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.
We started out on our way to Chicago with a slight detour to Green Bank, West Virginia to visit the Green Bank Radio Observatory, GBRO. For mid-April it was very cold and windy with snow at the higher elevations in Virginia and West Virginia. Up there in the mountains of western Virginia on US 250, we stopped at a wayside which marked the site of a Civil War era redout where the Confederates encamped trying to keep the Union troops from proceeding over the mountains into the Shenandoah Valley.
It was so cold there that we didn’t stay long although the view from there was beautiful and there were panels of historical information that we did not read. My camera apparently does not function well in the cold, so I could only take a couple of photos before it refused to work. It’s a place we will visit again in warmer weather.
On to GBRO where we toured the science center with its many exhibits about space, stars and the history of radio astronomy and vowed to return with the grandsons. It’s possible to walk or ride bikes around the entire grounds of the observatory, so that could be a good opportunity for bike riding.
Back on the road to Chicago, we stopped for the night in Richmond, Indiana, the very eastern-most point in Indiana on I-70 after Ohio.
We made it to Chicago on Tuesday morning and went directly to Bethania Cemetery to visit the grave of Henry’s parents, John and Margaret Lukas. It was a beautiful spring morning, perfect for strolling around a cemetery. The office was open so we went in and got a map with the general location of the gravesite marked on it by the helpful woman behind the counter. The gravesite was just a short walk away from the parking spot inside the gate and we had no trouble locating the spot where Henry’s parents are buried. It was easy to spot – it was just about the only one in the entire section with a flower arrangement on it. My father-in-law was diligent about ordering a decoration twice a year for the stone after my mother-in-law was buried in 1998 and I want to continue to remember them with the saddle bouquet that he always chose.
Bethania Cemetery, Justice, Illinois
We looked around for any other familiar names and, of course, we found his grandparents, Anna and Jurgis Dumpis, his aunt and uncle, Maria and Emil Stanaitis, Martin and Victor Pauperas, two of three brothers of a family that Henry knew growing up in Chicago, and Franz Otto Leppert, a friend of the family.
After visiting the cemetery we went to the Racine Bakery and bought a loaf of Lithuanian rye bread. We ate lunch at the Three Brothers Restaurant which shared the parking lot with the bakery.
Back down the highway we went to Indianapolis. We spent the night south of the city and in the morning drove up to Holy Cross and St. Joseph Cemetery. Finding any familiar graves here was a much more difficult task than finding Henry’s family graves in Chicago. For one thing, we had never been to this cemetery, for another, the office was in a different location, so we did not have a map. I had copied down the locations from FindaGrave but it was difficult just to determine what comprised a section. There were some people in the cemetery doing lawn work but Henry stopped one man in a truck and asked if he knew about the layout. He filled us in on the history of the place. It had been two separate cemeteries which were merged into one. That explained the confusing number/letter combinations for the sections. He pointed us in the right direction and we found the markers for Margaret (RIng) and Daniel Lyons, my great-grandparents. Nearby were the markers for Helen Lyons Seiwert, one of their daughters, my grandmother’s sister, and next to her was a stone for John Seiwert with just ‘1925’ on it. He was Helen’s son, who was born prematurely and died shortly after birth.
1876 Margaret Ring & Daniel (Lehane) Lyons
Close to the Lyons grave were a number of stones with the name Quill on them. Daniel Lyons’ mother was Abigail Quill, so, maybe they are relatives. I don’t know that yet.
I remembered another interment I wanted to check. Hannah (Ring) Gleason, sister of Margaret (Ring) Lyons, was buried next to her husband, David Gleason. FindaGrave had photos of their grave marker, so I searched through quite a few aisles in the section indicated in their memorials and I was almost ready to give up when I found it. The cross on the top of their monument has fallen off and it’s on the ground in front of the stone, obscuring the names etched into it. I moved the cross to read the inscription and I couldn’t believe what I saw! In addition to the names of David and Hannah was the name Mary Ring. Mary was the elder sister of Hannah and Margaret. There is a memorial on FindaGrave for her but no photo of her stone. Now I know why – it was hidden behind the broken cross. I was very happy to see her name there and pay tribute to her. She emigrated from Ireland with her two sisters, never married but worked hard and managed to save enough money to buy a house in Indianapolis.
