Very Rough. In progress...
THE FRANKS. Her parents, the Franks, had always lived near Mennonites, back in Pennsylvania, so they found the same after moving to Oscoda County, Michigan. Their cemetery in Michigan was started by a Mennonite family, named Kittle (if the name was on the Germanic-speaking end of the Swiss, it may have been spelled Küttel back in "the old country").
A newly raised Mennonite Church in Oscoda County would burn. Why? No arsonist was named, but it was clearly arson. Groups that historians call "nativists" had become active, pushing to eliminate whomever they had been raised to fear, varying their attacks depending upon what group was present. One example was the revitalized KKK of the early 1920s, which went against foreign speakers, Catholics, the Jewish, not just African Americans. Some group had been posting flyers, saying not to vote for any Mennonites for township officers. The Mennonite farmers did not want to feel beaten, so promptly raised a new church. That church burning happened after she left home, but in her lifetime.
The Franks went northward inside Pennsylvania, close to Lake Erie, then, staying close to the Great Lakes, they went first to an old lumber town on Lake Huron (Saginaw, a lakeside place at Michigan's eastern edge). Saginaw was sufficiently large that her father and possibly an uncle could both find work and save money to buy farmland from the government, chosen out of the small pickings still offered at that point to pioneering "homesteaders". They thus moved both inland and upriver, to Oscada County, to farm amidst forests. Those who farmed in the summer could log in the winter, logs sent downriver to one of the surrounding Great Lakes (Lake Michigan on the other side of lower Michigan, with upper Mich. having access to Lake Superior). The long logs floated down river would then be sawn and shipped elsewhere, to build other people's houses and stores, from Chicago to NY and beyond, generally carried by railroad in Lizzie's era.
LIZZIE. When tiny, the child her parents called "Elisabeth" (with an s, not a z, to make a a prettier sound) was unaware they had moved to Michigan from Penn. In their new place in her era, when might a daughter be so grown she could be counted as an adult? When she finished her education.
When did that happen for her? We know from Censuses that she only finished the seventh grade. Perhaps the local school only went that far, no farther? If her parents had been allowed to only go through sixth grade in Penn., they would have thought the Michigan schools offering Gr. 7 was a major advantage.
She moved a county away from her parents' home. She worked as a housekeeping maid, probably in a hotel or boarding house that served migratory lumber workers, hopefully under the close watch of a house matron or a church minister, hopefully able to befriend other working females like herself.
She would become a woman who could take care of herself.
Decades later, on record traveling into Canada without her husband, she took her three youngest children to visit their migrating father, Edwin, who traveled between lumber camps, sharpening the big saws to proper standards, etc.
She had had many, many siblings. The elder ones moving out early always left more room for the youngest. Would those staying behind naturally be more spoiled, as a result? Their very eldest brother had apparently been left back in Pennsylvania, or returned there, perhaps was counted as an adult while she was still a baby. Would she have counted him as least spoiled?
AN AMERICAN MIX OF RELIGIONS. Lizzie's maternal grandmother, Susannah Krug, was raised in the Mennonite religion back in the Swiss-German part of Pennsylvania. Susannah crossed religious and ethnic lines to marry a British-descended man from the nearby township of Paradise, possibly raised Episcopalian (Archibald Warren). Lizzie's German-speaking father, Peter Frank, had been brought with siblings to America by his parents, all Bavaria-born, reared by a German Catholic mother with a beautiful first name. That was Apollonia Glanig (also spelled Klanig/Klanish, etc.); she married Herr Johannes Frank "over there", who became Mr. John Frank here.) Several of her children and her spouse would be buried in Mennonite cemeteries, while Apollonia is buried in the old St. Joseph cemetery outside her Catholic church. Their children had separated them when elderly; she, living with daughter Margaret; he, with a son. The Census had no category for Separated, so when asked for marital status, she picked "Widowed" from the census list as fitting his not being with her, while he picked "Married", as he wished somebody would take them both. Social Security and pensions, so the extremely elderly lived with adult children and did their best to help out.
HER CHILDREN. What about this Lizzie? She was Apollonia's granddaughter, but instead is known to modern family members as a grandmother to their grandmothers, for example, to the Nancy Williams who had married Tom Norman. She had her own family with children; she was a junior Elizabeth, middle name Warren, while her mother was the senior Elizabeth, but with Warren as her maiden name. You have to check the husband or children to make sure you have the right one Elizabeth Warren Frank. A daughter Lauren had died very young, while they lived in an isolated, mountainous place (out in Idaho?) where getting help was hard.
There would be a big age gap between Lauren's older brother, Kenneth Ward Williams, who remembered Lauren's death, and Ken's two younger brothers, Harold Owen and Donald Edwin Williams, who perhaps would remember little or nothing about her death. Ken turned adult while they were still children, had a better experience of the Roaring Twenties before entering the Great Depression, whereas their youth mainly overlapped the Depression. Their different eras and birth order produced different people.
On his death bed, when asked what he would have changed, Lizzie's son Ken had said he would not have been so judgmental, quite an insight. Different listeners would have experienced different kinds of judging from him, but this apology was meant for all of them. One judging that can be discussed was Ken's not wanting his brother Harold to be so active in unions.
THE BABY. In addition to those surviving boys, there was one more, a "tail-end baby", perhaps "a surprise", little Marguerite, now the only girl in a family of older boys. Are such children sometimes allowed to self-indulge too much, the parents "too worn out" from rearing the older children to do much correcting or too fearful of repeating past mistakes, so they under-correct?
We might think this when we contrast Marguerite's many marriages and serious partying to the other ways her life could have gone. The 1940 Census showed her 16 and married, her first husband, Russell Parker, a seemingly good guy, but also "too young", working in a bakery. They lived with her parents, as they could not afford to live apart? Sociologists tell us that maybe 80% of the "too young" marriages end with at least one person very unhappy. There would be other husbands for Marguerite, but not all would be nice to her prior children. One was shockingly not nice, yet she stayed with him anyway. Knowing this, why did junior Lizzie not invite Marguerite back, with her kids, into the family home? Was everyone too fearful of that spouse?
