Kathryn Acker

Born: abt 1861 in New Jersey, United States

Mother:
Father:

Death:

Burial:

Marriage
Nathan Decker abt 1877

Children
John Henry Acker born 31 Mar 1878
Arminda Decker born abt 1879
Lilly Decker born Jun 1884
Jennie Decker born Jun 1886
Nellie Decker born Sep 1889

US Federal Census

• 1880: Detroit, Wayne County, Michigan, United States
• 1900: Camden, Camden County, New Jersey, United States

Miscellaneous

• Katie was born in New Jersey and apparently married a man twice her age and moved to Canada and Michigan before returning to New Jersey.

Research Goals

• Locate evidence of Katie’s marriage to Nathan Decker.
• Locate birth record for Katie.
• Locate death record for Katie.

Kathryn Acker’s Connection To Me
d. Arminda Decker
gd. Minnie Katherine Mead
ggs. Charles Woodful Hammell
gggd. Kathleen Patricia Hammell
ggggd. Melissa Susan McHugh

So where have I been? Well, I’m still unemployed (college full time now, so hopefully that will change soon) and my unemployment benefits were exhausted about the time I stopped posting. I no longer had any extra money to devote to research and as a result, it kind of fell off my priority list. I never forgot it but I just couldn’t keep banging my head against the wall.

I started back to school after taking the spring semester off (well…being forced to take the semester off) and I’m about a week and a half from finishing my summer semester. It was rough — four days a week, each class is two hour and in the first session, I had two classes. A lot of work, a lot of pressure but I came out of it with two A’s, and I should have a B for this second one.

So what’s changed and why do I want to get back into things? Well, just because I can’t do a lot of new active research, maybe I can continue to organize and analyze what I do have. Plus, since I had a computer crash, I have to reconstruct the Excel file I had to help me keep track of things on the blog. So look to see more updates here. (If anyone ever visits.)

This is my third time writing for the Carnival of Genealogy and when I first saw the topic “Cars” I couldn’t think what I could really write about except the sad parade of cars my siblings and I have used.

And then I remembered when I was going through some of the paperwork we found in my grandmother’s old suitcase, I found the title to a car that my grandfather purchased in 1955. So I dug it out to take a real good look at it.

It’s dated 23 May 1955 and the car in question is an Oldsmobile 1941 4 door sedan. I did a quick Google search for this car and found this site, A Picture Review of the Oldsmobile from 1901 to 1949. Unfortunately, it didn’t have a picture of this specific car, but I thought this one was probably pretty close to what it looks liked:

And of course, then I remembered that I had seen a picture of my great-great grandfather William Crompton in a picture with a car that had been labeled “My Dad’s First Brandnew Car” along with a second label “Grandpop Crompton & Beatrice Trainer” I asked my mother and it turns out that my grandfather (her dad) purchased the car from my great-grandfather, his future father-in-law.

I can date that picture a little more easily as William Crompton passed away in 1944 and my grandmother was born in 1938. You can’t see much of her in this scan, but she’s about three or four, which places this picture about 1941, which definitely backs up the story that my grandfather bought this from my great-grandfather.

I did a little research and found a site that talked about the purchase price of this car probably would have been around $852. In order to afford that car, assuming my great grandfather Harold Trainer had made minimum wage ($.30), he would have had to work 2840 hours. It would have accounted for more than half his annual wage and at the time this page was published in 2001, it would have been worth $10, 266.00, which is about what I bought my 2002 Mazda Protege for in 2006. And I had to finance it! So I know a little about what my great-grandfather must have felt like to have such a nice new car, especially after the Depression.

What else does this title tell me? My grandfather Charles W. Hammell was living at 208 Morris St, here in Gloucester City, NJ. He was living with my grandmother’s parents at the time. It gives me a bit of a timeline for him. His mother, Minnie Mead passed away when Charles was five and from that time on, he lived with his father’s parents, Francis Hammell, Sr. and Rebecca Priest. Francis passed away in 1941 and Rebecca about 1951, though we haven’t confirmed that and my aunt thinks Rebecca might have died a year or two later, but definitely knows she died on my aunt’s birthday, November 18.