Holy Cross & St. Joseph Cemetery, Indianapolis, Indiana. David Gleason 1847-1911, Hannah Gleason 1854-1923, Mary Ring 1846-1928.
Ring sisters: Margaret, Hannah and Mary (and I would love to know whose shadow that is!)
After the successful cemetery trip we went to downtown Indianapolis and visited the Indiana Historical Society. That is a place well worth a visit. There were exhibits with live re-enactors relaying the history of Methodist circuit riders and of an archeological dig of Native American burial mounds. We went into the library at the Historical Society but I really was not prepared with any questions so we took a look at a county history of Dearborn and Ohio Counties, which I have seen on Ancestry.com. I found something I hadn’t seen yet, however. In a list of soldiers in the War of 1812 was the name of Dr. Samuel Martin, my 3rd great-grandfather.
The next stop on our agenda was St. Ambrose Cemetery in Seymour, Indiana. We were keeping an eye on the threatening weather forecast for the next couple of days so we headed down to Seymour and found the cemetery on the main street. Again, there were men working on the landscaping. As we were asking them where we might start looking for the graves of John and Abigail (Quill) Lehane/Lyons, a man pedaled up on his bicycle. “That’s the man you want to ask. He knows everything.”, said the first man. It turns out it was Tom Melton who has created all of the FindaGrave memorials for the cemetery. He showed us to two stones for people with similar names – Timothy Lehan and his family and Timothy Leyhan, but there was no stone for John and Abby. Tom took my name and email address and promised to let me know anything about the church records.
Now we had to make a decision – where to next? Since hearing the name of the town of Rising Sun, Indiana, I have wanted to go there. That’s where William English Reed, my 2nd great-grandfather was born. After eating at Crossroads Restaurant in Versailles, Indiana, we took a look at the map and decided to drive to Rising Sun by way of Dillsboro. The road we took, Indiana 262, is a narrow, winding road that follows a creek on its way down to the Ohio River. After a rather harrowing drive, we got to Rising Sun. We parked on a street in the small town and took a walk to the river. It was a beautiful late afternoon, with a lovely breeze blowing across the river. We saw a couple of people sitting in rocking chairs on the porch of an old hotel (202 years old!) and we asked them if indeed this was a hotel and they answered in the affirmative. We found the proprietor who told us she had a room available, so we registered and took a walk around town. There’s a riverboat casino a couple blocks north of the hotel so we walked up there to check it out.
The proprietor of the hotel told us about a ferry that runs between Rising Sun and Rabbit Hash, Kentucky, so we planned on spending the $5 for the adventure of crossing the Ohio River on a ferry.
The next day we had breakfast at a nice little diner in Rising Sun, packed up our things and went north of town to catch the ferry across the Ohio River. On through Kentucky and West Virginia, with a detour along an alternate route to I-64 through West Virginia and we made it home before any storms caught up with us.
What I learned from this trip, first of all, is that there are some very nice people in Indiana. As far as genealogy research goes, being in the area where the ancestors lived was invaluable. Looking at maps certainly is helpful in visualising the lives of ancestors but driving past fields on which they grazed livestock, following a road along a rocky creek bed they most likely traveled with horse and buggy, and walking the same streets they walked to shop and tend to business was truly an inspiration. I am going to learn as much as I can about them and the lives that they led.
Our direct Irish immigrant ancestors were John and Abigail (Quill) Lehane (Lyhane/Lyons) who arrived in America in the early 1850’s. John and Abby lived in Seymour, Indiana where John worked on the railroad. Their son, Daniel, was born in Indiana in 1852. Daniel married Margaret Ring 24 February 1876 in Indianapolis. To see the line of descent from Abigail, click here.