Marguerite finally had a good husband at the end, one who "lasted". He liked doing his family history, so Marguerite then did her family's future genealogists a big favor by writing up dates, names and places, for both Edwin's parents and his mother's parents. That was back in the 1980s. She gave the list to a Jenny LaMore who put the info on the web before she died, in the 2000s, wonderful of her to do that for us, even though she died before we could thank her. Where did the names and dates come from?
Was Marguerite entrusted by her father with the French family bible? Perhaps the one Edwin's mother, Mary Eliza, bedridden and elderly, gave to her son Elmer to take to California, to defend her "snowbirding" brother A.O. French's right to a Civil War pension? Proving what the family all knew to be true, that he was who he said he was? The pension officials almost dis-regarded it, as it was missing the page with the publication date, but then decided to accept it as proof of identity anyway.
Edwin Williams' Puritan-influenced attitudes toward education would trump the Pennsylvania ones of Lizzie. The more education, the better. Unlike her older brothers, Marguerite did not do any college, but, at least had finished high school, which was four years more than the majority had done, seen by looking at 1940 Censuses. The eldest Ken, a Roaring 20s product, had two years of college, majoring in civil engineering at the Univ. of Idaho. His younger brothers would manage at least one year somewhere (not Idaho? as Lizzie junior had moved them to Spokane, Washington?). However, both the Depression and joining the military for WW II would take their toll, as Harold Owen Williams only did one year.
MARY ELIZA, MOTHER-IN-LAW. Edwin's mother, born Mary Eliza French, taking the surname of Overacker from the last man who left her widowed, grew up in the bottom row of Michigan counties. Mary Eliza's parents, Ransom French, who died young, at 50ish, and Rebecca Farley, his wife, together produced another daughter who was a teacher (Mary E.'s older sister Climena French) and a son who would fight in the Civil War, but did a year of college first (Mary E.'s older brother, A.O. French).
We don't know what Mary E. did school-wise, but the money meant to prepare for college or teacher's school had probably run out. She had only been 3 at her dad's death; her mother had a younger daughter who was sickly, plus several in their teen years. By the 1860 census, with Mary E. in her early teens, her brothers away from home (no room at relatives' houses?) and about to go off to the Civil War, it was clear that her mother had been reduced to living with different relatives, moving around, trying to get by.
After the littlest one, Olive, died, Rebecca and Mary went west, post-Civil War, following Mary's older sister Climena. Climena had taught and married in California, pre-Civil War, the timing produced a husband with better prospects for future happiness. Mary Eliza came of age post-Civil War, when few men were not war-damaged or "too old", but women married them anyway, as young women then were expected to do. Her first, editor of a Salinas newspaper, Melville Byerly, had seemed a good match, but was not healthy, so died. Things "went from bad to worse" thereafter. Finally, a widowed and re-married Mary Eliza returned from California to Michigan with California-born Edwin and his older brother. She must have wanted better for her own children than she had received. Her return made it possible for Edwin to meet junior Lizzie, who would have been unlikely to leave Michigan to meet him.
A CHAIN OF MOTHERS. The college attendance seen in junior Lizzie's sons had to be Edwin's doing, not Lizzie's? From appearances, it seems all siblings in Lizzie's family were expected to work as early as possible, forgoing a better education. If there was no HS where they lived, then there was no going to college, either, as finishing HS is a pre-requisite in most states. Perhaps Marguerite spent more time with Lizzie than with Edwin, explaining why she did not pick up the same values as had her brothers?
What to think, when looking back to Lizzie the junior (a woman bravely at home, alone with kids, while her spouse rotated across distant lumber camps), Lizzie the senior (brazenly fundamentalist), and the mysterious Susannah Krug Warren (a Mennonite who died too young to raise her daughter in the same faith)? Looking at the earliest and middle links in that chain down the path to Marguerite, some observers might say that Mennonites can be quite varied in tolerance of other faiths and quite varied in willingness to adopt other ideas. Lizzie the senior's father was not Mennonite (Archibald Warren), perhaps was indifferent, but, then, a fundamentalist church arrived in their township called Paradise, ready to proselytize, clearly intolerant of "other ways". Was a brand new religion a way for a child without her "real mother" to feel that she mattered? Senior Lizzie's two stepmothers, married by Archibald Warren, would have busy with the many children.
The first stepmother's death may have driven home the idea that loving mothers don't last, but your list of memorized bible lines will always be with you? Would the senior Lizzie have seen education as a threat to all the memorized lines? Junior Lizzie watched her sons become more educated than Marguerite, but also watched Marguerite become more educated than herself. All may have seemed well.
Young Lizzie's wedding showed signs of a different religious conversation than what senior Lizzie would have delivered. The groom, Edwin Williams, came out of Puritan beginnings, but once towns stopped subsidizing a town church, his people generally turned from undesignated Puritan to Presbyterian, when there was a choice, sometimes to Congregationalist, with some in the family clearly doing a U-turn and favoring Methodist-Episcopalian. Becoming a Baptist was rare and not lasting. A minister pronounced vows for Edwin and Lizzie, not a Justice of the Peace Religion mattered to them. Their minister was Congregationalist, but "not any old Congregationalist". He had been employed as a minister to a youth group of women. The ceremony took place, not in the county of the bride's parents, as often done, but in Lewiston, MI, where Lizzie had gone to work some years earlier. Was it easier for her new friends in town to attend than her old relatives from back home?
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MARRIAGE
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Nov. 30, 1899.
BRIDE: Lizzie W. Frank, domestic, age 19.
Father: Peter "J." Frank [should be G.]
Mother: Lizzie Warren.
Reported herself as born Saginaw, Mich. [Not the case. She did not remember her birthplace of Pennsylvania, too tiny when her family left; she would learn her true birthplace later. Was this a sign her parents were not at the wedding, that this was an elopement? Or, were her parents merely in another room?]
GROOM: Edwin N. Williams, laborer, age 21.
Born in California, to Louis Williams and Mary French.
Witnesses:
Elmer Byerly (Edwin's half-brother).
Eliza Craig (unknown).
Officiant: Stephen Vaughn, "Minister of the Gospel"
SOURCE: 1899 marriage record, handwritten, captured on microfilm. FamilySearch.org/ark:/61903/3:1:S3HT-67LS-PR9 (Corrected for spelling errors.)
