Grandma's Wings Search for our Family's Birth Grandmother

Chapter 1

Beginnings

April 16, 2012, Los Angeles, California

I was gazing down at the awesome downtown skyline of LA from my vantage point atop a hill at Rose Hills Memorial Park, Whittier, California. It was beautifully still up here. I could smell the moist grass. I was at my Aunt Diane’s funeral. Aunt Diane was my mother’s sister. She died at eighty, and lived a much longer life than my mother. My Mom, Margaret, died at the age of sixty eight in the year 1996. Mom had already been gone sixteen years. Dad had also passed away in September of 2000.

Suddenly a picture of my mother came to mind, and I remembered how the minister at her funeral passionately described her as the young woman with the long, flowing blond hair. He said this because that is how my father was first struck by her, with intense interest and attraction. My Dad, Percy, had conveyed this picture of my Mom to the minister, Rev. Tarte, who knew and admired my Mom. I think I could imagine how she would have looked. His description seemed perfect.

So the girl with the long flowing blond hair, my mother, was riding a ferris wheel in San Diego in 1942. My Dad was stationed there during World War II while in the Marines. He gazed up at her and thought she was beautiful and that he must meet her. It was one of those supposed love at first sight things. When she alighted from the ferris wheel, he realized she was younger than he had thought. At that time he was twenty but feared she might be in high school, which was true. Not completely undaunted, he walked right up to whom he supposed was her father, Lindley L.R. Martin.

Good evening, sir. I’m Percy Totheroh, a Marine stationed here in San Diego for boot camp.

Good evening. We’re proud of you for serving your country, L.R engaged him back.

My father, always one to get straight to the point, said Is that your daughter getting off the ferris wheel - the one there with the blond hair?

Yes, she is, my oldest. We’re here vacationing from Tucson, Arizona."

Oh, that’s nice. It must be nice to get away from the heat. Sir, is there any way you would allow me to meet her? Percy threw in a little small talk to smooth over his abrupt question about meeting L.R.’s daughter.

L.R. hesitated as Margaret was headed their way, but then decided it wouldn’t do any harm. He seemed like a nice enough young man, and was certainly straightforward. They’d probably never see each other again or so he imagined. He was definitely mistaken about that.

In the short visit that my mother and father had that fateful night, Dad managed to get Mom’s address. They wrote each other for the next four years while Dad served in the Marines. Through their letters, they became friends and learned about each other, and after a period of time, fell in love. Their letters became beautiful, intense declarations that we still have preserved in mother’s and dad’s things. Of course we thought they were gaggy when we were younger. They were rather melodramatic - my dearest darling love, blah blah. etc.

Percy and Margaret started their relationship by deceiving each other. Mom was afraid she was too young for him at sixteen, so she said she was eighteen. When he realized he was only two years older than she, he said that he was twenty-four. Their behavior appeared fear-based from the start - afraid of being too young or too old. They matched well in terms of having worries and fears; they just handled them differently.

I came back to the present as the minister was finishing his words at my Aunt Diane’s graveside. My husband, Joel, myself, my sister, Sophia, and my brother-in-law, Frank were all there. Sophia and I cried along with our cousins, Aunt Diane’s daughters, Janice, Denise, and Patti. In a touching ceremony, the daughters removed the angels off the sides of her casket to keep in her memory. After that moment, we filed quietly down the hill and left my aunt to her rest. I felt happy that she had a very beautiful place to sleep. I could hear birds chirping and singing everywhere.

After the funeral, the family had decided to go to a restaurant and have lunch together before we went our separate ways. We lunched with our family and enjoyed time visiting with each other. Joel and I and Sophia and Frank all had to work the next day, so we said our condolences once again, hugged and kissed our relatives, and headed back home to Phoenix. On the trip home, my sister and I talked non-stop about our memories of our family. I realized that so many family secrets and history had been lost with my Aunt, and we would now never recover them. I felt a profound sense of loss.

