Rosalind

Rosalind Dearborn Northrop Armstrong was my grandmother. She was born in San Antonio, Texas on September 6, 1895. She was the youngest of three although my great grandmother is supposed to have had 1 or 2 others. (Nothing is clear in family mysteries.) She lived in San Antonio and California most of her life though she traveled between them a great deal and told me she went to Illinois a few times. Of all the people in my family, I feel closest to her, and I think I take after her to a degree. I admire her a great deal because of her spirit and her independence.

When she was small, her mother, Sarah Short Dearborn, gave her away to a client who wanted a baby. I used to think this was pretty horrible but in truth after doing a little research found it to be quite common. Sarah was a dressmaker and had been left with her children by her husband - a railroad man. She had two older living children, May and Homer and I think just couldn't afford another mouth to feed. The clients name was Jennie Van Houten Northrop - called Mem-mee by my grandmother. I found record of Mem-mee and her adopted daughter Rosalind M. in the census for Bexar County. She named my mother after Jennie. She kept in contact with both of her siblings even though she hadn't grown up with them. I knew my Great Aunt May who lived most of her life int the Texas Hill Country.

My grandmother told me she quit school when she got to the 6th grade and went to work at Joske's, a very posh department store downtown. It was there when I first moved to San Antonio but I think it has gone away. She told me that she was a hostess in their tea room and they let her arrange flowers because she had nice hands. I don't know how she met my grandfather Harry, if she told me I've forgotten. I did find out that she married him when she was 16 and I think they married in El Paso, Texas. He served in the Philippines and was older than her by a few years. Eventually they moved back to San Antonio.

I have two pictures of her about the time they married. On the back of one Harry wrote on the back - "My sweet wife".

Eliza Jane Barnett

I love old family photos. I love staring at them trying to figure out who those people were - what they were like. The splendid lady above is Eliza Jane Barnett Armstrong sometime around 1928 when she was 68 years old. The back of the photo says something like, "not too bad for 68". Eliza Jane is my great grandmother and was born in Springfield, Illinois around 1860. She and John Henry Armstrong, her husband, had 13 children (among them a girl named Bertie Susan and a boy named Hazel.) John Harrison, their eldest son, was my grandfather.
I don't know much about her and I asked my grandmother (Harry's wife) what she had been like. She thought Eliza was been" Irish" though she could only remember her first name and "she was a mean woman". She didn't say much else about her. My grandfather had died much earlier so I couldn't ask anything about her to him.
When I started doing research I found out her last name was Barnett but she wasn't a fresh off the boat Irish. (I still don't know if she was Irish). Her father was William C. Barnett, who born in Tennessee but had moved to Illinois around 1830 or 40 with his parents. He married an Amy C. Jones and they had a number of children.
I find my grandmothers stories often contain an element of truth as well as some "let's make it better" . She didn't get along with Eliza, and from what I can tell Eliza was a strong willed woman. She separated from her husband at some point, because I find her living with her youngest son in the census. She moved her family to El Paso, Texas for awhile after they were all adults but then seemed to have moved back to Illinois. She died in 1942 and is buried up there in Union County. Some day, I might go look her up and see where's she's buried.

my mysterious grandmother

My family is full of mystery which is very frustrating because most of them are going to remain unsolved. This is hard because I'm pretty curious and can't stand mysteries which is why I generally read the endings to books about three chapters into the story. At any rate, my family has stories that have no endings which really can be maddening.

One of the big ones is who is my grandmother on my dad's side and what was she like? I know very little about her. I know her name was Frieda Angermeier (though I have seen it spelt Angomier, Angirmeier, and Angermeier) and that she was probably Jewish. She was married to my grandfather sometime around 1914 (when my dad was born) and they had three boys. In 1920,Frieda and Randy (as he seemed to have been called back then) lived in Dallas (according to the US Census) but later that year had deposited the three boys in an orphanage and disappeared after separating. Who was she? What happened to her? Where did she go? No one ever spoke about her. I did a lot of digging and found her entry to the United States through Ellis Island. I found small clues on the ship's passenger manifesto.... that she had a sister name Kathi Hauerwas who in 1910 lived in Albuquerque, New Mexico (before it was a state!) and that Frieda originally was from the Augsburg area in Germany. Her father's name was Frederich (who my father was named after) and the street that he lived on there was listed. She was 17 when she came to the US and it appears from the manifesto she might have traveled by herself. (No one else on the list is from the area she is.) and she was visiting - not immigrating.
I also found an earlier ship's list that included a Julia Angermeier also from the same area and was slightly older, who was a maid so I have conjectured that she is a relative as well. But nothing else. Vague rumors from and old conversation with one of my aunts (from my mom's side) that Frieda lived in El Paso Texas in the '60's.



One of my cousins I met when I started doing this research sent me a xerox of a photo of her. He doesn't know anything either. We think it's Frieda and her mother and it's dated 1906. Was this the young Frieda? Very faintly written in pencil (among others in Swabish) is Mrs. R. Wederstrandt. My grandmother.