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SIDE NOTES: Minister born England, 1862. Immigrated, 1882. Married in 1895 to Luella Coryell in Grand Rapids, Kent County, Mich. They led a young women's group inside their church, so he may have also been the bride's minister.
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THE MAIN STORY IS DONE--SIDE STORIES.
NAME PATTERNS. The families of Lizzie's parents often used surnames as middle names. Among the English-named Warrens, its use was occasional, not for every child.
On her father's side, they were more consistent. all children had their mother's surname as their middle name.
For Peter Frank's mother, born Apollonia Glanig, dialect caused K and G to mingle, making a sound half way between the two letters, so the listener sounding out a name might THINK they've heard either. Due to the sound mix-up of K and G at the front of Glanig, the German-speaking, Bavaria-born father of Lizzie junior, Peter G. Frank, might also be seen as Peter K. Frank. Overall, Glanig/Klanig was pronounced something like Klanisch, judging from a survivor's guess on Peter's death report.
Perhaps following the same pattern, Lizzie the junior used W. as a middle initial in her own name, as did many of her huge brood of siblings, except perhaps some of the younger ones. Our best guess is that, in all their cases, that W stood for Warren, the maiden name of their mother, the senior Elizabeth.
Again, Lizzie's marriage took place in Lewiston, Montmorency County, Michigan. A resort town now, it was, in her time, a place that offered work to the young offspring leaving the area's few farms, in an economy that instead depended more upon lumbering. Lizzie and Edwin both resided and worked in Lewiston pre-marriage. To show how common "working in town" was for the young adults, three other young people named Frank shared a house in that area in the 1900 Census. Maybe cousins to junior Lizzie, all were age 22 or younger--Herman, Bertha, and another Peter Frank, originally of Albert Twp., Montmorency County, Mich.. The three were children of German-born Jacob G. Frank of Elmer Twp., Oscoda County. That middle G makes us wonder if he might have been Peter G. Frank's brother, so Lizzie's uncle.
The potential cousins all used H. as THEIR middle initial, due to THEIR mother being a Holderman/Holdeman. (This name was probably originally spelled as Haldeman, judging from the varied spellings used by that family back in Lancaster County, Penn.)
Perhaps they were not first cousins? That Herman would marry Lizzie's sister Caroline/Carrie a year later (1901, April 4). The marriage of first cousins would raise eyebrows among many. Mennonite and Puritan groups discouraged it, yet it was seen more among them than, say, people raised Methodist-Episcopalian. Trying to marry someone of a similar age AND of exactly the same restrictive religious beliefs could lead to first cousins being the only people who fit the "sameness" idea.
Lizzie's own marriage record, as shown online, mis-listed her as Lizzie W. Franks, not Frank, and slightly mis-spelled the names of her parents. These small errors together made her records hard to find, her relationship to her sister Caroline and other siblings thus unclear. Her parents' list of children at Findagrave, therefore, omitted her until now (Oct., 2015, when we added her name).
Married at 19, she listed her occupation as "Domestic". That matched her granddaughter Nancy's memory that Lizzie had worked in a boarding house, perhaps meeting Edwin that way. Married at 21, he (Edwin) listed his occupation as laborer. That matched his grandchildren's knowledge that he had been, at first, a sawyer of wood and, later, a repairer of saws, traveling between different lumber camps.
Perhaps Lizzie's marriage was the first time someone asked her where she had been born? She instead gave the place she remembered as a young girl, Saginaw, Michigan. She then must have asked someone older in her family to help her give a better answer the next time. Thereafter, she cited Pennsylvania, matching the answer her parents gave for her in her first census, while still an infant. The census taker found her parents with their earliest children, living, temporarily, it seems, in Allegheny County, near Pittsburg, PA, away from the parents' original county of Lancaster, Penn. They were inching toward Oscoda County in Michigan slowly.
Once in Oscoda County, Michigan, her family of birth lived near Amish/Mennonite families, as they had done in Pennsylvania. (The fundamentalist church nearby in Penn., in Paradise Twp, deliberately moved in to Mennonite territory, to try to recruit among the Mennonites. It did not last through multiple generations, so closed later. Even if she went back to or never left the Menonnites, Lizzie's granddaughter Nancy believed that fundamentalists had succeeded in affecting her thinking, as the senior Elizabeth Warren Frank was still fundamentalist in practice.
Susanna Krug was not British, but Swiss-Germanic. She had a very clear Mennonite bloodline dating back to the well-documented Herrs. The Herrs had been very early Mennonites in their part of Penn., namely Lancaster County. If Susannah had lived, then the first Elizabeth Warren might have been raised Mennonite. As it was, she married a man, Peter Frank, himself from a "mixed" marriage, who, we hope, perhaps tempered things for Lizzie junior and the other children, made his wife's fundamentalism seem not so harsh
We assume they had relatives "back home" who remained "Anabaptist" (Mennonite, Moravian, Amish, Brethren). Earlier, her grandfather on her father Peter's side, John L. Frank, was buried in a Mennonite cemetery in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, as were several of his adult children (Margaret G. Frank, who married a Paes, and a Jacob G. Frank). However, her grandmother on Peter Frank's side, Apollonia S. Glanig Frank, was buried in a Roman Catholic cemetery in that same county. Would that Mennonite-Catholic union have been their era's version of a mixed marriage?
See Peter Frank's page for a partial list of his siblings.
Peter Frank may have enjoyed being in a large family as a child, as he had an even larger brood himself. Lizzie the junior always had someone to play with when growing up.
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In progress. Copyright by JBrown, Austin TX, 2105 & 2016. Last updated Mar & June 2016.
THE FRANKS. Her parents, the Franks, had always lived near Mennonites, back in Pennsylvania, so they found the same after moving to Oscoda County, Michigan. Their cemetery in Michigan was started by a Mennonite family, named Kittle (if the name was on the Germanic-speaking end of the Swiss, it may have been spelled Küttel back in "the old country").
A newly raised Mennonite Church in Oscoda County would burn. Why? No arsonist was named, but it was clearly arson. Groups that historians call "nativists" had become active, pushing to eliminate whomever they had been raised to fear, varying their attacks depending upon what group was present. One example was the revitalized KKK of the early 1920s, which went against foreign speakers, Catholics, the Jewish, not just African Americans. Some group had been posting flyers, saying not to vote for any Mennonites for township officers. The Mennonite farmers did not want to feel beaten, so promptly raised a new church. That church burning happened after she left home, but in her lifetime.
