Never Trust a Cute Goat Story

I thought this goat story was cute, and its being on the front page of this small-town newspaper was cute, too.


(Click on image to enlarge)
Hobart News, 24 Jan. 1924.

As everyone in Hobart in 1924 did, we know the Veal family: Walter Veal married Hazel Thompson in August 1922, and we saw the announcement in November 1923 of the birth of that little daughter.

Reading further in the microfilm, I found this item in the "Local Drifts" of the Hobart Gazette of March 21, 1924.

Baby Ruth Olivia, infant daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Walter Veal, who live on South Center street, died suddenly about 7 o'clock Wednesday morning, March 19, aged 3 months and 20 days. The child had seemed rather delicate all along, and gave the parents much anxiety. Funeral services will be held Saturday afternoon at 2 o'clock from the Church of Christ by Rev. R. Warren Main.

The death certificate gives the cause of death as maramus, with bronchitis contributory.

At this point the goat story stopped being cute, and became a story of worried parents trying ineffectually to help their very sick baby. I was moved to look further into this family, and found a long history of trouble and grief.

We know that Myrtle, Walter's previous wife, had a nervous breakdown and then died "due to a complication of diseases." When we check the death certificate, we find a grim situation: the contributory cause was interstitial nephritis; the main cause was dementia praecox, which, as I understand it, is an outdated term for schizophrenia.

I initially thought Myrtle had been Walter's second wife. A little digging on Ancestry.com brought me to a family tree that had dived deep and found two wives before her. The first, Iva Ball, had married Walter in 1900 in Preble County, Ohio (not too far from his hometown of Greens Fork, Indiana); they were divorced sometime before May of 1907, when she remarried. (I believe the stepdaughter referenced in Myrtle's obituary was born during this marriage: Lucille Veal Fye (1901-1973).) In 1907 Walter married Florence Olvey in Wayne County, Indiana; they were divorced in Colorado in 1910. In 1911 came his marriage to Myrtle Mantauk in Cass County, Indiana.

One man with two divorces was unusual in the early 20th century. It didn't bode well, then or now. Did Hazel Thompson know about Walter's past when she decided to marry him?

Less than a year after Walter and Hazel lost their little daughter, they had another: Ellwyn Lorraine, born in Hobart on January 5, 1925, who would be known by her middle name. The Veal family was still in Hobart when Kenneth Lee Enos was born in March 1927. By June 1929, when Mary Margaret was born, they had moved to the unincorporated village of Mexico, Indiana, where they remained at least through April 1930 when the 1930 census was taken.

They were in the small town of Akron, Indiana for the births of their next two children: Enos Glen (January 1931) and Robert Glen (July 1932).[1]

Then the family moved to Nappanee, where Doris Jean was born in October 1934 and George Morris (named for Hazel's dead father) in December 1936.

That's a lot of children and a lot of moving in ten years. This was all happening during the Great Depression, while Walter was practiced a dying trade (blacksmithing), so I imagine the family's life was not easy.

This 1937 story came out of Nappanee:


(Click on image to enlarge)
South Bend Tribune, 25 June 1937.

The children were probably Kenneth (10) and Enos (6). The grandmother in question was Nancy Thompson. I remember Eldon Harms telling me that Nancy sewed clothing for her grandchildren, and the Eva Thompson collection includes an envelope sent to Nancy from Nappanee on which someone has noted a measurement for Nancy's use in sewing a dress for the eldest Veal child, Lorraine:


(Click on images to enlarge)
Images above and below courtesy of Eldon Harms.



But something tells me that the 1937 story about the hitchhiking children is not as whimsical as it sounds. The kids might have wanted to go see their nice grandma, yes; but they might also have wanted to escape from a home that was stressful and perhaps even violent. The "something" telling me that is a 1939 story:


(Click on image to enlarge)
"Circuit Court," Elkhart Truth, 24 Feb. 1939.

The 1940 census, taken in April and May, records a scattered family. Walter was still an inmate at the Putnam County penal farm. Hazel was in St. Joseph County, keeping house for a widowed farmer with four children; her youngest child, George, was living there too.[2] The three boys, Kenneth, Enos, and Robert,[3] were all in Elkhart County, living at the Bashor Children's Home. The two oldest girls, Lorraine and Mary Margaret, were in Wabash County, inmates of the White Manual Labor Institute.[4] Five-year-old Doris Jean had been adopted by a childless Indianapolis couple, William and Hazel Hart, and was now named Carolyn.[5]

Hazel was finished with Walter. By November 1940, she had moved to South Bend and filed for divorce.


(Click on image to enlarge)
South Bend Tribune, 13 Nov. 1940.

In January 1941, Hazel married the 55-year-old Otto Keck, whose wife had died in the spring of 1940. He had three adult children,[6] and lived in the village of Wyatt, southeast of South Bend, where he operated his own well-drilling business. There Hazel joined him. No doubt she brought little George with her; I'd like to think she brought her other children as well.

On July 11, 1942, at the age of 41, Hazel gave birth to twins — Jerry Alan and Joyce Ann. The following year, they died within a day of each other.


(Click on image to enlarge)
Bremen Inquirer, 4 Nov. 1943.

According to their death certificates, Joyce died of scurvy, Jerry of broncho-pneumonia, but both suffered from malnutrition. Perhaps the disorder that had killed little Ruth in 1924 had surfaced again. But unlike Ruth, who seems to be lying in an unmarked grave in Crown Hill Cemetery, these little ones' graves are marked with an impressive stone.

By the way, I am not reassured by the fact that of all Hazel's own children, only George is listed among the survivors in the twins' death notice. The others may have still been scattered. But Robert, at least, joined Otto and Hazel's household in time to be counted with them, and his brother George, in the 1950 census.

After the twins, Hazel had no more children, and — aside from losing her mother in 1944 — no more heartbreak, I hope, at least until Otto died in 1959. All her other children were still living at Hazel's death in 1972.


When Eldon Harms was telling me about the Thompson family, he never hinted that Hazel's life had been so difficult. Perhaps he didn't know.

_______________
[1] I can't find a birth certificate for Enos. I got his birth date from his Korean War draft registration.
[2] To the enumerator (or maybe to her employer), she described herself as widowed.
[3] The census enumerator put him down as "Lester" Veal, but his age is right for Robert.
[4] The enumerator added a note to the name: "home for problem children." This institution, during the latter part of the 19th century, had been one of the notorious boarding schools in which Native American children were forcibly placed.
[5] I owe this information to a family tree on Ancestry.com; I would never have figured it out on my own. The 1940 census reported that Carolyn had been living in the Hart home since 1935, which would mean she was adopted as an infant, but that may have been an assumption on the enumerator's part. (I mean, the enumerator might have asked one of the adults, "Where were you living in 1935?"; that person said, "Here"; and the enumerator assumed the answer applied to the child too.)
[6] Still living, that is; one son had been killed in an accident in 1938.