We loved and missed our Aunt Diane, and felt sad that in her last years she had some form of dementia. We didn’t feel that we could ask her things about our family history then, and she was living in Kentucky, so we didn’t have many opportunities. Mulling what had been lost with our aunt’s passing and her later years of dementia, a couple of weeks passed. I decided I was going to look for my mother’s lost family, which was her biological father and his family. Her father’s name was Clarence Anson.

I wanted to know who the Anson’s were and where they were. I wanted to know what they were like. I think I was motivated partly by my age, as it seems history becomes more important as we get older. If possible, I also wanted resolution of family issues. We certainly had plenty of family issues, especially with our father. I didn’t know if any of this information would help since it was my mother’s family, but I wanted to try for the sake of having more peace in my life. I really didn’t know what the journey ahead would hold, but I was anxious to start it.

I began haphazardly searching for my maternal grandfather’s other children, not because I wanted to be haphazard, but because I really didn’t know much about researching and genealogy. I was certainly fascinated enough to learn and facile with the internet, so I began googling for what treasures I might harvest. I also read many interesting pieces on genealogy. I felt like I had a new family out there.

My birth grandfather’s name was Clarence Anson. Stories in the family were that he married and divorced my grandmother, Janice Phillips, twice. They were married in 1926, and Janice conceived my mother, Margaret, who was born on September 30, 1927. Her sister, and my Aunt Diane, my only aunt, was born four years later on March 18, 1931. Clarence and Janice’s relationship, from what I’ve heard, was quite volatile, as both of them were controlling and wanted their own way. There were probably a number of other reasons as well that none of us will ever know, at least not in this life.

After the divorce, which was in 1929 from what I could gather, Clarence, my Scandinavian grandfather, had moved away from Tucson, and back to his beloved farming country in Minnesota. He remarried in 1936, and coincidentally, had married a woman named Margaret, the same name as his first child, my mother. He basically had no contact with his daughters after he moved to Minnesota. I don’t know if it was too painful, or he just gave up. It’s possible my grandmother made it difficult. Perhaps it was because L.R. Martin had adopted them, and Clarence decided to move on. At any rate, he remarried and had six sons: Clarence Jr., Robert, Daniel, Sloan, James, and Ronnie. There was also one daughter but I don’t know her name. I think it may have been Barbara. I had met the family once when my father insisted that we visit my Mom’s birth father when we were on one of our family vacations.

My parents were both adopted, but I always thought that was selfish of Dad to make my Mom go and see her birth Dad. She really didn’t want to. Percy didn’t know who his birth parents were, and it may have made him feel better if Mom was in contact with her birth father. Did he ever ask her if she wanted to go? It seemed to me that he decided if he couldn’t have any resolution with his birth family, then he would see that she was going to have it with hers. Margaret was a gentle soul who craved harmony, and tended to avoid unpleasant encounters. From my perspective as an eight year old, she did not enjoy herself. She seemed to sit around quietly enduring while we were there. My father, the great story teller, blathered and droned away. I now wonder if Mom ever spoke to Clarence privately. I hoped that he had told her he loved her, but it is probably wishful thinking. I do have a wonderful picture of them together when my Mom was about two. They are apparently at the beach holding hands, and they were all decked out. Mom had a tiny parasol in her ensemble, and he had on a stylish looking swimming suit. It looked more like exercise clothes that people now wear.

On the other hand, I did have a wonderful experience. I played with their youngest son, Ronnie, went to Vacation Bible School, and ran with him in the fields on the farm. He was the only one with whom I had a relationship. We were inseparable while I was there. When we left, he handed me a little tiny heart trinket that said I love you. I treasured that heart for many years. I would have enjoyed meeting him again, and seeing if we still have that spark of friendship that we had so many years before.

After a few weeks of genealogy searching had passed, I became frustrated with trying to find my half cousins (3rd cousins once removed or whatever they were). I was perturbed that they had such a common name. Little did I know how frustrating searching for people with common names was going to be! I talked to a few different people who said Ancestry.com was flawed, but probably had more information than any other genealogical website. It seemed to be about as good as was currently available. These records are always going to be somewhat problematic because they are written in cursive in most cases, and sometimes very hard to read.