The Franks went northward inside Pennsylvania, close to Lake Erie, then, staying close to the Great Lakes, they went first to an old lumber town on Lake Huron (Saginaw, a lakeside place at Michigan's eastern edge). Saginaw was sufficiently large that her father and possibly an uncle could both find work and save money to buy farmland from the government, chosen out of the small pickings still offered at that point to pioneering "homesteaders". They thus moved both inland and upriver, to Oscada County, to farm amidst forests. Those who farmed in the summer could log in the winter, logs sent downriver to one of the surrounding Great Lakes (Lake Michigan on the other side of lower Michigan, with upper Mich. having access to Lake Superior). The long logs floated down river would then be sawn and shipped elsewhere, to build other people's houses and stores, from Chicago to NY and beyond, generally carried by railroad in Lizzie's era.
LIZZIE. When tiny, the child her parents called "Elisabeth" (with an s, not a z, to make a a prettier sound) was unaware they had moved to Michigan from Penn. In their new place in her era, when might a daughter be so grown she could be counted as an adult? When she finished her education.
When did that happen for her? We know from Censuses that she only finished the seventh grade. Perhaps the local school only went that far, no farther? If her parents had been allowed to only go through sixth grade in Penn., they would have thought the Michigan schools offering Gr. 7 was a major advantage.
She moved a county away from her parents' home. She worked as a housekeeping maid, probably in a hotel or boarding house that served migratory lumber workers, hopefully under the close watch of a house matron or a church minister, hopefully able to befriend other working females like herself.
She would become a woman who could take care of herself.
Decades later, on record traveling into Canada without her husband, she took her three youngest children to visit their migrating father, Edwin, who traveled between lumber camps, sharpening the big saws to proper standards, etc.
She had had many, many siblings. The elder ones moving out early always left more room for the youngest. Would those staying behind naturally be more spoiled, as a result? Their very eldest brother had apparently been left back in Pennsylvania, or returned there, perhaps was counted as an adult while she was still a baby. Would she have counted him as least spoiled?
AN AMERICAN MIX OF RELIGIONS. Lizzie's maternal grandmother, Susannah Krug, was raised in the Mennonite religion back in the Swiss-German part of Pennsylvania. Susannah crossed religious and ethnic lines to marry a British-descended man from the nearby township of Paradise, possibly raised Episcopalian (Archibald Warren). Lizzie's German-speaking father, Peter Frank, had been brought with siblings to America by his parents, all Bavaria-born, reared by a German Catholic mother with a beautiful first name. That was Apollonia Glanig (also spelled Klanig/Klanish, etc.); she married Herr Johannes Frank "over there", who became Mr. John Frank here.) Several of her children and her spouse would be buried in Mennonite cemeteries, while Apollonia is buried in the old St. Joseph cemetery outside her Catholic church. Their children had separated them when elderly; she, living with daughter Margaret; he, with a son. The Census had no category for Separated, so when asked for marital status, she picked "Widowed" from the census list as fitting his not being with her, while he picked "Married", as he wished somebody would take them both. Social Security and pensions, so the extremely elderly lived with adult children and did their best to help out.
HER CHILDREN. What about this Lizzie? She was Apollonia's granddaughter, but instead is known to modern family members as a grandmother to their grandmothers, for example, to the Nancy Williams who had married Tom Norman. She had her own family with children; she was a junior Elizabeth, middle name Warren, while her mother was the senior Elizabeth, but with Warren as her maiden name. You have to check the husband or children to make sure you have the right one Elizabeth Warren Frank. A daughter Lauren had died very young, while they lived in an isolated, mountainous place (out in Idaho?) where getting help was hard.
There would be a big age gap between Lauren's older brother, Kenneth Ward Williams, who remembered Lauren's death, and Ken's two younger brothers, Harold Owen and Donald Edwin Williams, who perhaps would remember little or nothing about her death. Ken turned adult while they were still children, had a better experience of the Roaring Twenties before entering the Great Depression, whereas their youth mainly overlapped the Depression. Their different eras and birth order produced different people.
On his death bed, when asked what he would have changed, Lizzie's son Ken had said he would not have been so judgmental, quite an insight. Different listeners would have experienced different kinds of judging from him, but this apology was meant for all of them. One judging that can be discussed was Ken's not wanting his brother Harold to be so active in unions.
THE BABY. In addition to those surviving boys, there was one more, a "tail-end baby", perhaps "a surprise", little Marguerite, now the only girl in a family of older boys. Are such children sometimes allowed to self-indulge too much, the parents "too worn out" from rearing the older children to do much correcting or too fearful of repeating past mistakes, so they under-correct?
We might think this when we contrast Marguerite's many marriages and serious partying to the other ways her life could have gone. The 1940 Census showed her 16 and married, her first husband, Russell Parker, a seemingly good guy, but also "too young", working in a bakery. They lived with her parents, as they could not afford to live apart? Sociologists tell us that maybe 80% of the "too young" marriages end with at least one person very unhappy. There would be other husbands for Marguerite, but not all would be nice to her prior children. One was shockingly not nice, yet she stayed with him anyway. Knowing this, why did junior Lizzie not invite Marguerite back, with her kids, into the family home? Was everyone too fearful of that spouse?
Marguerite finally had a good husband at the end, one who "lasted". He liked doing his family history, so Marguerite then did her family's future genealogists a big favor by writing up dates, names and places, for both Edwin's parents and his mother's parents. That was back in the 1980s. She gave the list to a Jenny LaMore who put the info on the web before she died, in the 2000s, wonderful of her to do that for us, even though she died before we could thank her. Where did the names and dates come from?
Was Marguerite entrusted by her father with the French family bible? Perhaps the one Edwin's mother, Mary Eliza, bedridden and elderly, gave to her son Elmer to take to California, to defend her "snowbirding" brother A.O. French's right to a Civil War pension? Proving what the family all knew to be true, that he was who he said he was? The pension officials almost dis-regarded it, as it was missing the page with the publication date, but then decided to accept it as proof of identity anyway.