My grandfather then went into the military until he was discharged shortly before his wedding to my grandmother, Beatrice Trainer, in 1958. I don’t know what happened to the car after that.

After looking at the back of the title, it has my grandfather’s signature under “seller” but no one listed as a buyer. I asked my father about it and he thought that maybe since my grandfather bought it from his fiancee’s father, he wasn’t that concerned about where he signed. We’re not sure. It’s possible that when my grandfather went overseas, he attempted to transfer it into my grandmother’s name while he was gone or maybe deeded it back to Harold Trainer.

Without my grandfather to answer these questions, it’s not what this particular title means but it does clear up a few things for me — My mother knows that my grandfather’s grandmother, Rebecca, did not pass away until he’d met my grandmother, so we know it was before 1955, as they’re living together and my grandmother didn’t meet Charles until after she’d dropped out of high school after eighth grade, so it does narrow Rebecca’s death window to 1951-1955. I’ll have to continue a little search for that.

Kate Lyden (3 Nov 1886-5 Apr 1957)

Kate Lyden is a major brick wall, mostly because her mother married a few times and Kate went on to marry twice herself, and lie about her name and age a lot. Here’s what I know for sure.

She’s born 3 Nov 1886 to Michael & Mary Lyden (spelled Lidon in the registry entry). Michael Lyden married Mary Hartman on 7 Sep 1884. Both of these events occured in Philadelpha, Pennsylvania. I discovered both entries at the Philadelphia City Archives on February 2008.

In the 1900 census, Mary has married George Cannon, and her daughter is using the name Katie Hartman. Has Michael died? Possibly. Did Mary divorce him? Unlikely but something to investigate. A divorce would explain why Kate is not using her father’s name.

When Kate marries William Peter Crompton in 1906, she states her name as Agnes Hartman, her parents being Mary Mahoney and John Hartman. I have this marriage certificate from the New Jersey State Archives in October 2007. I knew that Mary had been married three times, from a photo of George Cannon that my grandmother (Kate’s granddaughter) had labeled as “3rd husband - George Cannon” so at the time I assumed that John Hartman was Mary’s first husband, and father of Frank Hartman, a man we have photos of that are labeled as “Grandmother’s Brother Frank Hartman” as noted by Beatrice Trainer, granddaughter to Kate Lidon.

I knew from my grandmother that Kate’s name had been stated as Katherine Agnes Barnes at the time of her death, so I assumed that she was using her middle name. How in six years, she went from a lovely name like Kate to, well, Agnes, I guess we’ll never know, but it makes sense.

She states her age on the certificate as 19, which in September 1906 is completely true. In 1910, she’s Agnes Crompton, age 24, living with her parents with her two daughters. By 1918, she has secured her divorce and has married Ernest Seward Barnes, age 21. Quite a few things have changed about our dear Kate/Agnes since her first marriage. She is now stating her name as Agnes Mary Lyden, her age as 24 (she’s actually 32), she’s never been married and her parents are Michael Lyden and Mary Mahoney.

Good grief.

I have yet to send for a copy of her death certificate to find out who, if any, parents are listed there as well as a birth date. I knew going into the research that we knew next to nothing about Kate/Agnes and her parents but I didn’t realize how hard it would be track anything down.

So what do I know for sure? Kate/Agnes was 70 at the time of her death. She married twice. She lied about her age and her name on official documents (though it’s possible she did it to have her marriage blessed by the church without going through a pesky annulment) and she either didn’t know Michael Lyden was her father in 1906 or a mistake was made. It’s possible.

I tell my mother that her great-grandmother is a pain in my ass because I have thousands of unanswered questions about her that, barring some sort of miraculous discovery of a diary or letters, will never be answered and it’s frustrating. For now, I’ll chalk it up to a vain woman who never wanted to be older than her husband and possibly wanted to put her first marriage completely out of her mind.

I know that I’ll have a few answers after I send for her divorce records, but there are a lot of things I’ll never know. Until I die and I can nag her in person but that’s a long way off hopefully.

