Evidence

Much of last year’s trip to Indiana was evidence gathering. Not in a legal sense but in a records sense. There was genealogical research I had to do.

Dorothy, My Dad’s Mom

The birth name of my father’s mother has always been a mystery to me. Dorothy was what she used. Sometimes Dortha. She usually put Culp down as her last name on official documents, but I have found a smattering of the usage of Geiger. I don’t believe she ever officially changed records from her birth name (probably Geiger) to Culp. She became a Hill when she married my grandfather.

My father could tell me amazing stories about the Hill genealogy. We would take family drives and visit places where former generations of my father’s family had lived, where they were buried , and the major facts of their lives. I loved these “visits”. I felt as though I was stepping back in time to somewhere around the the turn of the 19th Century to the 2oth Century.

The image that I call up in my memory of this type of event is one of the last times I was with my father when we were visiting the Colburn, Indiana cemetery. I remember him half sitting, sort of leaning, on a Culp or Eisley headstone and telling me about the family that had adopted his mother. He wore a suit and a wide brimmed hat. When he dressed up he always looked like someone out of the 1940s. My family lived simply and being with them always seemed like a throwback to idyllic pastoral farming.

Below is my dad as a small child pitching hay.

My “Grandma Culp” was really my great-grandmother, but I grew up hearing her referred to as Grandma Culp because she was my Dad’s maternal grandmother in every sense of the word that mattered to him, in a way that carried love and fond memories if not in blood. I now have to track down more info about the Culps. I did not realize how little info I had about them until I began to track down the woman they raised as their daughter.

I had heard, though without any corroborating evidence that Dorothy (or Dortha, or Dorothea) was born as a Geiger, and given away by her father when she was still a small child. Her father also gave away her other siblings according to the story I first heard.

Finding Records, Real Evidence

It makes more sense to me now that I have some real info, with real supporting evidence, from my investigation of records in Jay County, Indiana and in the Genealogy section of the Allen County Public Library.

After driving across Indiana from West Lafayette, I found the Jay County Historical Society by early afternoon. I started with a search for maternal deaths in Redkey, Indiana between 1890 and 1900. It was an incredibly productive initial search.

I knew my Grandmother Dorothy Marie Hill, was born in 1894. Her marriage certificate lists her birthplace as Redkey, Indiana. If her mother’s dying caused her father to give her away as a small child. I figured I would start going through the death records of women of child-bearing age between 1890 and 1900 in Redkey, in Jay County.

Jay County, back then was a reasonably-sized town. But it only took me a few minutes to locate death records for that decade for Redkey. I found only one woman named Geiger of childbearing age who died in that decade. Alice V. Geiger, of Redkey died December 3, 1899 of Typhoid. Alice married John Geiger on July 2, 1892.

Alice had been born Alice J. Wilson to Charles J. Wilson and Sarah J. McNeil Wilson in Ohio.

Alice’s sister Elisabeth, who was married to George Thompson, with children of their own, took in Alice’s children. George and Elizabeth Thompson must have had a houseful! But when George died after they took the children in, the widow Elizabeth could scarcely take care of her own children.

The Trail Goes Cold

That is where the st0ry of my Grandmother goes cold. I don’t believe she was ever officially adopted. Somehow she got from Jay County to Tippecanoe County where Great Grandma Culp lived on Brown Street in Lafayette.

I wonder if there was a church assisted placementinvolved in this somehow.. My father’s Hill relatives were very involved with the Evangelical United Brethren Church. My great Grandfather, Silas, Milton Hill, was a Rev. in northeastern and north central Indiana.

Dorothy married my grandfather, Ellis Hill, in 1914, and they had their first child, my father Donald in 1915. She died of cancer in 1955 two years before I was born in 1957.

I wish my father were alive. He would love to know what I found out about his mom.