Edwin Williams' Puritan-influenced attitudes toward education would trump the Pennsylvania ones of Lizzie. The more education, the better. Unlike her older brothers, Marguerite did not do any college, but, at least had finished high school, which was four years more than the majority had done, seen by looking at 1940 Censuses. The eldest Ken, a Roaring 20s product, had two years of college, majoring in civil engineering at the Univ. of Idaho. His younger brothers would manage at least one year somewhere (not Idaho? as Lizzie junior had moved them to Spokane, Washington?). However, both the Depression and joining the military for WW II would take their toll, as Harold Owen Williams only did one year.
MARY ELIZA, MOTHER-IN-LAW. Edwin's mother, born Mary Eliza French, taking the surname of Overacker from the last man who left her widowed, grew up in the bottom row of Michigan counties. Mary Eliza's parents, Ransom French, who died young, at 50ish, and Rebecca Farley, his wife, together produced another daughter who was a teacher (Mary E.'s older sister Climena French) and a son who would fight in the Civil War, but did a year of college first (Mary E.'s older brother, A.O. French).
We don't know what Mary E. did school-wise, but the money meant to prepare for college or teacher's school had probably run out. She had only been 3 at her dad's death; her mother had a younger daughter who was sickly, plus several in their teen years. By the 1860 census, with Mary E. in her early teens, her brothers away from home (no room at relatives' houses?) and about to go off to the Civil War, it was clear that her mother had been reduced to living with different relatives, moving around, trying to get by.
After the littlest one, Olive, died, Rebecca and Mary went west, post-Civil War, following Mary's older sister Climena. Climena had taught and married in California, pre-Civil War, the timing produced a husband with better prospects for future happiness. Mary Eliza came of age post-Civil War, when few men were not war-damaged or "too old", but women married them anyway, as young women then were expected to do. Her first, editor of a Salinas newspaper, Melville Byerly, had seemed a good match, but was not healthy, so died. Things "went from bad to worse" thereafter. Finally, a widowed and re-married Mary Eliza returned from California to Michigan with California-born Edwin and his older brother. She must have wanted better for her own children than she had received. Her return made it possible for Edwin to meet junior Lizzie, who would have been unlikely to leave Michigan to meet him.
A CHAIN OF MOTHERS. The college attendance seen in junior Lizzie's sons had to be Edwin's doing, not Lizzie's? From appearances, it seems all siblings in Lizzie's family were expected to work as early as possible, forgoing a better education. If there was no HS where they lived, then there was no going to college, either, as finishing HS is a pre-requisite in most states. Perhaps Marguerite spent more time with Lizzie than with Edwin, explaining why she did not pick up the same values as had her brothers?
What to think, when looking back to Lizzie the junior (a woman bravely at home, alone with kids, while her spouse rotated across distant lumber camps), Lizzie the senior (brazenly fundamentalist), and the mysterious Susannah Krug Warren (a Mennonite who died too young to raise her daughter in the same faith)? Looking at the earliest and middle links in that chain down the path to Marguerite, some observers might say that Mennonites can be quite varied in tolerance of other faiths and quite varied in willingness to adopt other ideas. Lizzie the senior's father was not Mennonite (Archibald Warren), perhaps was indifferent, but, then, a fundamentalist church arrived in their township called Paradise, ready to proselytize, clearly intolerant of "other ways". Was a brand new religion a way for a child without her "real mother" to feel that she mattered? Senior Lizzie's two stepmothers, married by Archibald Warren, would have busy with the many children.
The first stepmother's death may have driven home the idea that loving mothers don't last, but your list of memorized bible lines will always be with you? Would the senior Lizzie have seen education as a threat to all the memorized lines? Junior Lizzie watched her sons become more educated than Marguerite, but also watched Marguerite become more educated than herself. All may have seemed well.
Young Lizzie's wedding showed signs of a different religious conversation than what senior Lizzie would have delivered. The groom, Edwin Williams, came out of Puritan beginnings, but once towns stopped subsidizing a town church, his people generally turned from undesignated Puritan to Presbyterian, when there was a choice, sometimes to Congregationalist, with some in the family clearly doing a U-turn and favoring Methodist-Episcopalian. Becoming a Baptist was rare and not lasting. A minister pronounced vows for Edwin and Lizzie, not a Justice of the Peace Religion mattered to them. Their minister was Congregationalist, but "not any old Congregationalist". He had been employed as a minister to a youth group of women. The ceremony took place, not in the county of the bride's parents, as often done, but in Lewiston, MI, where Lizzie had gone to work some years earlier. Was it easier for her new friends in town to attend than her old relatives from back home?
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MARRIAGE
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Nov. 30, 1899.
BRIDE: Lizzie W. Frank, domestic, age 19.
Father: Peter "J." Frank [should be G.]
Mother: Lizzie Warren.
Reported herself as born Saginaw, Mich. [Not the case. She did not remember her birthplace of Pennsylvania, too tiny when her family left; she would learn her true birthplace later. Was this a sign her parents were not at the wedding, that this was an elopement? Or, were her parents merely in another room?]
GROOM: Edwin N. Williams, laborer, age 21.
Born in California, to Louis Williams and Mary French.
Witnesses:
Elmer Byerly (Edwin's half-brother).
Eliza Craig (unknown).
Officiant: Stephen Vaughn, "Minister of the Gospel"
SOURCE: 1899 marriage record, handwritten, captured on microfilm. FamilySearch.org/ark:/61903/3:1:S3HT-67LS-PR9 (Corrected for spelling errors.)
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SIDE NOTES: Minister born England, 1862. Immigrated, 1882. Married in 1895 to Luella Coryell in Grand Rapids, Kent County, Mich. They led a young women's group inside their church, so he may have also been the bride's minister.
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THE MAIN STORY IS DONE--SIDE STORIES.
NAME PATTERNS. The families of Lizzie's parents often used surnames as middle names. Among the English-named Warrens, its use was occasional, not for every child.
On her father's side, they were more consistent. all children had their mother's surname as their middle name.
For Peter Frank's mother, born Apollonia Glanig, dialect caused K and G to mingle, making a sound half way between the two letters, so the listener sounding out a name might THINK they've heard either. Due to the sound mix-up of K and G at the front of Glanig, the German-speaking, Bavaria-born father of Lizzie junior, Peter G. Frank, might also be seen as Peter K. Frank. Overall, Glanig/Klanig was pronounced something like Klanisch, judging from a survivor's guess on Peter's death report.