I joined Ancestry in May 2012, and was starting to search for the Anson’s, when my sister, Sophia, came up with some interesting information. My sister had the most room at her house, so she had become the repository of family pictures and documents.

Dorey, she exclaimed one Friday evening, I think I’ve got Dad’s original birth certificate in that big box of pictures.

I got excited, Do you think you could find it? I’d love to search for Agnes Baker.

Agnes Baker was my father’s birth mother who he never knew or even met. We knew her name because we had heard it from Dad several times. Perhaps we had seen the birth certificate at one time or another, but I personally don’t remember it. Wow, I thought, this is much more exciting; this is our big family mystery!

Soph found the certificate that very weekend and sent me a copy. That’s when our true quest began.

Chapter 2

Early Searches

I looked in Ancestry and Sophie looked in Family Search and various other places on the internet to see what we could find. In fact, it felt to me like we were spending our lives on some site or other: Genealogy.com, Family Timeline.com, My Heritage.com, Find A Grave, Sysoon, Ancient Faces, Drylies Around the World, etc. I remember many a Saturday that I would sit at the computer and think, I have to stop doing this. I just can’t do this all day. Then I would do it anyway. I was besought with my new activity. It had gone from casual interest to obsession quite quickly.

On June 5th, 2012, I wrote to my sister the following e-mail and I have included her response:

I wonder if Agnes Baker ever checked on Dad to see how he was doing (without him knowing of course). Wouldn't you be at least be so curious as to what your child looked like or how he was doing?

You’d think so (my sister responded). I remember a friend of mine back in the day had given up a child. She felt sad and mentioned that she wished she knew about him. But I don’t think she ever pursued it. I also had a friend who had given up a child; she too never pursued finding the child.

It didn’t seem our birth grandmother had either. I also had a friend who had given up a child. I remember the haunted, sad look in her eye when this subject would come up. So, how were we ever going to know if she had checked on our Dad? Or who she was for that matter.

I realized shortly that looking people up and trying to remember one from another was not working worth a darn. I didn’t think there would be so many Agnes Bakers in Kentucky in the period of time that we were looking. At that point I created a spreadsheet to put the different Agnes’s in print with their individual information such as full name, birth date, social security number, name of spouse, occupation, etc. We had forty two Agnes’s when all was said and done. Here is part of one of the spreadsheets to get an idea of what we collected:

The Mystery of Agnes Baker

Name Birth Birthplace Residence Occupation

Agnes Baker Lists age as 28 Uniontown, KY Teacher

Agnes Rosaire Baker 1894 New York Teacher/Nun

Agnes R. Long 10/1895 Uniontown, KY Union County, KY Public School Teacher

Agnes Agnita 1894 Kentucky Omaha, NeTeacher in Catholic School

Agnes (Sister)10/20/1894 Illinois Collinsville, Il Music Teacher/Nun;

Louise Agnes Baker Wright 1893 Benzie, MI Ohio English teacher

Mary Agnes Sweeney 1893 Kentucky Kentucky Nun; Teacher in Catholic School

Carrie Agnes Baker Stenson 4/12/1894 Wisconsin Teacher

A.B. Baker 4/15/1893 Kentucky Ckeres Practional - Ancestry

Annie A. Baker 1894 Kentucky 401-34-7586-Ky - None

Agnes A. Baker Michigan None

Agnes Baker 9/26/1894 Pennsylvania Md, Pa

Agnes Baker 10/20/1895 Texas Seamstress

Agnes Baker 11/14/1895 Scotland None

Agnes Baker 8/8/1894 PA -Seamstress

Agnes Baker 5/14/1896 MO None

Agnes Baker 4-10-1898 Illinois None

Agnes Baker 1893 Missouri Twin Falls, ID

Agnes Baker DeClerque 8-16-1896 Illinois None

Agnes Baker 4-2-1897?

Agnes Baker 1889 Illinois Housewife

Agnes Thompson Baker 1/18/1894 Wisconsin None - 7 kids

Agnes Baker11/16/1894 New YorkNew York

Agnes B. Daugherty 2/10/1897 Pennsylvania 333-34-7477-Il US Navy CMM, Sargeant

Agnes Baker 9-13-1897 Wisconsin

Agnes C. Hansen 1896 Illinois K-Teacher

Agnes R. Baker 5-14-1896?