What does this teach me? When I make weird decisions, to write down why or tell someone because I would hate for my great-great-granddaughter to want to murder me as well.

I’m pretty sure that I’ve been able to get into genealogy at the best time. Nine years ago, when my mother began this research, she wrote to a lot of people, she visited a few of the local historical societies, she talked to the living relatives and she managed to work out a decent pictures of her WINSTANLEY line, who began in Leeds, York, England and ended up in Collingswood, Camden County, New Jersey.

A lot of the resources I’ve been able to use were not available to my mother (she’s especially sore about that 1930 census coming out after she no longer had the time to devote to it) and I’ve not only surpassed her research, but I’ve been able to go further back and flesh out the ancestors she put me in touch with.

I have a very small budget when it comes to my genealogy — I’m unemployed and I usually can’t spare more than $50 a month to devote, sometimes a lot less so I have to be careful where I spend my time and money.

The three things I recommend are as a follows:

HARDWARE
A single disposable camera. I know it doesn’t sound like much a of a technological advantage and I’m sure most people have graduated to digital cameras. I don’t have the money and my local CVS is usually running a deal — two for one is my favorite. I take my instant camera to the local cemeteries, to the places where I know my relatives grew up to take pictures and even take pictures of landmarks where my family lived in Salem and Cumberland counties of New Jersey, just to take home the memory of where my grandmother’s family lived for nearly a hundred and fifty years before she married and moved to Camden County. So, for you genealogists on a budget, I wholeheartedly recommend a disposable camera.

SOFTWARE
I’ve tried a lot of software — from managing my entire family tree, to managing the documents I have, to even managing my research but I have to say that the piece of software I could never live without is my Excel. I find that I like being in control of my own information, how it’s formatted, how it’s sorted and even how it prints. I use it to plan my research trips, to organize the information I’m going to post on this blog and even to find out what I don’t know. You don’t have to use Excel, since it can be expensive, but any kind of spreadsheet program is definitely recommended.

WEBSITE/BLOG
It’s so hard to narrow this down because I do have a list of sites and blogs I check faithfully, but the other day my mother and I were having a discussion about this and I knew that in the coming months I was going to have cut out all but one or two subscriptions and I have to say that I knew right away that this site was one that I wouldn’t dream of cutting, even though it’s a huge chunk of the budget and that’s my world deluxe subscription to Ancestry.com. I know a lot of people will say that but there’s a reason for it — it’s true. Especially for someone like me where just about all of my known foreign relatives wandered here from England and most of my lines have been here since the late 1700s or early 1800s. Even if the only thing Ancestry could offer were their census collections and the BMD indexes, I would feel that it was worth the price of $30. Do I wish it were less? Sure, but I’m okay with what I get for my dollar.  Thank God, Ancestry has a lot more, of course. A great military collection, access to some decent vital records — it’s worth every penny.

I was very fortunate when I began my family genealogy — my mother had done work on her own lines a few years ago for a project in college and had completed a lot of the ground work, particularly on her maternal line for her mother Beatrice TRAINER (1938-2006). She had already gathered a great deal of information about Beatrice’s father Harold TRAINER (1907-1967) and his parents, the first of that line to emigrate to the United States from their native England.

Harold TRAINER is descended from Alice WINSTANLEY (1868-1942), who was born in the English county of York, in Leeds. (Further breakdown has her being born in the civil parish Holbeck). Her parents were William WINSTANLEY (abt. 1840 - abt 1874) and Eliza Ann GAME (abt 1844 - 1905). She had four siblings - John William WINSTANLEY (1863-1922), Elizabeth WINSTANLEY (1866-??), Clara WINSTANLEY (1876-1883) and Ann Eliza WINSTANLEY (1879-1960). I know that Clara and Ann were born after Eliza was already widowed — believe me, I’m looking into that but this post is related to John and Elizabeth.

Thanks to my mother, I knew that John had married a woman that we only knew as Rebecca H (1859-?). Whether the H was the first letter of her last name or her middle name, we weren’t sure. Elizabeth married a man named Charles Thomas JAGGER (1863-?) and we were able to track her quite easily in the 1891 and 1901 census.