Perhaps following the same pattern, Lizzie the junior used W. as a middle initial in her own name, as did many of her huge brood of siblings, except perhaps some of the younger ones. Our best guess is that, in all their cases, that W stood for Warren, the maiden name of their mother, the senior Elizabeth.
Again, Lizzie's marriage took place in Lewiston, Montmorency County, Michigan. A resort town now, it was, in her time, a place that offered work to the young offspring leaving the area's few farms, in an economy that instead depended more upon lumbering. Lizzie and Edwin both resided and worked in Lewiston pre-marriage. To show how common "working in town" was for the young adults, three other young people named Frank shared a house in that area in the 1900 Census. Maybe cousins to junior Lizzie, all were age 22 or younger--Herman, Bertha, and another Peter Frank, originally of Albert Twp., Montmorency County, Mich.. The three were children of German-born Jacob G. Frank of Elmer Twp., Oscoda County. That middle G makes us wonder if he might have been Peter G. Frank's brother, so Lizzie's uncle.
The potential cousins all used H. as THEIR middle initial, due to THEIR mother being a Holderman/Holdeman. (This name was probably originally spelled as Haldeman, judging from the varied spellings used by that family back in Lancaster County, Penn.)
Perhaps they were not first cousins? That Herman would marry Lizzie's sister Caroline/Carrie a year later (1901, April 4). The marriage of first cousins would raise eyebrows among many. Mennonite and Puritan groups discouraged it, yet it was seen more among them than, say, people raised Methodist-Episcopalian. Trying to marry someone of a similar age AND of exactly the same restrictive religious beliefs could lead to first cousins being the only people who fit the "sameness" idea.
Lizzie's own marriage record, as shown online, mis-listed her as Lizzie W. Franks, not Frank, and slightly mis-spelled the names of her parents. These small errors together made her records hard to find, her relationship to her sister Caroline and other siblings thus unclear. Her parents' list of children at Findagrave, therefore, omitted her until now (Oct., 2015, when we added her name).
Married at 19, she listed her occupation as "Domestic". That matched her granddaughter Nancy's memory that Lizzie had worked in a boarding house, perhaps meeting Edwin that way. Married at 21, he (Edwin) listed his occupation as laborer. That matched his grandchildren's knowledge that he had been, at first, a sawyer of wood and, later, a repairer of saws, traveling between different lumber camps.
Perhaps Lizzie's marriage was the first time someone asked her where she had been born? She instead gave the place she remembered as a young girl, Saginaw, Michigan. She then must have asked someone older in her family to help her give a better answer the next time. Thereafter, she cited Pennsylvania, matching the answer her parents gave for her in her first census, while still an infant. The census taker found her parents with their earliest children, living, temporarily, it seems, in Allegheny County, near Pittsburg, PA, away from the parents' original county of Lancaster, Penn. They were inching toward Oscoda County in Michigan slowly.
Once in Oscoda County, Michigan, her family of birth lived near Amish/Mennonite families, as they had done in Pennsylvania. (The fundamentalist church nearby in Penn., in Paradise Twp, deliberately moved in to Mennonite territory, to try to recruit among the Mennonites. It did not last through multiple generations, so closed later. Even if she went back to or never left the Menonnites, Lizzie's granddaughter Nancy believed that fundamentalists had succeeded in affecting her thinking, as the senior Elizabeth Warren Frank was still fundamentalist in practice.
Susanna Krug was not British, but Swiss-Germanic. She had a very clear Mennonite bloodline dating back to the well-documented Herrs. The Herrs had been very early Mennonites in their part of Penn., namely Lancaster County. If Susannah had lived, then the first Elizabeth Warren might have been raised Mennonite. As it was, she married a man, Peter Frank, himself from a "mixed" marriage, who, we hope, perhaps tempered things for Lizzie junior and the other children, made his wife's fundamentalism seem not so harsh
We assume they had relatives "back home" who remained "Anabaptist" (Mennonite, Moravian, Amish, Brethren). Earlier, her grandfather on her father Peter's side, John L. Frank, was buried in a Mennonite cemetery in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, as were several of his adult children (Margaret G. Frank, who married a Paes, and a Jacob G. Frank). However, her grandmother on Peter Frank's side, Apollonia S. Glanig Frank, was buried in a Roman Catholic cemetery in that same county. Would that Mennonite-Catholic union have been their era's version of a mixed marriage?
See Peter Frank's page for a partial list of his siblings.
Peter Frank may have enjoyed being in a large family as a child, as he had an even larger brood himself. Lizzie the junior always had someone to play with when growing up.
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In progress. Copyright by JBrown, Austin TX, 2105 & 2016. Last updated Mar & June 2016.
Very Rough. In progress...
THE FRANKS. Her parents, the Franks, had always lived near Mennonites, back in Pennsylvania, so they found the same after moving to Oscoda County, Michigan. Their cemetery in Michigan was started by a Mennonite family, named Kittle (if the name was on the Germanic-speaking end of the Swiss, it may have been spelled Küttel back in "the old country").
A newly raised Mennonite Church in Oscoda County would burn. Why? No arsonist was named, but it was clearly arson. Groups that historians call "nativists" had become active, pushing to eliminate whomever they had been raised to fear, varying their attacks depending upon what group was present. One example was the revitalized KKK of the early 1920s, which went against foreign speakers, Catholics, the Jewish, not just African Americans. Some group had been posting flyers, saying not to vote for any Mennonites for township officers. The Mennonite farmers did not want to feel beaten, so promptly raised a new church. That church burning happened after she left home, but in her lifetime.
The Franks went northward inside Pennsylvania, close to Lake Erie, then, staying close to the Great Lakes, they went first to an old lumber town on Lake Huron (Saginaw, a lakeside place at Michigan's eastern edge). Saginaw was sufficiently large that her father and possibly an uncle could both find work and save money to buy farmland from the government, chosen out of the small pickings still offered at that point to pioneering "homesteaders". They thus moved both inland and upriver, to Oscada County, to farm amidst forests. Those who farmed in the summer could log in the winter, logs sent downriver to one of the surrounding Great Lakes (Lake Michigan on the other side of lower Michigan, with upper Mich. having access to Lake Superior). The long logs floated down river would then be sawn and shipped elsewhere, to build other people's houses and stores, from Chicago to NY and beyond, generally carried by railroad in Lizzie's era.
