’s a Luke Ellis – also from Virgina, as are his parents – living in Eleanor’s household in 1930. He, like my great-grandmother Katherine, is listed as Eleanor’s cousin.

To Summarize, here's what we know based on census and vital records:

Are they sisters? Are they cousins? Are they mumble mumble no guesses?

Alright, so how am I going to solve this mystery? Obviously I need to do some more census digging. I’ve done many an online search for various combinations of these men and women living in family groupings in Virginia, with no luck. Perhaps birth records in Virginia will be useful – I have Orange County as a starting point. Obituaries, if I can find them, would likely be very helpful!

I'm also tracking Luke Ellis - the "cousin" living with Eleanor and Katherine in DC in 1930 - back through as many records as I can, and then fleshing out the households and families to whom he’s connected. (When researchers tell you organization is key, believe them!) One tantalizing tidbit from this line of digging is that in 1900, there’s a Luke Ellis living in the household of James Stearns and Charlotte (Ellis) Stearns in Orange County, VA. He’s listed as their grandson. Also in the household? An Ellen Allen, also listed as their grandchild! And both she and Eleanor Allen – the one living in DC by 1910 - are born about 1890; we may be on to something here!

So, do you have any recommendations for ferreting out the answer to this mystery? Or do you have information that may help us figure out what the relationship is between Rose Ann, Bertha and Eleanor Allen? Please leave your comments below!