I have often wondered about my maternal grandfather’s middle name. Rouel? Ruel? Rule?The paper trail for my Pop offers a number of different spellings of this curious name. It kind of sounds like Raoul, but who knows why his parents decided to call him that? Through several years of genealogical research I never came across another family member with that name until recently.

Pop’s parents were Charles William Read, the artist, and Laura Anna Coffin. Laura was born in Portland, Pennsylvania (on the Delaware River) in 1867. By the time Laura was 12 years old, her family had moved to Indianapolis. I know this because her mother, Mary Agnes Salena Simpson, died in Indianapolis when Laura was 12.

So here is the important part – Laura had a cousin named Ruel, born in Pennsylvania in 1874, so she was seven years old when he was born. Laura’s father, William Jones Coffin, and Ruel’s father, Vincent Coffin, were brothers, both employed as cigar makers. It is possible that the two families traveled together from Pennsylvania to Indiana. 

Imagine now that a little girl, about 7 years old, is traveling with her parents and her aunt and uncle with their cute little baby boy. I don’t know how they would have traveled from the eastern edge of Pennsylvania to Indianapolis, but I know it would have taken days, whether by train or horse drawn coach, or by canal/river. There would have been plenty of time for little Laura to fall for her baby cousin Ruel. 

But there was something special about Ruel. He never married and all of the census records I have found for him indicate that he was never employed and in those years when the question was asked, he was listed as ‘unable to work’. When his parents died, Vincent in 1913 and Ellen in 1919, he went to live with his sister, Susan, and her family. Ruel and Susan had two brothers, Albin and Frederick, both of whom went on to live out normal lives. Their obituaries tell us that they spent years working at their respective occupations, Albin as a woodworker, and Frederick as an employee of a brass foundry.

Ruel was different in some way, and we will probably never know why. He must have had some sort of disability, whether it was due to a childhood illness or accident, or some other cause. He lived to be 76 years old, passing away from heart disease in 1951. I find this remarkable and a tribute to those loving family members who cared for him through all those years. 

When Laura and Charles had a baby boy in 1893, the third of eight children, they named him William Ruel/Rouel Read, surely after his mother’s cousin, Ruel.