What also fascinates me is that people who tell embroidered or confused history are not conscious of embroidery or confusion. For example, in my post about the Stoltz tragedies, the person who reported Mary Stoltz's thoughts in the minutes before her death — something impossible to know — believed what he or she was saying.
It is time now to return to the juicy story related by Minnie Rossow Harms that I discussed some 13 years ago. If you don't want to click on that link to read the original post, I will boil it down: the story told in the Ainsworth neighborhood (and written down years later by Minnie) was that Charles Chester's first marriage was to Ida Harms and went very badly; Ida developed a "weakened mind"; Charles brought another woman into the home; and finally Ida disappeared and locals suspected that Charles had murdered her and buried her body in the woods.
As I noted then, it's a great story that I could not find a shred of evidence to support.
Thanks in part to some amazing history-detective work by Emily Iland, we now know more of the truth about Charles' two marriages, and the surprising reason why the Harms name ever came up.
On August 15, 1893, Charles Chester, 23 years old, married Dora Foreman,[2] a 20-year-old Illinois native. In May 1894, they had a son, Arthur, followed by a daughter, Theresa, in July 1895.
According to Charles' later testimony, the marriage went bad around that time. Dora was unfaithful to him (again, Charles' testimony) and by early 1896 had left their home in Ross Township[3] and gone to live on her own. In November 1898, Charles filed for divorce, saying that he had been completely abandoned by his wife for some two years.
There is one fact that is inconvenient for Charles' version of the story: that same month, Dora gave birth to another son, Willie,[4] who had been fathered by Charles, as established by modern DNA technology. Dora could thus not have completely abandoned Charles after 1896. However, the child was born in Iowa, so they were living apart at the time.
Charles was up to his own activities in the months before Willie was born. This item is from the Hobart News of October 14, 1898:
In speaking of the work of the recent grand jury the correspondent from Crown Point to the Hammond News uses the following: "One of the most surprising of the charges was that brought against Chas. Chester of Ross Township. … He is now charged with adultery and fornication and was arrested and stalled in the county jail last Friday on that indictment. According to reports Chester has a wife living in Iowa by whom he has had children, and one in Ross Township. If these reports are true Chester will find it hard work to clear his skirts."The "wife" in Ross Township was Constance McClain Booty. She lived in his home, but she and Charles were not married.
Charles started the divorce action on November 12, 1898. Oddly enough for one whom the local papers viewed as a Ross Township resident, he filed in Cook County, Illinois, telling the court that he had been living in Chicago for the past three years. He said initially that Dora's last known address was in Hobart, Indiana, and that is where the court clerk mailed to her a copy of the notice of the pending divorce suit. The notice was also published in the National Corporation Reporter, a Chicago newspaper. At the divorce trial in December, Charles said Dora was living in Chicago. It is likely that Dora, the whole time, had been in Iowa, where she gave birth to Willie on November 14.
On November 25, in Lake County, Charles was cleared of the adultery charge.
The adultery case against Chas. Chester tried in the Lake circuit court the 25th of last month resulted in a vindication of the defendant. The report that the woman who is keeping house for him is his wife could not be proven and Mr. Chester and the woman swore they are not married, she being only his housekeeper working for weekly wages. Mr. Chester does not deny that he has a wife living in Chicago. We understand the defendant has begun a $10,000 damage suit against a number of Ainsworth farmers who were instrumental in his prosecution, for defamation of character.[5]I never heard any more about that defamation suit, and I expect Charles quietly let it drop. While it's true he was not a bigamist, lawsuit proceedings might have elicited testimony making it difficult for him and Constance to maintain that there was absolutely nothing personal going on between them.
Charles' suit for divorce was heard in the Cook County court on December 21, 1898. Dora may not have attended the hearing — there is no record of testimony from her, although Charles and Constance testified. Charles was awarded his divorce and custody of the two children, Arthur and Theresa. There was a third child, as we know, but the court did not address that child. Charles may not have known about him.
