They Survived a World War …

I bought this postcard because I thought it was cute. I had no idea what a tragic story I would encounter when I started researching the sender.


The year was 1943, and, for the U.S., it was the middle of World War II. Carl Pequignot, a 21-year-old Hobart man, was in the Army, stationed somewhere out West, I gather. He had this gag photo taken and made into postcards to send to the home folks.


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He sent this one to a friend, 18-year-old Mary Olive Boudrot, who lived at 753 Garfield Street and preferred to go by her middle name.



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Two years later, the war ended. Carl and the rest of the soldiers and sailors from Hobart — those who had survived the war — were able to come back home. Their family and friends breathed a sigh of relief. At last, these young people were safe.

And then this happened.


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Hobart Gazette, 2 May 1946.



The appalling deadliness of the crash was a reminder, to us, of how little the designers and the users of car thought about safety in those days. Structural features that are so familiar to us, like the crumple zone, the safety cage, and the padded dash, didn't exist. Seat belts had been invented, but were not common, and even if Carl's car had any, I'm sure that young men out riding in the wee hours of the night would not have thought of wearing them.

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Olive Boudrot was a native of Canada. Her parents, Thomas and Margaret, brought her to the U.S. when she was just a baby. Here she is in 1942 as a senior at Hobart High, known to her classmates as "Frenchy":


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HHS Senior Edition, Hobart High School, 1942.

In August 1946, Olive married Richard Shaw.

Tressy's Secret

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Image courtesy of the Hobart Historical Society.

When a stranger named Mandy Haggerty contacted me out of the blue to tell me that her grandfather was Theresia Chester's illegitimate child, I was astonished. Tressy? Who would ever have thought…?

But the birth certificate is easy enough to find, if only I had known to go look for it. I wonder that I did not stumble across it before in all these years of research.


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Image from Ancestry.com.

The father, George Peterson, was born December 24, 1888, somewhere in Wisconsin (sources vary). His parents, Danish immigrants, were farmers (1900 Census, and I am relying on Mandy's research for his background, since a guy with a name like George Peterson — well, you have to have a special interest in him to do the work of separating him from all the other George Petersons). At about 20 years of age George married for the first time and had a child; the 1910 Census shows him living in Chicago with his in-laws. I do not know what became of that marriage. George somehow found his way down to Ross Township. When the Great War broke out and he had to complete his draft card on June 5, 1917, he described himself as single (WWI Draft Cards). He was working as a hired hand on the farm of Nicholas Fleck, Jr.

Living in Ross Township, he not surprisingly came to know Tressy Chester. She was about ten years his junior.

What is surprising about this episode is that throughout the late autumn of 1917, and the winter and spring of 1918, none of the local papers mentioned a word about Charles Chester's taking any legal action against his daughter's seducer — or even illegal action, as might be the first impulse of the hot-headed Charles.

To his credit, Charles apparently did not do anything against his pregnant daughter, either. It was probably under his roof, on May 14, 1918, that George Jr. was born. As noted on the birth certificate, George Sr. was then residing back in his home state, Wisconsin.

We have no way of knowing how Tressy felt about giving her child up for adoption. The fact that birth certificate recorded a name rather than just "baby boy" would suggest emotional attachment — but I ought not to subject Tressy to my amateur psychologizing.

At that time and place, of course, her keeping the child as a single mother would have come at a very heavy social cost. As to letting her parents raise the child as their own — as the Ols family had done with little Lela — well, Charles and Constance were both about 46 years old at that time; I suppose they could have brazened it out if they'd really wanted to. But that didn't happen.

The child having been adopted out, Tressy's life resumed all appearance of normality. As we know, in September 1919 she married Robert Shaw. The ceremony took place in Holy Name Cathedral in Chicago. The bride wore white crepe de chine and was attended by her sister, Jennie.[1]

Our knowing what we know now makes it all the more poignant that the first child of that marriage, a little boy names James, died shortly after birth (Cook County, Illinois, Deaths Index). Robert and Tressy went on to have two more sons whom they raised to adulthood.