Agnes E. Baker 1891 IllinoisLeaf River, Il None

Agnes F. Moran Baker Approx 1894 Ky Jefferson, KY None

Aggie Baker 1893 Ky-Millstone

Agnes Boch Baker 1900 Muscatine, IlIowa Bookkeeper

Agnes Baker 1899 Illinois Housewife

Agnes Slohm Baker1894-25 yrs old Illinois Chicago, IL

Agnes S. Baker 10/29/1894 Michigan Belleville, Il Sub teacher?

Agner Baker Molenhouse 4/25/1893 Chicago, Il (From Holland) Housewife

Agnes Baker Ky

Agnes Land Baker 4/4/1894 Ohio

Agnes Ellis Baker 10/29/1894 Indiana

Agnes Tolls Baker 1873 - too oldKy? Mercer, KY

Agnes Bakerapprox. 1895 Illinois Wilson/DeWitt, IL

Essentially, we had seven pieces of information from the original birth certificate:

1) Her name: Agnes Baker.

2) An address of 315 E. Harrison in Danville, IL.

3) Her birthplace: Uniontown, Kentucky.

4) She was 28.

5) The father was unknown, but was a teacher/principal who lived in St. Louis, Mo and was forty years old.

6) She was a teacher.

7) She had no other children.

Dad knew that his real mother was a teacher and his father a principal, or at least he knew that is what the birth certificate said. We didn’t think for a minute that Agnes didn’t know who the father was, but for the certificate’s purpose, that’s probably how the certificates were done - with the unknown designation. That could easily be true today as I am not up on these things. Perhaps DNA has changed all that.

I do believe that after my Dad was grown and married, he did travel to Kentucky to try and find out about Agnes, but he wasn’t able to gain any information. It must have been a great disappointment to him, and also very painful. When Dad went down to Kentucky he was told there was a huge fire and a lot of records had been lost during the 1920’s. He must have been terribly devastated. I’ve tried to imagine how I would feel not knowing who my parents were, and it is not in any way pleasant. I think it would gnaw at me. I know it did on him. Then to think that he might have a chance to find out, and boom, the records were destroyed.

Unlike my father, my sis and I had a variety of clues, but were plagued with questions. Is Baker her maiden name or married name? Was she living in Danville or did she just go there to have the baby? What year was she actually born? Was she a grade school or high school teacher? This infinitely more interesting search pretty much waylaid my search for my mother’s birth family. The Anson’s were not the great mystery that Agnes was. So what was first an adventure became a mission. I must find Agnes. Obviously she had passed on, but I wanted to know who she was, what her family was like, what she looked like, and what kind of person she was.

One of the first things Sophia did for our search was to call the assessor’s office in Danville and check the address of 315 E. Harrison. The assessor told her that there was no such address and never had been. Accepting her word for it, we now knew there was one untruth on the document, and we wondered if there were more. We decided to search Illinois and Kentucky and see if we could find that address in either state. We actually found that same address two places in Illinois: one in a small suburb, Elmhurst, near Chicago, and one in a tiny town called Belleville, near St. Louis. The Belleville address had actually belonged to a Dr. Levi M. Allston, who we thought could possibly be my Dad’s father. Alternately, we surmised that perhaps the doctor took Agnes in to help her while she was pregnant. Belleville, being close to St. Louis, made us suspect that there might be a connection as to how the father and she had met, and if they had lived or taught near each other.

We let our imaginations run away with us as we looked at the Elmhurst address, and noticed a high school nearby. In fact, it was the only high school in Elmhurst at that time. We found that the Principal at that time was a James Harry Kent, who moved to Iowa not long after 1923. We felt he was suspicious too since he seemed to have left town about the time Agnes would have gotten pregnant. Even with our speculations, we really didn’t expect we would ever find the father without knowing his name. I felt I could live with that, but of course we would have very much preferred to know.