Once a free man, Charles hastened to bind himself again.
On Tuesday of this week, Dec. 27th, 'Squire Mathews at his home spoke the words that united Chas. E. Chester and Constance Booty, of Ainsworth, as man and wife. Miss Booty for some time has been keeping house for Mr. Chester. We presume Mr. Chester has been successful in securing a divorce from his former wife, action for which was begun in Chicago some little time ago.Thus began a long and apparently happy marriage between Charles and Constance.
And now we get to the reason why the Harms name worked its way into the story when Minnie Rossow Harms wrote it down, over half a century after it happened: one of Dora Foreman Chester's alleged adulterous lovers was (according to Charles) none other than John Harms.
(Click on image to enlarge)
I have not identified Edward Naughton.
How does "John Harms was Dora's lover" translate to "Ida Harms was Charles' wife"? That would be one of the creative miracles of human memory!
Although the divorce suit was tried in Cook County, I think it very likely that some knowledge of Charles' accusation reached John Harms' relatives in Ainsworth. (Whether there was any truth to the accusation, we'll never know. There was never a hint of any such goings-on in the local newspapers, which could sometimes be surprisingly frank about naming adulterers.) That knowledge injected the Harms name into the scandal. By the time Minnie Rossow Harms, born in 1897, was old enough to be told of such things (probably by her mother-in-law) memory may have already worked its magic; or maybe the magic happened between Minnie's hearing of the scandal and her writing it down — which I think was about 1952, and maybe later.
So in a sense, Minnie did not make up Ida Harms out of whole cloth. There really was some involvement of a Harms figure in Charles Chester's first marriage.
But what of the more serious allegation in the gossip: namely, that Ida-Dora disappeared and Charles was suspected of murdering her?
It may be that as far as Ainsworth people were concerned, Dora did disappear. She left her husband's Ross Township home. People probably heard she might be in various places — Chicago, Iowa, Hobart — but likely no one in the neighborhood ever saw her again. As for Charles' murdering her — if that can be explained by anything other than a wild flight of fancy, it might have arisen from the general feeling that Dora Foreman had been treated badly by Charles. He did have another woman living with him while he was still married to Dora. We see him emerging from the divorce proceedings with everything he wanted: his freedom, sole custody of his and Dora's two oldest children, and the love of a woman who would be his partner until her death. Meanwhile, Dora and Willie, her youngest child, had difficult and short lives.
Dora left Willie to be raised by her father and stepmother, while she went to work. The 1900 Census shows her boarding in a home in Lyons Township southwest of Chicago, giving her occupation as "servant," while her little boy lived in the city with Christ and Susan Foreman. Christ, at 57 years of age, worked as a day laborer, so likely the family was not well off.
A 1905 directory for East St. Louis, Illinois, apparently shows Dora and her father living there; but Dora may have already been an inmate of the St. Clair County Farm.
On January 4, 1908, the Belleville News-Democrat published her death notice:
(Click on image to enlarge)
The St. Clair County Farm housed indigent people. But I ask myself if perhaps, when this news trickled back to Ainsworth, the poorhouse became an institution … an asylum … an insane asylum — hence the "weakened mind" of "Ida Harms" in the original story. However, there were other possible origins of the "weakened mind," as we shall see.
Willie was not yet ten years old when his mother died. He went on living with his grandparents in East St. Louis (1910 Census).
We have to piece together some of Willie's subsequent history from family stories (as confirmed by DNA): later in that decade, he got a young woman pregnant. He did not marry her, it seems. She gave birth to a baby boy who was adopted by Willie's married cousin, Frances Bonanno, and her husband. Willie's draft card from 1918 shows him apparently living with the Bonannos, working as a coal miner. (Since he listed Frances as his nearest relative, his grandfather may have died sometime after 1910.) The 1920 Census likewise shows Willie with the Bonannos and their "adopted son" in Collinsville, Illinois. Willie worked in a brickyard.
