Family Lore Meets Historical Fiction

When starting my next novel, A Farm at the End of the World, two of my characters were becoming eerily similar to a story which has been floating around my family half a century. I decided to go all in, planting my great, great grandmother and great grandmother at the center of the new novel.

This is what the beginning of a goose chase looks like.

When I was a child, I heard a tale about a distant relative named Effie Smith.

Effie was an Irish immigrant who had a baby out of wedlock after arriving in the states. When the child's father, William, visited Effie and the young girl on the farm, he found his daughter tied to a table on a leash. That young girl was my great grandmother, Amelia, raised by William and Mary Koehler. On Mary’s deathbed, she confessed to Amelia that she was not birth mother.

Only some of that is true.

The mistakes lay in my own memory, the memory of the storytellers, and all of our interpretations of what was said. While it is not an accurate historic account, it does have the makings of lore, something perhaps more memorable and enticing than the truth.

The story stuck with me all through my life. I imagined it into a short story in college. I told it to friends when juicy family secrets of relatives long passed made the night's gossip. And it came to me again as I started my second book, wondering what if Effie and Amelia got a second chance at living together as mother and daughter.

It set me on a quest to find out as much of the truth as I could—which, I’m sorry to say, is not all of it, as of yet. But it's a start.

Sources of Truth and Mystery

The majority of my research has been online, using sites like Ancestry, FamilySearch, FindAGrave, and other genealogy databases. My brother-in-law did most of the heavy-lifting of mapping our family tree years ago, which has greatly fast-tracked my research. Government websites, libraries, historical archives, Google Maps, Zillow and Facebook groups have also been extremely helpful.

Some research has been on foot, paying visits to the Assessor’s Office and Recorder of Deeds, hunting down houses in the fashionable Lafayette Square neighborhood, and driving past parking lots and strip malls where homes used to be.

While memory is imperfect, it has helped me where I would have been utterly stuck in my research. My mom and grandma Barb have broken loose a few of my log jams.

The absolute treasure trove, though, is a manila envelope stuffed with photos, letters, and other documents that people in my family have thought wise to hold onto. I refer to these as "the family documents," and they are all in the photos at the top of this blog.

Most of the photographs were unlabeled. Some of the letters were in envelopes they couldn't have been sent in (i.e., the postmark predates the letter date). There is one envelope with no corresponding letter (a very frustrating mystery).

I have run into what may be a few important dead ends, but am still working to break through them. I haven't had success on obtaining Amelia's birth certificate to see if William—or anyone—is listed as the father, or finding her adoption certificate. But on a sunny winter's day, a clue appeared that may help to track down the latter.

The "E Ledger"

I called my mom (who is VERY into family history and the lore of Effie Smith) and asked if she wanted to go on a wild goose chase with me to city hall. She was in.

We showed up at the Assessor's Office just after opening to see if they had a 1913 adoption certificate for Amelia. I had a small piece of paper which seemed to be a handwritten receipt of the certificate (which cost $5) with all the necessary details. I'd looked at this paper a dozen times, copying the information, trying to suss out if I'd missed anything.

Alas, the Assessor didn't have it. They gave us some tips of where to try next—FamilySearch, the Archdiocese of St. Louis.

Our next stop was to see the neighborhood listed on the adoption receipt. The house was no longer there, but I was curious if any other houses of the time period still stood. Zilch. All sad strip malls and asphalt. But behind the strip mall there was what looked to be an old cemetery. We pulled in to regroup and look over the family documents again.

Sitting in the passenger seat of my car, my mom looked at the adoption receipt again. This time, unlike the many times I had looked at it on a tabletop or in my lap inside my house, the sun shone brightly behind it. A secret revealed itself.

The receipt was written on watermarked paper with an "E" symbol, a cutoff word before "LEDGER," and maybe the numbers "24." While I'm still digging to find out what it means, the watermark has been my best "zoom, enhance" detective moment to date.

Happy-Cry Moment Reading a Census Record

In the 1910 census, Effie was listed as a boarder in the house of a female physician, Dr. Hesse. She was 18 years old, working in Union Station after being raised on a farm, and pregnant.

I assume Effie was not welcome to have her baby in her father's house (her mother had died when she was 12). So she found another situation with Dr. Hesse. Their house is still standing, a beautiful three-story in St. Louis' historic Lafayette Square neighborhood.

The family documents include a clipping of Dr. Hesse’s obituary in the St. Louis Globe-Democrat. She died a few months before Amelia was adopted, and Effie may have been living with Dr. Hesse at that time: the address in the obituary matches the address on the adoption receipt.

Dr. Hesse must have meant a great deal to Effie, as it was she (or possibly the Koehlers) who saved the obituary. Whoever saved it, I think I know why.

Look at the first name.

In the early hours of April 30, 1911, at the age of 19, Effie gave birth to her first child. She named her Amelia, perhaps after the kindly Dr. Hesse who had taken her in or may have, in fact, delivered the baby.

It's these stories of women bringing new life into the world, in imperfect or even hostile circumstances, that I want to share in my new book. I want to give Effie another chance at being Amelia's mother. It doesn't all go perfectly, but no life does. At least they'll get to live it together.