Robert died en route, but his wife and 5 children, George, David, Julie, Adeline, Bloomfield, and Suda, (whose real name was...Susannah!), arrived in Washington territory. Suda is the only one to have had any children of her own. George eventually became LAPD, Julia, Adeline, and David all doctors. Suda died very young.
Suda's daughters Cora and Myrtle were both nurses. Cora went to care for the daughters of the widower Arthur in Shenandoah, Iowa. He was a prosperous traveling salesman. He started out as a grocer. Julia and Alfred were born there. Arthur and Cora divorced (he was beating her). Cora then nursed Caleb Bigelow, who had lost an arm in a farm accident. That was Aunt Betty's father.
Cora's brother, Elmer, was in jail for highway robbery, literally, and she seemed to have moved to Oklahoma with Caleb, to be near him. She was also petitioning for his release. Elmer was in the jail that Tom Joad is coming home from in the beginning of Grapes of Wrath. In the meantime, Julia and Adeline (henceforth the GAs) and George ended up in LA. They were also in Oshkosh, WI for a time, I forget why. They had a car. GA Julia was the first woman (maybe person) in Wisconsin to get a speeding ticket. She once hit someone. The GAs went to the Chicago Women's Medical college, both of them. Julia was a brilliant student. They had a magazine about healthy living practices and were very involved in the suffrage movement. However they are largely ignored in documentation about amazing women of the day. Perhaps because they were involved with the eugenics movement rather heavily, and their magazine was funded by a eugenics group! They were distributors of birth control, and probably practitioners of abortion.
Cora would already have known that they were awful people, because they had originally gotten Elmer sent into the juvenile system, because he was growing wild; the evidence for this is that he was consorting with Chinese persons. The GAs began raising Julia and siblings when Cora died. Julia would have been 11. They basically raised Cora, Myrtle, and Elmer, so this was their second little family. They appear to have adopted the children of patients they saw as unfit also.
Well known people involved in women's welfare and education helped Julia with her lawsuit against the GAs. She also had a high school friend (Hollywood High) whose parents protected her at the time. Apparently, Julia went, with the GAs reluctant consent, to live in a dorm, at a Christian college. The GAs demanded that they be informed if she left the dorm for any reason. They were very weird about men. The college refused, (GA Julia's letter to them is pretty creepy,) and they gave Julia permission to go stay with the friend. GA Julia came after her, but the friend's family and the neighbors intervened, and GA Julia was unable to grab Julia.
The man below is James Riddle Hoffa.
7 comments:
OK, wow. This is an info fire hose. Did you take notes? Can we get all the goods?
Chandran
I'm wrong about some stuff. More tomorrow.
Wait, are we related to Jimmy Hoffa? And what is the likelihood that we are related to someone named Tom Riddle?
It was impossible for me to take decent notes. The information came so fast.
Thank goodness, not a Tom among the gang.
There are 2 pics that I thought were from Oscars family, that turn out to be Riddle. 1. A building that is still standing in Shenendoah that was Anderson meat market, with Arthur Colvin standing in front, and 2. a decorated car in a parade with 2 women, probably the GAs.
I should have said 'probably' in reference to Arthur Colvin.
There are a lot of Riddles, but, yes, Jimmy Hoffa is in our tree. A really interesting thing--of the family that went west from Kansas, only Suda had children. Of Suda's children, only Cora had children. Of Cora's children, only Grandma had children. This means we have no unknown cousins on the Riddle side.
Looking at Hoffa's face, it kind of makes sense.
CHandran
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