Searching for John Shufelt, Part 1
I’m pretty sure I got the genealogy bug sometime during 6th grade when one of my friends informed me that his mom had been researching their family history in the library and discovered that they were related to Jesse James. It could easily have been nothing more than a 12-year-old’s boast, completely fabricated, but that didn’t matter. I was off on my own fantasy track at that point, wondering about the famous people who might be in my past. Never mind the fact that I had come, as far as I knew, from a long line of Swiss and French Canadian farmers who’d never held up a bank or a train or anything else besides their end of a bargain.
It took a few years for me to act on the fantasy. Armed with the names of my great-grandparents, I began exploring, eventually realizing that what I’d basically known all along–the bit about farmers–held true. No outlaws, no brigands, no one of note, neither famous nor infamous. I did discover that my ancestors came to Canada in the 1500s and that some of them were Acadians–the inhabitants of French Canada booted out by the British, many of whom ended up in Louisiana. My branch of the Acadians took the shorter path to Quebec where they were absorbed into the rest of French-speaking Canada. The Swiss branch I never got very far with, the records being in German and my knowledge of German limited to what I’d picked up from watching Hogan’s Heroes re-runs. Dummkopf!
My wife’s grandmother as a child, along with her invalid aunt, Mary Shufelt, circa 1915.
Even so, my search fading into nothingness, I was still infected by the bug and so began searching for my wife’s roots–more firmly American and thus a little easier to track. There was one branch of the family that really had me curious. My wife’s grandmother had been orphaned at a young age. Her father, a Chicago physician, had died when she was 6, and her mother died two years later. At 8 years old, she was sent to live with an invalid aunt while her two older brothers were taken in by the other side of the family (probably wealthier).
Some creative digging led me to the physician, Edgar Reed Hawley of Chicago, who died at 48 in 1912. His wife, however, was more of a mystery. All I had was her maiden name, Helen Shufeldt. I could find no record of her death or her birth, no mention of a Helen Shufeldt in earlier census records, and the census records of her married life with Dr. Hawley were conflicting and sketchy. My desire to have a Jesse James-type story kicked in again. What had happened to Helen (Shufeldt) Hawley?
A bit more digging got me to Helen’s mother, Ellen Shufeldt, who I soon discovered had been born Ellen Doyle and who had immigrated from Ireland as a girl in the 1860s. I found this out when I got hold of Ellen’s 1916 death certificate. It gave me her maiden name, the names of her parents, the year she’d immigrated, and the fact that she was a widow. Her deceased husband had been named John Shufeldt, sometimes spelled Shufelt. More digging for John got me nowhere–no death certificate, no nothing. A bit more of putting two and two together told me he’d been born in Canada, but that was it.
With John Shufelt a dead end, I turned back to his daughter, Helen, about whom the only thing I really knew was that she died around 1914, leaving three minor children without parents. But where was her death certificate? The state of Illinois is really good about putting those old documents online, but there was nothing for Helen. I reached out to genealogical “helpers”–people with more experience than me, not to mention a ton more tenacity. Some agreed that there was something fishy about Helen. Had she really died in 1914? Maybe she’d gone mad with grief after her husband’s death and been locked away, the story of her early death the family’s way of hushing up the scandal. Maybe she’d remarried but had needed to send her children away to live with relatives as she put her life back together. The possibilities were intriguing.
I kept searching, trying probate records to see if there was any official record of what had happened with the minor children. I tried looking at death records and census records for other states, theorizing that Helen may have been somewhere other than Chicago when she died. Again, nothing.
Helen Hawley’s 1914 Death Certificate
Finally, a savvy genealogist in Chicago offered a suggestion: maybe the lack of information on Helen’s death stemmed from nothing more exotic than a simple transcription error. I gave her what I knew, and within a few hours she had the answer. There wasn’t any mystery, no hidden family scandal, no foul play. Helen Hawley died in Chicago in 1914 at the home of her mother, Ellen Shufeldt, succumbing to pneumonia at the age of 43. The doctor who wrote out the death certificate listed her name as “Ellen” rather than “Helen,” and his handwriting of “Hawley” was so fancy that the H looked more like St. Whoever had transcribed the death certificate for the Illinois database had misread the name and entered it as “Ellen Stanley” rather than “Helen Hawley.” Case solved.
But could I rest with this knowledge? Could I say, “Okay, now I’m done?” Nope. Genealogy is a cruel mistress, it seems, and I had a new mystery–John Shufeldt. Who was he? Where had he come from? When had he died? Was he really Canadian? Why was his marriage certificate with Ellen Doyle the only thing I could find on him? I didn’t start down the path of foul play and family mysteries this time, but I also wasn’t ready to give up. It would take me a few more years of intermittent searching, but I finally succeeded, making some surprising connections along the way.
More on that next time.
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[…] Last time, I started the story of how I dug into my wife’s roots and ended up figuring out what happened to her great-grandmother but then found myself with another mystery on my hands: her great-great-grandfather, John Shufelt, about whom I could find almost no information. […]
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