In 1926 Willie became an inmate of the Peoria State Hospital — an insane asylum. This information, if it reached Ainsworth, might be another inspiration for the "weakened mind" of "Ida Harms." But there was one more possible source: when Arthur Chester (son of Dora Foreman and Charles Chester) died in 1930 at the Logansport State Hospital, the death certificate listed his cause of death as epilepsy, with a contributory cause of epileptic psychosis. This news most likely did reach Ainsworth, since Arthur had been a local most of his life, and he was brought back to Hobart for burial. A little confusion in human minds, after a decade or two, could transform Arthur's psychosis into his mother's "weakened mind."
Willie was still an inmate of the Peoria State Hospital when the 1930 Census came around. On August 29, 1931, he died there.
Considering the fate of her two sons, and her own untimely death, there is a sense of tragedy about Dora and her family. That tragic atmosphere might have eventually fermented into the story of Charles' murdering her. Yes, it would be an amazing transformation. This piece of neighborhood gossip, as reported by Minnie, is a tribute to the creativity of human memory.
We know Charles was innocent of the worst allegation in the scandal. Yet he does not come out of this story looking very good. He lived under the same roof with Constance while still married to Dora (and we have to wonder — did he hire a housekeeper because Dora had left him, or did Dora leave him because he "hired" a "housekeeper"?). He filed for divorce in Cook County, not Lake County where he lived; and Charles and Constance both seem to have lied to the court about being residents of Chicago. I suspect they also lied, to both the Cook County and the Lake County courts, about being no more to each other than employer and employee. We know from the DNA results that Charles lied about being completely abandoned by Dora. And if he did not have more evidence than we know of for his accusations of adultery against Dora, he blackened her name unjustly.
But isn't there something in this that rises above the sordid? Perhaps my mind is shaded because just lately I've been re-reading the Kristin Lavransdatter trilogy and watching a similar story play out in great literature: two people in the throes of love abandoning all principles to be united, for better or for worse, until death. Charles and Constance became each other's lifelong companions, apparently happy together. If we believe that suffering can compensate for sin, we might look at what Charles and Constance went through in their marriage: the heartbreak of losing a son and a daughter, as well as dealing with a life-altering injury to one child (whom they both ultimately outlived) and the illegitimate pregnancy of another.
Those two latter, of course, were Dora Foreman Chester's children. I would have liked to see at least one of her children go through life without suffering a major misfortune.
It is a sad story all around. I almost feel guilty for having enjoyed finding out the truth behind what seemed to be a wildly fanciful piece of gossip; or at least, getting some insight into the possible route human brains might have travelled from Dora Foreman and a divorce, to Ida Harms and a murder.
I would never have found out the real story if Emily Iland had not tracked down the records from the divorce proceedings and shared them with me. To view those records, you may click here.
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[1] I know it's a myth that pearls form around grains of sand. They form around pieces of the oyster's own mantle tissue, or in the case of cultured pearls an introduced bead, or even a parasite that drills through the oyster's shell. But was I supposed to title this post "The Piece of Mantle Tissue of Truth…"?
[2] Indiana Marriage Collection; "Chester-Foreman Nuptual," Hobart Gazette, 18 Aug. 1893. If Dora had any relation to the Ainsworth or Hobart Foremans, we have not uncovered it.
[3] I am not sure where Charles and Dora lived locally during their marriage. My guess is that they rented a farm somewhere in Ross Township.
[4] Ancestry.com. Iowa, U.S., Births and Christenings Index, 1800-1999 [database on-line]. Provo, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations, Inc., 2011. Original data: "Iowa Births and Christenings, 1830–1950." Index. FamilySearch, Salt Lake City, Utah, 2009, 2010. Index entries derived from digital copies of original and compiled records.
The 1900 Census seems to agree with the 1898 birth year for Willie, although in later records he himself gave 1897 as his year of birth.
[5] "Additional Locals," Hobart Gazette, 2 Dec. 1898.
