Rev. Duncan H Selph Animated

 ©  Kathy Duncan, 2021

Well, this is pure crazy, magic. My Heritage now has a new app called Deep Nostalgia that takes your ancestor's photograph, uses an algorithm for eye and head movement, and animates it. My guess is that it works better on ancestors you never knew, so you don't know how they were in life. At this point, it is fun, but I am not emotionally ready to use it on loved ones I knew. 

Here is a photograph that I received last year of Rev. Duncan Hyder Selph:

And this is the animation: 

You can play with the new My Heritage app here. 

Kate Brown, Daughter of John D. Brown

 ©  Kathy Duncan, 2021

Catherine E. "Kate" Brown was one of two young adults daughters of John Deloss and Nancy (Johnson) Brown who died young. She, evidently, was named after her grandmother Catherine E. (Hay) Brown. To date, her middle name is undiscovered.

Kate shares a tombstone with her mother in the Nixon Township Cemetery in Weldon, DeWitt County, Illinois.

The events surrounding her death can be surmised from period newspapers. The short version is that she contracted typhoid, never regained her health, and died months later. She was buried in the wedding dress that she never had a chance to wear and attended by her intended at the end.

But I prefer the long story.

The Clinton Public of 28 July 1893 revealed that Kate Brown was ill with typhoid fever.

On the same day, the Herald and Review of Decatur, Illinois reported that Kate was ill at her sister Mary Ellen (Brown) Miller's home. At that time, Mary Ellen was a widow. Although she later moved to Weldon, I believe at this point she was still living in Springfield, Illinois, so that is where Kate would have been.

A few weeks later, Kate seemed to be improving but was still ill.

Months later Kate was still ill and was by now termed an invalid. She and her mother traveled from Weldon to Springfield so that she could receive medical treatment. They would have probably stayed in the home of Mary Ellen (Brown) Miller. 

It seems likely that Kate Brown and her mother Nancy (Johnson) Brown had remained in Springfield from mid-November to mid-February. Evidently, the medical treatment they sought had not resulted in an improvement of her health. 

Two months later on 6 April 1894, The Clinton Register related that Kate was somewhat better and a doctor from Springfield had arrived to treat her. The little Opal Miller mentioned was her niece. 

The Weekly Pantagraph of the same day termed her illness a "nervous trouble," which sounds frivolous. No doubt she had not recovered from her bout with typhoid. 

By mid-April, The Pantagraph was reporting that she was likely to die from her illness. 

By the end of the month, Kate Brown was deceased.

I was delighted to find this little obituary published by The Clinton Public on 4 May 1894. It has a bit more detail than most obituaries of the period, including the detail that she was buried in her unused wedding gown.

However, it was her hometown newspaper, Weldon Record, that published a truly detailed obituary on 27 April 1894. It details who was in the choir, the hymns they sang, the sermon, the pallbearers, the flower arrangements, the viewing of the body, her engagement to C.O. Stone, and his contributions to the funeral.

The Children of John D Brown in the Newspapers

   ©  Kathy Duncan, 2021

I don't think it is possible to stress how much information can be found in old newspapers, especially in the social news columns of the late 19th century and early 20th century. 

Newspaper editors knew back then that the way to sell newspapers was to report on local happenings. Bridal showers, weddings, baby showers, birthdays, and anniversaries were often reported in surprising detail. Those details, of course, were usually supplied by the participants themselves. 

The end result is that family researchers can glean interesting details about a family from these little articles and notices.

On 27 March 1888, John Deloss and Nancy (Johnson) Brown with three of their daughters attended the wedding of Clarence A McConkey and Grace Allan. They were among the handful of guests whose gifts were reported in the paper. The Brown's gifts seem to have been rather modest. John and Nancy have them a glass fruit stand, Viola Brown gave them a glass dish, and Florence and Kate Brown gave them a pair of towels. My guess is that Florence and Kate made the towels, which would have been the norm then and were often embroidered linen.

Some of these little articles are much more personal. For instance, the Brown children attended the Lincoln School in Nixon Township. Their final exams were administered in February of 1891, and their grades were reported to the newspapers for all to see! The girls had the highest grades: Kate with a 94 and Viola with a 93. Charles Brown had a respectable 84. Florence Brown was not included in this report because she was grown and married by this time. 

When school resumed in the fall of 1891, Viola Brown had the highest average in the fifth grade for the month of September. 

John Brown and the 1860 Census

  ©  Kathy Duncan, 2021

In my previous post, I was lamenting the fact that I could not find John Deloss Brown on the 1860 census. I had looked for him several times and just could not locate him. While John Brown is not the easiest name to research, by 1860 he had a wife and three children, who should have either been with him or somewhere else on the census. I could not find any of them. I was starting to think that either their household was overlooked or recorded on a damaged page of the census. 

There was one John Brown on the Champaign County, Illinois census who SHOULD have been the John Brown I was seeking. He was the right age and born in the right place. As a bonus, he lived very near John Brown's brother Augustus Leroy Brown and Conrad Hay, who I suspect was their uncle. But that John Brown was living with a seemingly random family and without a wife and children. 

The other night I went back to look at that John Brown one more time and kept asking myself, why isn't he "my" John Brown?? As my eye skimmed down the page to Augustus Brown's household, it hung on two names: Nancy and Emma. Hey, those were the names of John Brown's wife and daughter! I leaned in for a closer look and there were John Brown's wife and three children in the household between the one he was in and his brother's household. Wife Nancy, daughters Emma and Eva, and son Joel H. Brown were in the household of John Racine.

Or were they?

The census taker crossed out the birthplaces of John Brown and John Racine and then interchanged them. He also wrote over their ages to correct them. 

So what when wrong? I've read that some census takers made notes as they made their rounds and then neatly transferred their information onto official census forms in the evening. In this insistence, the census taker may have gotten off by a line, recording the two men in the wrong households. Then realized his mistake and tried to correct it. Or he may have been taking a proxy report from the Brown family on the inhabitants of the neighbor's household and put the two men in the wrong order on the form. 

Either way, the end result is that the census taker did not correct which households the men were living in. He also did not correct the tick mark that made John Brown a person over the age of 20 who could not read or write. In fact, John Brown was known at the time of his death as a lifelong, avid reader. I've seen misspelled names and poor handwriting before but this mix up is a first. 

This census placed John Brown and his family in Town 19 N Range 8 E of Champaign County, which was Champaign Township. Tolono, Illinois is on the border of that township. That means John Deloss Brown only traveled a few miles to meet Lincoln's presidential train at the Tolono station in 1861.