LIZZIE. When tiny, the child her parents called "Elisabeth" (with an s, not a z, to make a a prettier sound) was unaware they had moved to Michigan from Penn. In their new place in her era, when might a daughter be so grown she could be counted as an adult? When she finished her education.
When did that happen for her? We know from Censuses that she only finished the seventh grade. Perhaps the local school only went that far, no farther? If her parents had been allowed to only go through sixth grade in Penn., they would have thought the Michigan schools offering Gr. 7 was a major advantage.
She moved a county away from her parents' home. She worked as a housekeeping maid, probably in a hotel or boarding house that served migratory lumber workers, hopefully under the close watch of a house matron or a church minister, hopefully able to befriend other working females like herself.
She would become a woman who could take care of herself.
Decades later, on record traveling into Canada without her husband, she took her three youngest children to visit their migrating father, Edwin, who traveled between lumber camps, sharpening the big saws to proper standards, etc.
She had had many, many siblings. The elder ones moving out early always left more room for the youngest. Would those staying behind naturally be more spoiled, as a result? Their very eldest brother had apparently been left back in Pennsylvania, or returned there, perhaps was counted as an adult while she was still a baby. Would she have counted him as least spoiled?
AN AMERICAN MIX OF RELIGIONS. Lizzie's maternal grandmother, Susannah Krug, was raised in the Mennonite religion back in the Swiss-German part of Pennsylvania. Susannah crossed religious and ethnic lines to marry a British-descended man from the nearby township of Paradise, possibly raised Episcopalian (Archibald Warren). Lizzie's German-speaking father, Peter Frank, had been brought with siblings to America by his parents, all Bavaria-born, reared by a German Catholic mother with a beautiful first name. That was Apollonia Glanig (also spelled Klanig/Klanish, etc.); she married Herr Johannes Frank "over there", who became Mr. John Frank here.) Several of her children and her spouse would be buried in Mennonite cemeteries, while Apollonia is buried in the old St. Joseph cemetery outside her Catholic church. Their children had separated them when elderly; she, living with daughter Margaret; he, with a son. The Census had no category for Separated, so when asked for marital status, she picked "Widowed" from the census list as fitting his not being with her, while he picked "Married", as he wished somebody would take them both. Social Security and pensions, so the extremely elderly lived with adult children and did their best to help out.
HER CHILDREN. What about this Lizzie? She was Apollonia's granddaughter, but instead is known to modern family members as a grandmother to their grandmothers, for example, to the Nancy Williams who had married Tom Norman. She had her own family with children; she was a junior Elizabeth, middle name Warren, while her mother was the senior Elizabeth, but with Warren as her maiden name. You have to check the husband or children to make sure you have the right one Elizabeth Warren Frank. A daughter Lauren had died very young, while they lived in an isolated, mountainous place (out in Idaho?) where getting help was hard.
There would be a big age gap between Lauren's older brother, Kenneth Ward Williams, who remembered Lauren's death, and Ken's two younger brothers, Harold Owen and Donald Edwin Williams, who perhaps would remember little or nothing about her death. Ken turned adult while they were still children, had a better experience of the Roaring Twenties before entering the Great Depression, whereas their youth mainly overlapped the Depression. Their different eras and birth order produced different people.
On his death bed, when asked what he would have changed, Lizzie's son Ken had said he would not have been so judgmental, quite an insight. Different listeners would have experienced different kinds of judging from him, but this apology was meant for all of them. One judging that can be discussed was Ken's not wanting his brother Harold to be so active in unions.
THE BABY. In addition to those surviving boys, there was one more, a "tail-end baby", perhaps "a surprise", little Marguerite, now the only girl in a family of older boys. Are such children sometimes allowed to self-indulge too much, the parents "too worn out" from rearing the older children to do much correcting or too fearful of repeating past mistakes, so they under-correct?
We might think this when we contrast Marguerite's many marriages and serious partying to the other ways her life could have gone. The 1940 Census showed her 16 and married, her first husband, Russell Parker, a seemingly good guy, but also "too young", working in a bakery. They lived with her parents, as they could not afford to live apart? Sociologists tell us that maybe 80% of the "too young" marriages end with at least one person very unhappy. There would be other husbands for Marguerite, but not all would be nice to her prior children. One was shockingly not nice, yet she stayed with him anyway. Knowing this, why did junior Lizzie not invite Marguerite back, with her kids, into the family home? Was everyone too fearful of that spouse?
Marguerite finally had a good husband at the end, one who "lasted". He liked doing his family history, so Marguerite then did her family's future genealogists a big favor by writing up dates, names and places, for both Edwin's parents and his mother's parents. That was back in the 1980s. She gave the list to a Jenny LaMore who put the info on the web before she died, in the 2000s, wonderful of her to do that for us, even though she died before we could thank her. Where did the names and dates come from?
Was Marguerite entrusted by her father with the French family bible? Perhaps the one Edwin's mother, Mary Eliza, bedridden and elderly, gave to her son Elmer to take to California, to defend her "snowbirding" brother A.O. French's right to a Civil War pension? Proving what the family all knew to be true, that he was who he said he was? The pension officials almost dis-regarded it, as it was missing the page with the publication date, but then decided to accept it as proof of identity anyway.
Edwin Williams' Puritan-influenced attitudes toward education would trump the Pennsylvania ones of Lizzie. The more education, the better. Unlike her older brothers, Marguerite did not do any college, but, at least had finished high school, which was four years more than the majority had done, seen by looking at 1940 Censuses. The eldest Ken, a Roaring 20s product, had two years of college, majoring in civil engineering at the Univ. of Idaho. His younger brothers would manage at least one year somewhere (not Idaho? as Lizzie junior had moved them to Spokane, Washington?). However, both the Depression and joining the military for WW II would take their toll, as Harold Owen Williams only did one year.