I wonder if Robert knew about Tressy's first child?

The Chesters kept quiet about it all even within the family, it seems. In contrast to the Ols descendants, to whom the story of Jennie and Lela was just a part of family history, none of the Chester descendants I'm in touch with knew anything about Tressy's secret. The story was equally unknown among the descendants of Tressy's baby. Mandy Haggerty needed an Ancestry.com DNA test, with its suggestions of possible relatives, as well as the help of a "search angel," to figure out that the grandfather she knew as Donald Robert Haggerty had come into the world as George Peterson, Jr.

I will talk about him and his adopted family in a future post.

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[1] "Hobart," The Times (Hammond, Ind.), 5 Sept. 1919.

James S. Sanders (Or Do You Spell It Saunders?)

Curious about the administrator of Luther Smith's estate, I looked into James S. Sanders and found that he was a long-time resident of Winfield Township and usually recorded as James Saunders.

He was born in Virginia in 1809. According to a family tree on Ancestry.com, by 1829 he had moved to Pennsylvania, where he married Mary Haines. The same family tree tells us that the young family left Pennsylvania for Ohio around the mid-1830s. Mary gave birth to a child in Ohio in January 1846, but early in May of the same year Early Land Sales, Lake County shows James S. Sanders buying land in Winfield Township, Lake County, Indiana: 160 acres in Section 16, along the Porter County line. The 1850 Census records James, Mary, and their eight children farming what seems to be the same parcel.

In December 1852, James purchased 80 acres in Section 5, and then in February 1854 another 160 acres — thus, the 240-acre farm we find on the 1874 Plat Map:


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The Sanders home appears to be on the north side of 109th Avenue not far east of its intersection with Grand Boulevard. No trace of the home remains as far as I can tell. (As for the 1846 farm, it's now buried under the Lake of the Four Seasons development.)

Here the Sanders family was recorded in the 1860 Census and the 1870 Census. Around 1874, apparently, James got tired of farming. He and Mary moved to Jackson Township, Porter County, where James became postmaster in the village of Jackson Center and started the first store there in 1874, and ran it for a couple of years.[1]

But by the 1880 Census James and Mary had moved to Westville in LaPorte County, and James, now 72, served as a justice of the peace. Living with them was their 16-year-old granddaughter, Melissa Shaw, whose mother, Joanna Sanders Shaw, had died.

James died in 1891 and Mary in 1900.

One would think that Deer Creek Cemetery, the Sanders' neighbor for some 20 years, would hold much evidence of the family, but the only person by the name I can find there is Alma Sanders — about whom nothing is known but her name.[2] I do not know where Joanna Sanders Shaw is buried.

I have satisfied my own curiosity about James S. Sanders, estate administrator, and to judge by the family tree on Ancestry.com, this family has already been well researched.

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[1] Goodspeed and Blanchard (eds.), Counties of Porter and Lake Indiana (1882), p. 203.
[2] I haven't been out to the cemetery to find out why we know her name but nothing else. Perhaps there is a grave marker that is illegible (or blank) but for the name.

Tressy Leaves Ainsworth

Early September 1919 took Theresia Chester away from Ainsworth, as she became the wife of Robert Shaw:


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The "Sept. 5" in that article is a typo — the wedding took place on September 3, 1919, and I gather it was in Chicago.

I notice, from another story on that page, that the area had a dry summer in 1919, as we've been having, and that the Gazette's editor felt free to use the word "drouth," which seems to nowadays to have fallen away in favor of "drought."

The Border Wireless had been released in September 1918; its story line managed to combine the Great War with the Wild West.


Sources:
♦ Cook County, Illinois, Marriages Index.
♦ "Shaw-Chester." Hobart Gazette 5 Sept. 1919.