THE LOST LEGACY OF NATHANIEL BARKER PT2

As Michael John Neil recently said on Facebook, "If you weren't there, you
don't KNOW".  So I don't know exactly when or things started going bad for
Nathaniel Barker's family. However, if I had to pick an exceptionally bad
turning point, I'd pick 1884.

 As I mentioned in an earlier post, I was struck by the fact that Nathaniel,
Huldah, and their son Nathanel S. all died within a few months of each other
in 1884. First Nathaniel S. died on 20Mar 1884, cause unknown. His parents
followed shortly after. Cousin Mary Ennis found these lines about them
in the Oxford Democrat newspaper:

"April 15, 1884:  Died in Albany 12th inst Mr Nathaniel Barker age 90 and 3 mos.
A pensioner of the War of 1812
May 27, 1884:  Mrs Barker, an aged lady, who has been sick several weeks with
lung fever is but just alive.  No hopes for her recovery."

Huldah Barker died shortly after on 7 June 1884.

Nathaniel S, Barker left a widow, the former Lucy  Coburn and five children.
They would have been the following ages in 1884:
Huldah  22years old.
Lee 20 years old
Frank 19 years old (my great grandfather)
John 15 years old
Lucy 7 years old.

It would have been difficult but not impossible for the Barkers to pull through
the situation, and perhaps they did for awhile. And here is where I run into
the "I don't KNOW" part. Thanks to the infamous lost 1890 census, the next
record I have of the family is the 1900 census, and none of them were living on
the farm in Albany. Lee had died in April, 1891. Frank was working as a baggage
master for the Grand Trunk Railroad in Bethel, Me, and John was listed as a
lawyer. Lucy was married and had a family of her own, and I haven't found
any record of their sister Huldah's fate as yet.

I can only guess at what had happened with the farm. The period between
1873 and 1896 had a series of recessions and banking panics. It's sometimes
called the Long Depression by some economists. The Barker farm might
have fallen victim to the economic problems of the time. I'm hoping to
find some court or real estate record to shed some light on what happened.

There was one final bit of tragedy. My great grandfather Frank had married his
cousin Charlotte Barker, another grandchild of Nathaniel and Huldah. His
mother Lucy(Coburn) Barker was living with them in 1900. In the fall of 1904
she fell ill with "Le Grippe",  a fancy name for influenza, and died 15 Nov 1904.
My great grandfather contracted the flu as well and it developed pneumonia.
He died on 21May 1905 at age 40, leaving a pregnant wife with two children,
one of whom was my grandmother Cora Berthella Barker.

My thanks to cousins Chris Dunham and Mary Ennis for their help with
my Barker research!

THE FOUR MARRIAGES OF LOTTIE BARKER

Today was one of those days that illustrated the wisdom of rechecking
databases for records.

I was trying to fill in the blanks for the family of my 2xgreat grandfather
Daniel J Barker early this afternoon. He was the son of my 3x great
grandparents Nathaniel and Lucy (Coburn) Barker and for some reason
I hadn't spent any time researching him. A few minutes on Ancestry filled
in those blanks (and turned up some fodder for another blogpost). Then
I moved on to other Barkers and eventually came to my great grandparents
Frank Wesley Barker and Charlotte(Lottie) Lovenia Barker.

I've written about Frank and Lottie before. They have the same last name
because they were first cousins: Frank was the son of Nathaniel S Barker
and Lottie was the daughter of Amos Hastings Barker, (Daniel J was the
older brother of Nathaniel and Amos). Frank died 21May 1905 of
"pneumonia following of La Grippe" according to the Maine Death Records
leaving a pregnant Lottie with two small children and an older fifteen year old
son.  I'd already found records of her subsequent marriages to Dennis Mahaney
in !913 and Charles Blacquere in 1920 in Ancestry's Maine Marriages database.
But they'd added the Maine Marriage Records images since then so I decided
to see if I could find the images for those two marriages. I searched the Ancestry
"Birth, marriage, and death"  database and found the two images.

And I found a third.

There'd been another husband, Luther Hodson. Lottie's first husband, my
great grandfather Frank, had died on 21May 1905. She married Luther
Hodsdon  on 24May 1906. Sometime between those two dates her
youngest son Harry H Barker was born.

I decided to take a quick look over on FamilySearch hoping to find an image
for Frank and Wesley's marriage in New Hampshire, and again I was lucky
and found it. But in doing so, I found anther mystery Look at the record and
see if you can spot it. The clue is in what I've told you here about Lottie's
life.

 To be continued....

A JOKER IN THE FAMILY TREE?

Randy Seaver’s post about the databases at the LDS Family
Search Record Search site prompted me to make a return trip
over there. I ran searches on the names of a few relatives and
came up with images from the 1900 census for Asa Ellingwood,
Frank Barker, Amos Hastings Barker and John Phelps West and
their families.


I also came up with two errors, one correctable, the other not.


The first one is the correctable one. I originally searched for my
great grandfather Philip Jonathan West and when I found the
index entry for him it listed his father as a “Jonathan D. West”.
Looking at the image of the census page I can understand how
that “P” could be mistaken for a “D”. So I clicked on the Feedback
tab and sent an email to the FamilySearch Lab to point at the
mistake and explain how I knew it should read “Jonathan P.
West”. I also thanked them for making it possible for me to even
see that image!


The other error…well, this is something that can’t be fixed and
it certainly isn’t the fault of Family Search. I think it instead
might be my ancestor Asa Freeman(or Freeland) Ellingwood
playing some some sort of prank.


You see, on the 1900 Census he gives his father’s birthplace as
England. Since it’s pretty well documented that John Ellingwood
Jr. was born in Maine I can only guess as to how or why “England”
would be entered.Perhaps Asa was tired of answering questions
and made that answer up to see if the census taker would accept
it?


At any rate, it’s there on the census to confound his descendants
and creat a genealogy mystery!