John and Abigail Lehane died in 1898 and 1897, respectively, and are buried in St. Ambrose Cemetery in Seymour, Indiana.
Possibly Anna Kelleher, mother of Margaret RingProbably Abigail Quill, mother of Daniel (Lehane) Lyons
Margaret Ring and her two sisters, Mary and Hannah, emigrated from Ireland in 1872/73. They were from the town of Macroom in County Cork. Mary, who never married, worked doing housework but managed to save enough money to buy property in Indianapolis. Hannah married widower David Gleason when she was about 39 years old. To see the line of descent from Margaret, click here.
1876 Margaret Ring & Daniel (Lehane) Lyons. This looks like a wedding photo.Mary Ring, sister of Margaret and HannahMary Ring, sister of Margaret and HannahThree sisters – Margaret, Hannah and Mary Ring in Indianapolis
My mother, Frances Margaret Read, remembered hearing her grandmother, Margaret, speaking Irish with her sisters Hannah and Mary when she was little. In the 1920 U.S. Census, Frances, then 4 years old, is listed as living with her parents, William R. Read and Agnes Teresa Lyons, in the home of her grandmother Margaret in Indianapolis. Agnes was the daughter of Margaret and Daniel Lyons, one of nine children.
Margaret died at the age of 76 years in 1931 in Columbus, Ohio, at the home of her daughter, Abigail Dumm. Her sister, Hannah, died in 1923 at the age of 69 in Indianapolis and Mary died at age 82 in 1928.
The Indiana Genealogical Society posted a link on Facebook to a collection of online Historical Indiana Plat Maps at the Library of Congress. My mother’s roots are in Indiana so I searched Clay Township and I found the name ‘Orpha Martin’, my 3rd great-grandmother on an 8.33 acre lot in Dillsborough. The map is in a book entitled Atlas of Dearborn County, Indiana, published in Philadelphia in 1875.
Orpha’s husband, Dr. Samuel M. Martin, had died in July of 1874, a year before the book was published. Just a short distance away from Orpha’s property is the land of J.W. Eggleston, her son-in-law, husband of her eldest daughter, Orphena. It must have been a comfort for Orpha to have her family so near.
The atlas is available from the Library of Congress online at https://www.loc.gov/resource/g4093dm.gla00092/?sp=45 (image 45 of 54). There are some engravings of local sights in the atlas including one of the Dearborn Hotel. I can imagine that Orpha saw the hotel often when she went shopping or on Sundays when she went to church, and maybe even visited there and enjoyed a concert or lecture.
Orpha Courtney Martin is buried in the Old Dillsboro Public Cemetery in Dillsboro, Dearborn County, Indiana. Her gravestone says she was born on March 1, 1814 and died on July 22, 1890 (76 yrs, 4 mo, 21 days). Click here for her Find a Grave memorial.
One thing that puzzles me is this: there is an Orpha Martin listed in the 1880 U.S.Census living in Brownstown, Indiana which is about 60 miles west of Dillsboro. This Orpha is a ‘Border’, although she is listed as head of household. To add to the puzzle, there is a death record for Orpha Martin in Jackson County, Indiana where Brownstown is located. This record has the same date of death as her gravestone and gives her age as 75.
In the 1888 Indianapolis City directory there is an Orpha Martin, widow of Samuel, boarding at 309 Lexington Avenue.
So the questions that come to mind: why would she move to Brownstown, 60 miles away from Dillsboro (1880); why would she move to Indianapolis, more than 70 miles away from Brownstown (1888); and why did she move back to Dillsboro where she died in 1890?
My next step is to look for other relatives who I know were living in Indianapolis at that time and see if they were at the same address. That address seems to ring a bell for me. I have gone through the first 38 pages of the 1880 census looking for a name of a known relative in Brownstown, so I need to look beyond page 38 for someone with a familiar name. Maybe I should look for one of her granddaughters.
It is possible that there were two Orpha Martins of the same age living in Indiana at the same time, so I have a challenge before me to figure out this puzzle.
