The Unforgotten - The First Edith Lenora Sauser

 I must warn you, this blog post is tragically sad. 

Years ago, when researching my step-father's side of the family, I came across a conundrum. It has literally taken me five years to solve.

Let's begin with my step-great grandmother, Edith Lenora SAUSER. 

She was the daughter of Paul Frederick SAUSER and Orpah Annette SCHNOOVER who were married in Johnson County, Iowa, 27 July 1911. According to her birth certificate, she was born 07 October 1911 in Prarieburg, Linn County, Iowa. Paul was 23 and Orpha was 28. Edith was born after just 2.5 months of marriage. 

As I began to work my way up her tree, I came across an article before her birth, mentioning her father, Paul SAUSER. It was a plea for divorce by a Margaret SAUSER who claimed abuse and wanted custody of their ONE YEAR OLD daughter, EDITH LENORA SAUSER. 

The Courier; Page 3, Waterloo, Iowa, Mon 30 March 1908

I immediately began investigating this Margaret, but couldn't find a marriage record on Family Search or Ancestry. I also began looking for records for an Edith Lenora SAUSER born 1907 and all the results were either completely wrong or records that I knew were MY Edith Lenora SAUSER born 1911.

Then last week I decided to google archived marriage records for North Dakota. I ended up at the State Historical Society of North Dakota. I did a vague search, only entering SAUSER for the groom's last name and then the year 1905 and got exactly one hit. 

SAUSER/BEATTY 

Notice this tells us Paul's middle initial is the same as MY Paul FREDERICK.

The next information I found were Waterloo, Iowa,  city directory entries for Paul F SAUSER, wf Margaret, for the years 1906 and 1908. 

Then the 1910 census find Paul F SAUSER living in Boulder, Linn, IA, with his brother John M. SAUSER. His marital status was marked 'D' for divorced. 

So then I began looking for Margaret V. BEATTY. I found her in the 1900 census as VIOLA M. BEATTY age 12, birth state, Illinois, the daughter of James W. and Edith BEATTY, living in Whitewater, Dubuque, IA.  and in the 1905 Iowa State census she's again listed with J W BEATTY as Margaret BEATTY, her mother, Edith is not listed. I later find two obituaries for Edith and it creates more questions than answers. 

The first obituary is from page 5 of Monticello Express 11 Dec 1902. It states, "Mr. and Mrs. BEATTY had no children of their own but their hearts were full of sympathy for the little ones who were without parental care"

And the second obituary from page 5 of the Cascade Pioneer, published in Cascade, Iowa on Friday, December 12th, 1902 goes on to name the foster children as "Margaret BEATTY, Mildred RAFFETY, Myrta DAVIDSON, Elon RAFFETY, and Linnie SHOTWELL" 

I have searched and searched for Margaret Viola BEATTY SAUSER in the 1910 census and can find no trace of her or the one year old baby, Edith Lenora SAUSER, from the 1908 article. 

I keep searching and find a marriage record in Jackson County, Missouri on the 21 Dec 1918 for a Margaret V BEATTY, born in 1888, to a Charles PRATT. I decide to look for them in the 1920 census to see if this Margaret was also born in Illinois and sure enough, they're living in Kansas City, Jackson, Missouri and she is indeed born in Illinois. But there is no Edith Lenora born 1907. It's only Charles and Margaret PRATT.

I research this couple a little more to discover sadly, that two short years later, Margaret dies from pulmonary tuberculosis. Her death certificate goes on to list her parents as David E. GLENN and Mary L. CLARK. I begin to second guess myself. Maybe this isn't the right woman after all. But when I find the obituary for this Margaret I get some answers..... and more questions.

So now I don't know who Margaret's birth parents were and I don't know why baby Edith born 1907 wasn't with her in 1920 or mentioned at all in her obituary. Did Paul get custody? Was my Edith actually 4 years older? Did they falsify records? Was her birth certificate accurate? Was Orpha SCHNOOVER not her mother after all?

Or, more likey, maybe the first Edith Lenora SAUSER died. Babies died often back then. I can find no birth record or death record no matter how much I search. I laid everything aside and decided to come back later. Maybe a few days would give Ancestry's algorithms a chance to catch up to all the new information. 

When I came back, there weren't any accurate hints. They all are records for my grandmother born in 1911. But when I hit "search" a Find-a-grave record comes up for an Edith SAUSER born in 1906 and died 24 March 1930 in Oklahoma County, Oklahoma. I feel this is unlikely to be her so far away but the inscription on her stone makes me decide to dig a little further. 

EVEN THOUGH ALONE IN LIFE NOT FORSAKEN IN DEATH

I decide to once again turn to old newspapers and there her tragic story unfolds. 

Edith had been adopted around 1908 to a Mr. and Mrs. H T HECHT according to the below articles. This turns out to be an error that I discover once I was able to find her marriage record. She married Mr. Alphia O HART in 1921. Marriage announcements give her the name Hazel HECHT, the daughter of Mr. and Mrs. A B HECHT of San Bernardino, CA. I was then able to find Hazel E HECHT, the adopted daughter of  Albert and Jessie HECHT in the 1920 San Bernardino census. She was born 1907 in Iowa. And again in 1910 with Albert and Maude HECHT in Waterloo, IA.

Maude died in 1912. Notice that her husband, Albert worked for the same company Paul SAUSER did in the 1906 Waterloo, IA, directory. 

Something happened between Hazel/Edith and her husband and the marriage ended in 1927. Sometime afterwards in Jan 1929 she gave birth to an "invalid" son at Holmes Home of Redeeming Love in Oklahoma, City. He was 14 months old at the time of his mother's death. I'm unsure if Mr. HART was his father or not.

