Of Quiet Families and Undocumentable Assertions

I like working jigsaw puzzles and I'd do it more often if I weren't ashamed to spend my time on such an obviously useless pursuit. So I spend my time on a less obviously useless pursuit: this blog. And while I'm having fun with all this, I expect that a reader might find it as exciting as watching someone else work a jigsaw puzzle — which, in a way, is still what I'm doing, even though it doesn't come neatly packaged in a box, I don't have all the pieces, and I don't know what the picture is supposed to look like when I'm done. I'm just collecting all these little pieces, trying to figure out how they fit with each other and waiting for a picture to form.

Waiting for a picture to form, or sometimes, I have to admit, getting an idea of how I'd like the picture to look, and then jamming the pieces in to suit my preconceived ideas, and sketching in the blanks where pieces are missing.

What's all this got to do with anything?

Well, here's the thing: in the Yager/Chester story, I slipped in a statement about the Noltes being a "quiet, respectable family." It occurs to me that I should just use a different colored font when stating my opinions, conjectures, and creative interpretations of evidence or lack thereof. It would save a lot of weasel words like "apparently," "I believe," "it seems," and so forth. It would also clearly signal any reader who cared to look up my sources that he'd be wasting his time trying to find a source for " quiet, respectable family."

There's no way for me to document that characterization without reproducing all the Ainsworth-area news columns, week after week, year after year, to show how often other Ainsworth names show up in them, and how rarely Nolte. For example, between January 1899 and December 1911, members of the Chester family are mentioned about 121 times, and that's not counting births and deaths. Members of the Blachly family (a smaller group) are mentioned some 35 times, not counting births and deaths (or the ads J.B. Blachly placed to sell his fancy stock). In the same time frame and with the same exclusions, the Nolte family totals only ten mentions. One of those is a mistake, another its retraction. One is a notice of a legal survey affecting numerous landowners including the Noltes.

I feel a special interest in them, for no reason but sympathy, because theirs is a sad story. And because of that sympathy, I think, I tend to interpret any evidence, or lack of evidence, in a light that favors them.

So I interpret the absence of social news about the Noltes as evidence that they were a quiet family, either happy at home and not socializing much, or else too modest to publicize their social activities. I interpret the absence of arrests, lawsuits and scandals involving them as evidence that they were peaceable, orderly and respectable.

I could, if I wished, interpret the lack of social news as evidence that they were shunned by their neighbors. But then I'd run into some difficulty around 1910-11, with the sudden appearance of bunch of social reports — and by "bunch" I mean five — that primarily involved Bertha Nolte visiting with reputable Ainsworth people, the Raschkas and the Wojahns. (And, unless it's an error, her nickname was "Birdie." How cute is that?)

If I wanted to get really far-fetched, I could interpret the absence of arrests, etc., as evidence that they had some kind of influence over important members of law enforcement as well as the newspapers, and were unscrupulous enough to use it. But really, I'd have to start smoking something to reach that point.

My notions got a jar when I encountered a Gazette report, in December 1911, that Henry Nolte was one of the candidates for Ross Township road supervisor. How uncharacteristic to put himself forward like that! But when a subsequent report of the election results made no mention of him, even as a losing candidate, I concluded that the Gazette had been as mistaken about his candidacy as they'd been about his "lung trouble."

The central library in Merrillville has an index of Ross Township school enumeration records in which the Nolte children show up. According to that index, when Louis Nolte started school at the age of six, he was entered on the rolls as "Lulu." I chose to interpret the persistence of that babyish nickname as evidence of deeply affectionate family relations — not of some pathological family dynamic that sought to infantilize the children even as they began to go out of the home for the first time.

Back in January, when I briefly sketched the history and a speculative portrait of the Nolte family, I had already reached the conclusion I still hold about what sort of people they were. I think it's pretty funny that I did so on the basis of even less evidence than I have now.

It would be even funnier if the next decade or two of microfilm shows me to be wrong, after all this imaginative speculation. An arrest or two, maybe, would do it; a juicy scandal; even just one bitter lawsuit. We shall see.

This concludes today's Nolte lecture. There will be others, I promise you. Or warn you, I should say.