England has this beautiful resource that I freaking adore and that’s their free indexes for birth, marriage and death records, all of which are available for free at Ancestry.com and probably at other resources. These indexes give you the names of the ancestors in question, the year in which the event is registered, the county and the district and then the volume and page number to make ordering records from the General Register Office. I have done this very easily for about six records and even with the general weakness of the American dollar, I’ve been able to order a record for roughly $14 USD, so two records are about $29. This is a bit less those available in my own home state of New Jersey, where vital records can run from $30-$70.

Anyway, I used the BMD Index for marriage records and found that John William WINSTANLEY married Rebecca Hannah NEWELL in the district of Hunslet in the county of York in 1881. From census records in 1891 and 1901, I was able to find out that Rebecca was born in the same place that she married. I just like to have a complete idea of all the people I research, even though Rebecca has no actual blood relationship to me. I attempted to locate her in 1881 because I knew thanks to finding John’s census record in 1881, that they were not yet married at the time of the census.

I was expecting to find Rebecca in a household with a father who’s last name was NEWELL. Imagine my surprise to find Rebecca H Newell living as a widow with her parents William JAGGER (1835-1913) and Rachel DOVER (1832-1891), along with her brother Charles. I checked my records for Charles Jagger and found that the date and location of birth for Rebecca’s brother matched that of Elizabeth’s husband and it would be way too much of a coincidence if Charles and Rebecca were not siblings.

Though again, neither are my actual relatives, I went ahead and did a little bit more research for their family just to have a total pictures. Rebecca married William NEWELL in 1878 and he later passed away in 1880. She waited about a year and married again, having three children with John. Elizabeth and Charles Jagger had about nine or ten children, most of whom still live in England but one or two moved to the states.

Though the fact that two of my ancestor’s siblings married siblings isn’t exactly going to help me in tracing more generations of my family, it’s a lovely little fact to file in the folder and I wouldn’t have found it unless I traced the spouses backwards to their own families. It reminds me of something that I tend to forget every once in a while — genealogy is about more than just the names, dates and places. It’s about the people

It’s also interesting to note that thanks to Ancestry.com, I found all of the above information in a single sitting in about a half hour.

Edmund Hewitt Priest

Born: abt 1850 in Pennsylvania, United States

Mother: Sarah [--?--]
Father: George W Priest

Death:

Marriage
Mary Ann Snyder on 25 Jan 1872 in Camden, Camden County, New Jersey, United States

Children
Lizzey Priest in 1873
George Priest in 1874
Daniel Priest in Dec 1875
Rebecca Ann Priest on 25 Oct 1878
Louis C Priest in Jun 1882

Census
1880: Camden, Camden County, New Jersey, United States
1900: Camden, Camden County, New Jersey, United States
1910: Camden, Camden County, New Jersey, United States

Miscellaneous

• In 1910, Edmund is enumerated in the county jail in Camden. I’ll be looking into finding out why he was in jail at the age of sixty.

Research Goals

• Find evidence of Edmund’s death.

Edmund Priest’s Relationship to Me
Edmund Hewitt Priest
d. Rebecca Ann Priest
gs. Francis Thomas Hammell, Jr.
ggs. Charles Woodful Hammell
gggd. Kathleen Patricia Hammell
ggggd. Melissa Susan McHugh

Margaret B Krips

Born: 14 Jan 1858 in Pennsylvania, United States

Mother: Sabina Gary
Father: Thomas Krips

Death: 4 Dec 1927 in Camden, Camden County, New Jersey, United States

Burial: New Camden Cemetery, Camden, Camden County, New Jersey, United States

Marriage
Germaine Smith Hammell on 26 Jun 1875 in Camden, Camden County, New Jersey, United States

Children
Francis Thomas Hammell, Sr. on 8 Oct 1875
Mary L Hammell on 16 Jul 1878
Mary E Hammell on 14 Aug 1881
Lois Hammell on 11 Aug 1884
Walter Hammell on 1 Jul 1887
Edmund Hammell on 18 Sep 1890
Margaret Hammell on 2 May 1893

Census
1860: Camden, Camden County, New Jersey, United States
1870: Camden, Camden County, New Jersey, United States
1880: Camden, Camden County, New Jersey, United States
1900: Camden, Camden County, New Jersey, United States
1910: Camden, Camden County, New Jersey, United States
1920: Camden, Camden County, New Jersey, United States

Research Goals

• Find evidence of Margaret’s birth.