Edith struggled to make ends meet and suffered with unimaginable heartbreak and depression as well as failing health. She was a waitress making $16/week. Because of sympathy and her good nature, her employer paid her more than the going rate. But life was just too cruel. I imagine when child services took her son, it was the last straw and she decided to end her life by drinking poison. Her last words, "I'm to blame for everything."

In one of the articles it mentions that she was born in Waterloo, IA.  

Edith Lenora Sauser - May she rest in peace. 

Edith Sauser sketch

So here's to a woman whose history and existence is only to be found in Newspapers for those who would take the time to connect the dots. 

If her son survived and has heirs, I hope they one day find this information. I have no idea what his name was, first or last. 


Here's a picture side by side of Grandma Edith and her half-sister by the same name. As well as a picture of their father in later years. 

Until next time
Becky 

After posting inquiries online where one might find old adoption records, the following article from the 'Semi Weekly Reporter' 7 July 1908 was shared with me. 

I dug a little more using a different newspaper archive and found another similar article from the Waterloo Daily Courier 3 July 1908. This article gets the name change right.

DNA, Home Remedies, and Customs

This is a picture of my grandmother's maternal grandmother, Clara Inda EVANS ACORD. She went by the name "Indie". In this picture she is about 26 years old. 

Her parents Josiah EVANS and Jane CONNER were some of the early pioneers of NE Johnson County, Arkansas, and they started the little backwoods cemetery known as Evans Cemetery. It sits on a little level area on the side of a mountain  above the Little Mulberry Creek.

Family tradition has always been that Jane's mother, Effie, was Native and her last name was BULL (a few researchers say CHRYST) The only records Effie can be found in are the 1850 & 1860 census in Greene and Webster counties, in Missouri. There are no marriage records. No one can be certain who her parents were. In census records she gives her birth state as North Carolina and says she was born around 1794/5. 

While I may not be able to prove parentage, I'm starting to feel confident about heritage. 

Several years ago, I tested my DNA with 23andMe and noticed that I had trace amounts of "Indigenous American" and "Broadly Sub-Saharan" DNA. I then began to look at my DNA matches and only those who also descended from Grandma Indie also had these results. 

My grandmother's oldest sister tested her DNA with Ancestry.  Ancestry narrowed her African results down to the Cameroon, Congo & Western Bantu Peoples of Africa. This really piqued my interest, but I didn't really investigate further until I began reading a book that was describing superstitions, remedies, and recipes of former slaves and one story reminded me of one that has been told in my own family. In the book a former slave mentioned that cow manure tea brewed with mint could cure consumption. My grandmother tells a story of  how Grandmother Indie made sheep dung tea to cure grandmother's sister of the measles. Her sister didn't know what was in the tea, but grandma had seen Indie making it and was told not to tell her sister! 

This reminded me once again of the African DNA results. But this isn't the only connection to possible slave roots. The Evans Cemetery, I mentioned earlier, has lots of broken pieces of pottery scattered around. Each year when it's time to clean the cemetery, descendants go through and pick up any that have been strewn from weather and wildlife and place them once again on their ancestors graves. This tradition was started by Indie's mother Jane, who was sometimes called "Black Granny". According to stories told by her descendants, Granny Jane would take her grandchildren and walk over the country gathering broken dishes. They would then take them to decorate the graves at the cemetery. Each grave had a wooden frame built around it. Just before decoration, Jane and the children would carry water from the Little Mulberry creek to the cemetery where they would remove all the pottery and glass and wash it. Then they would take newspaper and place it in the frames as a weed barrier and then take the now clean pottery and glass and place it on the newspapers. (Taken from the Evans, Oark, Patterson Springs and Yale cemetery book compiled by Doris Evans and Jimmie Dewberry).

Evans Decoration 1939 (my grandmother is the baby being held by her father, Newell)

Jane's son Rev. William Walker EVANS at his wife's grave.

Below are some current photos of the broken pottery that remains. 

 

Whenever I research this tradition of decorating graves with pottery online, the very first search result said,

The Africans of the Congo introduced this tradition of decorating graves with grave goods to America. They did this by using pots and shells as grave goods to signify certain statuses or traits, honoring and protecting the spirit. [3] This tradition has continued through the twentieth century and has evolved over time.   

Another resource said,

In North America the surface decoration of graves with ceramics and other objects is the most commonly recognized African-American material culture indicator of cemetery sites. William Faulkner, in Go Down, Moses, described a black cemetery with “shards of pottery and broken bottles and old brick and other objects insignificant to sight but actually of a profound meaning and fatal to touch, which no white man could have read”(Faulkner 1942:135; cf. Vlach 1978:139)

 

Notice above the mention of the Congo region of Africa, precisely the same area our DNA results indicate. Using Ancestry, I began to compare DNA results to other descendants of Jane and found several others had the same results ranging from 1%-3% of Cameroon, Congo and Western Bantu Peoples. From Jane's eldest daugher, Effie,  (pictured to the left and named after her maternal grandmother) my great aunt had three matches that shared this same African DNA. From Jane's son "Jody" my great aunt had one match that shared this same DNA as well as one who had Nigerian. And from another son, William, (pictured below) there one descendant who also had Nigerian DNA results. 



 
 

     From the maps below you can see that these two regions border one another. Several of these descendants also had Indigenous markers. All of this leads me to have a strong belief that not only was Jane's mother, Effie, native, but she was most likely also a descendant of a slave. We may not know the names of our ancestors going further back in Effie's lineage, but I think it's truly special that this particular custom belonging to her heritage remains today.

Also, today I noticed my flowering quince that I dug from Granny Jane's homestead a few years ago has bloomed for the first time. 

My Aunt Diane, my mother's sister, tested recently with Ancestry DNA and her results came back with Cameroon and Congo as well! 

Until next time, 
Becky