We also gave William C. Barnes, the principal of Danville High School, some perusal as we weren’t sure if Agnes possibly had been a teacher in Danville. Barnes was the Principal during the time Agnes would have been there. He wasn’t the right age, but we did investigate him thoroughly as we didn’t want to discount him just in case. After all, we weren’t flush with father candidates for my Dad.

My emotions regarding this Agnes Baker person were not very friendly. My sis and I called her Ag as our little way of being passive aggressive, as if we knew her well enough to nickname her. I was angry with her for giving up my Dad; in fact, it probably could be called hatred. I was pretty judgmental at the time, deliberately not thinking about what might have made her make the decision that she made. Perhaps it was more that I just didn’t want to give her a break, or wasn’t ready to do so. She got no sympathy from me, but she sure got my time and a huge amount of my attention. I was definitely emotionally engaged.

So, emotions aside, initial searching was done without any genealogy experience, mostly by trial and error. I must say that I sometimes looked at facts loosely to see if I could make them fit. This wasn’t entirely unreasonable as no one jumped out at us as having all the right facts connected to her. My sister called me to task on this more than once. I just wanted to get this search handled, since that fit nicely with my type A personality. I also think that I was overwhelmed with the number of possibilities, which was something I couldn’t have predicted. It was actually pretty entertaining to come up with scenarios that might have taken place.

In the early days of searching, I focused on an Agnes Schwartz Baker who lived in Chicago and was born in 1894. Then I met Larry.

Chapter 3

Percy Baker Totheroh, Part I

Adopted child syndrome is a controversial term that has been used to explain behaviors in adopted children that are claimed to be related to their adoptive status. Specifically, these include problems in bonding, attachment disorders, lying, stealing, defiance of authority, and acts of violence. The term has never achieved acceptance in the professional community. The term is not found in the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, 4th edition, TR. - From Wikipedia

Psychologist David Kircher also described personality traits of adopted child syndrome as impulsivity, low frustration tolerance, manipulativeness, deceptive charm but shallowness of attachment.

Percy Baker Totheroh, was born on May 28, 1923, to an Agnes Baker at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital in Danville, Illinois. Although officially named by the woman who bore him, he was subsequently given for initial custody at the age of one week. I wondered if Agnes had named him because she wanted to keep him, or perhaps she wanted him to know who he was. Either or both could have been true, but we were never to know.

His adoptive parents, John and Mae Totheroh, lived in Indiana in a small town called Ambia. Just over the border from Illinois, Ambia, was forty miles from Danville. Ambia may not have had more than a couple thousand folk, but at the time was a bustling little town where the older men always stood around shooting the bull at the local car repair garage. We called them the John Barger Men because one of them was named John Barger. Dad would go talk to them when we were in town during the summers. We traveled from Phoenix almost every year to visit Grandma and these men were always there in her little town. We kids would sidle down there when Dad was with the men, so that we could get a grape or orange soda. If he was distracted enough by his conversation and not to look like he was a bad guy to the others, he would usually give us the pop!

John was forty-three and Mae was thirty-five at the time that they adopted the little blond, baby boy. They had adopted two daughters previously, but both had died before they were a year old. To the best of my knowledge, both of them died of dysentery, a common problem in those days. This must have had a huge emotional impact on John and Mae, but I never heard either of them speak of it. Even Dad didn’t seem to know anything except the fact that they had the two girls, and that they had died in infancy.

During his searches to help me find Agnes, Uncle Gary, my Mom’s brother, ferreted out the following information: Percy is shown at age 6 as an Adopted Son. They rented for $7 a month, and they also asked if they had a radio in the home. They did have a radio in their home. I think it is interesting that some of the Totheroh's were laborers of some sort. In the 1940 census John's occupation was WPA on road construction. So he was part of the WPA project by President Roosevelt. I thought that was kind of neat, making my Grandpa part of history.

There is very little known about my Dad’s early childhood, and not many photographs were taken of him. There wasn’t money for such things. The stories that were told to us were ones from my Dad when he was old enough to remember. One thing was clear; he and Mae clashed. I had a hard time reconciling my fun, plump little Granny (all 4’ 10" of her) with the picture he painted. He was punished often, usually with some sort of stick or paddle, and always by my grandmother.