Margaret Krips’s Relationship To Me
Margaret B Krips
s. Francis Thomas Hammell, Sr.
gs. Francis Thomas Hammell, Jr.
ggd. Kathleen Patricia Hammell
gggd. Melissa Susan McHugh

Germaine (German) Smith Hammell

Born: 15 Sep 1854 in Camden, Camden County, New Jersey, United States

Mother: Mary Locke
Father: Joseph R Hammell

Death: 16 Apr 1925 in Camden, Camden County, New Jersey, United States

Burial: New Camden Cemetery, Camden, Camden County, New Jersey, United States

Marriage
Margaret B Krips on 26 Jun 1875 in Camden, Camden County, New Jersey, United States

Children
Francis Thomas Hammell, Sr. on 8 Oct 1875
Mary L Hammell on 16 Jul 1878
Mary E Hammell on 14 Aug 1881
Lois Hammell on 11 Aug 1884
Walter Hammell on 1 Jul 1887
Edmund Hammell on 18 Sep 1890
Margaret Hammell on 2 May 1893

Census
1860: Camden, Camden County, New Jersey, United States
1870: Camden, Camden County, New Jersey, United States
1880: Camden, Camden County, New Jersey, United States
1900: Camden, Camden County, New Jersey, United States
1910: Camden, Camden County, New Jersey, United States
1920: Camden, Camden County, New Jersey, United States

Research Goals

• Find evidence of Germain’s birth.

Germaine Hammell’s Relationship To Me
Germaine Smith Hammell
s. Francis Thomas Hammell, Sr.
gs. Francis Thomas Hammell, Jr.
ggd. Kathleen Patricia Hammell
gggd. Melissa Susan McHugh

My Trenton trip was just about a success. I came home with about eighteen documents and found almost all of the records I went there to search for. A few marriage records still remain elusive and I’ve just about given up hope of finding some of them in the state archives. I’ll have to pay a visit to the Cumberland County repositories in the near future since a great deal of my ancestors on the Hudson side have come from there.

I brought everything home, I filed it all  and entered it in to the databases. There were a few interesting nuggets — I was able to confirm that my possible Civil War men William Krips and John Ottinger were, indeed, part of the family, so my mother is thrilled to finally have a confirmed war vet on her side.  She’s 1-4 for my dad, because Dad already had two and I found two more. (One Revolutionary and three Civil War). I think I’ll get my DAR membership through him first mostly because my grandmother’s side is from rural South Jersey and different lines appear to have been here since the creation of man. But I might be able to slide my mom into the DAR through her Mead ancestor. It makes me laugh because she was always so sure it’d be her Hammell guys to do it and we’ve stalled at 1822 for them.

Anyway, my project for this week is to work on my census extracts. I’m attempting to achieve one of my research goals for the year by logging all the different census data to make sure that I’ve combed every possible detail from them. Once that’s done, I’ll work on researching some of the collateral people like brothers and sisters and children to see if I missed an ancestor somewhere.

After I feel like that’s done, I hope to employed with a steady job at that point so that I can resume spending some money on this hobby. I have oodles of records to send for from England and I need to hightail it to Philadelphia for those family members (unfortunately, the photo copying is just a bit higher there than NJ Archives so it’s going to cost a bit more what with gas to get there and whatnot).

It’s tough having a hobby like this on such a strict budget. There’s so much I want to do and so many books I want to buy but I have to do everything piecemeal. It’s somewhat frustrating but at least I’ve been able to maintain my Ancestry membership all along, it’s the only saving grace.