Overlooked
While I was considering what direction to take this topic “overlooked,” the answer jumped out at me while looking at part of my family tree. I noticed that there was information missing for my mom’s maternal aunts and uncles. I knew them all, and spent many Thanksgivings with them and their spouses while I was growing up. They were an interesting bunch! I knew they had all passed away, but looking at my tree, I noticed I had never filled in their dates of death. I certainly didn’t mean to overlook them, and I guess I thought I would get to them sometime, but I never had. Once again, I sure wish I had asked them some questions about their lives, because now there is no one to answer them.
My mom had 5 aunts and uncles on her mom’s side that lived into adulthood. Her mom Florence (b 1889) was the second oldest. The first born was Edith (she later started spelling her name Edythe), John Raymond “Bud”, Helen, Clifford, and the youngest Melvin (b 1903). In between Cliff and Mel were two children who died very young. All the children were born and raised in Philadelphia PA, and most of them settled in that area. The exceptions were my grandmother Florence, who settled in Atlantic City and my Aunt Edythe, who lived most of her adult life in East Orange, NJ. It is through my great aunt Edythe’s first marriage that I found this story.
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| Thanksgiving about 1953 Ventnor NJ The Koetzle clan, with Uncle Oliver and Aunt Edythe the 2nd & 3rd adults from the right. |
I am the person in the family who has inherited most of the old family photos. Because of this, I can recognize most of the people in these photographs, which go back well over 125 years. Early on, my mom helped me identify many of them. So I knew that my Aunt Edythe had been married twice, and I knew her first husband’s name was Frank Armstrong, and there were a few photos of him with Aunt Edythe. Based on dates on the photos, I knew they married around 1912, and that he died unexpectedly in 1918, just 6 years after they were married. But what follows is what I didn’t know.
One of these early photos (dated 7-4-1912) was of my Aunt Edythe and her husband Frank, with two young children standing in front of them, a boy and a girl. Well, I grew up knowing that Aunt Edythe never had any children. So who were this two kids, and why was there a picture of just them with Edythe and her husband Frank? Time for some ancestry.com searching!
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| Edith, Frank, Dorothy, Ellis 7/4/1912 |
What I came to learn was that Frank was married before. He and his wife Helen (nee Barton) married in 1903 and had two children together. Then Helen passed away suddenly in 1908, leaving Frank as a single parent with two young children. Frank (their father) was listed as widowed in the 1910 census and as a lodger at a boarding house. No mention of his kids. I haven’t been able to find where the kids went after their mother died or where they were living. Maybe they were with grandparents or a sibling of one of their parents, but I can’t verify that through any records. Then Frank and my Aunt Edythe met and were married in 1912, which was the same year this photo was taken.
Fast forward about 6 years to the WWI era. Frank registered for the draft in September 1918. He and Edith are now living in East Orange New Jersey. One month after Frank registered for the draft, he passed away from complications of bronchitis and pneumonia in October 1918. Now his two children, both still under the age of 18, have had both parents die.
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| Frank Armstrong and Edythe at the beach |
The good news is that I found the names of both of these children from various records online. Ellis was born in 1903 and his sister Dorothy was born in 1906. Ellis was 15 years old when his father Frank died, and Dorothy was 12. Their mother had died 10 years before that, in 1908. Although I was not been able to find where the children lived after their parents died, I did find both of them in their adult lives.
From the obituary for Ellis I was able to piece together some key parts of his adult life. He did live in East Orange, New Jersey until he was in his mid 40’s. So that leads me to believe that my Aunt Edythe, or others most likely played some role in his early life there. Ellis was very active in several Masonic groups. He played contract bridge and whist as well. He was in the insurance business as his career, and an executive of the Armstrong-Ennis Byam Associates in Madison, New Jersey (not very far at all from where I grew up). I sure wish I had had the chance to meet him. He married, and had two daughters, who also now have families of their own. He passed away in 1981.
Dorothy made her way to Arizona at some point, met her future husband there, married, and moved to the Los Angeles, CA area, where she and her husband raised two children. Ellis and Dorothy obviously knew of each other and must have kept in touch, as Ellis’s obituary mentioned his sister Dorothy.
Aunt Edythe married again in 1920 to David Oliver Dillon. He was from Ireland. I like to think that my Aunt Edythe and Uncle Oliver (as we called him) were in contact with Eliis, as they were both very involved in the Masonic orders there in East Orange. As a matter of fact, Eliis was also a patron of the Ophir Chapter 60 of the Eastern Star, which Aunt Edythe was a member of as well. Pretty cool I think!
Since I have the obituaries of both Ellis and Dorothy, I now have the names of their children, and would like to contact them, with the end result being to share the photos I have of their father, Frank L. Armstrong when his kids were young. They might not have any photos like that, and I would love to be able to share them with his families.
There are certainly questions remaining, and they might never be answered, but it is amazing to me how simply filling in some dates of death and a little curiosity lead me down this path. I realize now how much more complex and intriguing my Aunt Edythe and Uncle Oliver’s early lives were than I ever imagined.