My grandfather, John, was tall and quiet, an imposing stature of a man with huge hands, who suffered Mae’s abuses (and watching Percy’s), mostly in silence. I think Dad admired his father’s hands because they symbolized protection, but according to his version of events, John did not protect him from Mae. John could have easily crushed her with those giant hands, but it seemed that little Granny Dynamite wore the pants in the family. I would guess John was afraid of her tongue and temper. He did love his son without question. Dad adored him. My impression is that they enjoyed the times that they were working in the fields together without any interference by Mae. These stories I know from Dad’s remembrance.

John was a farmer, and Mae took in washing or worked as a waitress in the one and only, local restaurant. I remember in the summers as a child, walking on the wooden sidewalks in the little town to the restaurant where Grandma worked. I was amazed that there was such a thing as a wooden sidewalk. They were obviously very old and dilapidated. They certainly didn’t have them in Phoenix where I was living.

Surely there must have been good times that Percy and his parents experienced. Dad didn’t talk too much about any good times, so we, his children, weren’t really aware of them. I like to think that they did have many happy moments and good times as a family. I know that we kids had fun when we went to visit them, although it could be tense if Dad and Granny got into it. It wasn’t hard to see how much Mae could irritate him and make him angry. He never seemed annoyed with John, nor did he try to get his goat, like he tried to get my grandmother’s.

Dad liked to tell the story of how my Mom referred to a family in the church as so common. My Dad inwardly rolled his eyes and thought, Oh brother, wait till she meets Mom and Dad…

Being a farmer isn’t very glamorous, but what do I know. In point of fact, I think that at times John was just a day laborer. Lest we get too haughty because our Mom’s family was educated and higher on the social strata, John himself and his brothers were all gifted musicians. There aren’t too many Totheroh’s around, so it was easy enough for me to google up a Totheroh who was in the cinema business and one who wrote a book. I know the one who wrote a book was definitely our relative. I think that they were a pretty talented group of folk.

Already having a meager existence, the Depression hit when my Dad was six, and it made a very large impression on his childhood. They were very poor, and he was the stereotypical kid with cardboard in his shoes, the cardboard covering up the holes. It would always tug at my heart when he would talk about being so excited to get an orange and a stick of peppermint in his stocking at Christmas. He probably never saw an orange the rest of the year, or a peppermint for that matter. Dad talked about how hard it was many, many times. I think there is often shame connected to being poor, and he may have felt that. There could easily have been resentfulness too; why do they have so much and we have so little.

Another theme my Dad portrayed was how difficult Grandma was and her mean-spiritedness towards him. He seemed very negative when speaking of his childhood. Of course he had reason, and he bore resentments and had unresolved emotional issues all his life. I’ve often thought it was sad that his generation had very little connection to psychology, counseling or anything of that sort. Of course a faith in God is even better, but it didn’t appear to help my father much. He remained stuck in his anger.

When my father was eleven, he was going through some papers in the family desk, and to his great surprise, found his original birth certificate! He had had no idea that he was adopted. He ran from the house yelling and crying, feeling completely betrayed, having the foundations of his life taken from him by one little piece of paper. How careless of my grandparents to leave such a document so easily found.

He was very bitter throughout his life that his birth mother had abandoned him. I believe he also felt bitter that even his adoptive mother was punishing and belligerent. He may have felt double emotional abandonment by the lack of his birth mother and a mean, vengeful adoptive mother. I don’t know how they calmed him down that night he found the birth certificate, but I imagine him crying himself to sleep. The anguish he felt must have been catastrophic. It is very sad to me that a woman, my grandmother, who was unable to bear a child and had lost two other adopted children, would treat my father so cruelly. I don’t imagine it was intentional; she had her own hurts, life disappointments, and few coping skills. It bothers me though.

What happens to children who are beaten and dealt with harshly? Some or many become rebellious, vindictive, and revengeful. That certainly describes my father. A critical spirit seems to go hand in hand with the anger. The adopted child syndrome as quoted at the beginning of the chapter doesn’t describe my father completely, but I would definitely describe him as having a defiant attitude