MARY ELIZA, MOTHER-IN-LAW. Edwin's mother, born Mary Eliza French, taking the surname of Overacker from the last man who left her widowed, grew up in the bottom row of Michigan counties. Mary Eliza's parents, Ransom French, who died young, at 50ish, and Rebecca Farley, his wife, together produced another daughter who was a teacher (Mary E.'s older sister Climena French) and a son who would fight in the Civil War, but did a year of college first (Mary E.'s older brother, A.O. French).
We don't know what Mary E. did school-wise, but the money meant to prepare for college or teacher's school had probably run out. She had only been 3 at her dad's death; her mother had a younger daughter who was sickly, plus several in their teen years. By the 1860 census, with Mary E. in her early teens, her brothers away from home (no room at relatives' houses?) and about to go off to the Civil War, it was clear that her mother had been reduced to living with different relatives, moving around, trying to get by.
After the littlest one, Olive, died, Rebecca and Mary went west, post-Civil War, following Mary's older sister Climena. Climena had taught and married in California, pre-Civil War, the timing produced a husband with better prospects for future happiness. Mary Eliza came of age post-Civil War, when few men were not war-damaged or "too old", but women married them anyway, as young women then were expected to do. Her first, editor of a Salinas newspaper, Melville Byerly, had seemed a good match, but was not healthy, so died. Things "went from bad to worse" thereafter. Finally, a widowed and re-married Mary Eliza returned from California to Michigan with California-born Edwin and his older brother. She must have wanted better for her own children than she had received. Her return made it possible for Edwin to meet junior Lizzie, who would have been unlikely to leave Michigan to meet him.
A CHAIN OF MOTHERS. The college attendance seen in junior Lizzie's sons had to be Edwin's doing, not Lizzie's? From appearances, it seems all siblings in Lizzie's family were expected to work as early as possible, forgoing a better education. If there was no HS where they lived, then there was no going to college, either, as finishing HS is a pre-requisite in most states. Perhaps Marguerite spent more time with Lizzie than with Edwin, explaining why she did not pick up the same values as had her brothers?
What to think, when looking back to Lizzie the junior (a woman bravely at home, alone with kids, while her spouse rotated across distant lumber camps), Lizzie the senior (brazenly fundamentalist), and the mysterious Susannah Krug Warren (a Mennonite who died too young to raise her daughter in the same faith)? Looking at the earliest and middle links in that chain down the path to Marguerite, some observers might say that Mennonites can be quite varied in tolerance of other faiths and quite varied in willingness to adopt other ideas. Lizzie the senior's father was not Mennonite (Archibald Warren), perhaps was indifferent, but, then, a fundamentalist church arrived in their township called Paradise, ready to proselytize, clearly intolerant of "other ways". Was a brand new religion a way for a child without her "real mother" to feel that she mattered? Senior Lizzie's two stepmothers, married by Archibald Warren, would have busy with the many children.
The first stepmother's death may have driven home the idea that loving mothers don't last, but your list of memorized bible lines will always be with you? Would the senior Lizzie have seen education as a threat to all the memorized lines? Junior Lizzie watched her sons become more educated than Marguerite, but also watched Marguerite become more educated than herself. All may have seemed well.
Young Lizzie's wedding showed signs of a different religious conversation than what senior Lizzie would have delivered. The groom, Edwin Williams, came out of Puritan beginnings, but once towns stopped subsidizing a town church, his people generally turned from undesignated Puritan to Presbyterian, when there was a choice, sometimes to Congregationalist, with some in the family clearly doing a U-turn and favoring Methodist-Episcopalian. Becoming a Baptist was rare and not lasting. A minister pronounced vows for Edwin and Lizzie, not a Justice of the Peace Religion mattered to them. Their minister was Congregationalist, but "not any old Congregationalist". He had been employed as a minister to a youth group of women. The ceremony took place, not in the county of the bride's parents, as often done, but in Lewiston, MI, where Lizzie had gone to work some years earlier. Was it easier for her new friends in town to attend than her old relatives from back home?
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MARRIAGE
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Nov. 30, 1899.
BRIDE: Lizzie W. Frank, domestic, age 19.
Father: Peter "J." Frank [should be G.]
Mother: Lizzie Warren.
Reported herself as born Saginaw, Mich. [Not the case. She did not remember her birthplace of Pennsylvania, too tiny when her family left; she would learn her true birthplace later. Was this a sign her parents were not at the wedding, that this was an elopement? Or, were her parents merely in another room?]
GROOM: Edwin N. Williams, laborer, age 21.
Born in California, to Louis Williams and Mary French.
Witnesses:
Elmer Byerly (Edwin's half-brother).
Eliza Craig (unknown).
Officiant: Stephen Vaughn, "Minister of the Gospel"
SOURCE: 1899 marriage record, handwritten, captured on microfilm. FamilySearch.org/ark:/61903/3:1:S3HT-67LS-PR9 (Corrected for spelling errors.)
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SIDE NOTES: Minister born England, 1862. Immigrated, 1882. Married in 1895 to Luella Coryell in Grand Rapids, Kent County, Mich. They led a young women's group inside their church, so he may have also been the bride's minister.
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THE MAIN STORY IS DONE--SIDE STORIES.
NAME PATTERNS. The families of Lizzie's parents often used surnames as middle names. Among the English-named Warrens, its use was occasional, not for every child.
On her father's side, they were more consistent. all children had their mother's surname as their middle name.
For Peter Frank's mother, born Apollonia Glanig, dialect caused K and G to mingle, making a sound half way between the two letters, so the listener sounding out a name might THINK they've heard either. Due to the sound mix-up of K and G at the front of Glanig, the German-speaking, Bavaria-born father of Lizzie junior, Peter G. Frank, might also be seen as Peter K. Frank. Overall, Glanig/Klanig was pronounced something like Klanisch, judging from a survivor's guess on Peter's death report.
Perhaps following the same pattern, Lizzie the junior used W. as a middle initial in her own name, as did many of her huge brood of siblings, except perhaps some of the younger ones. Our best guess is that, in all their cases, that W stood for Warren, the maiden name of their mother, the senior Elizabeth.
Again, Lizzie's marriage took place in Lewiston, Montmorency County, Michigan. A resort town now, it was, in her time, a place that offered work to the young offspring leaving the area's few farms, in an economy that instead depended more upon lumbering. Lizzie and Edwin both resided and worked in Lewiston pre-marriage. To show how common "working in town" was for the young adults, three other young people named Frank shared a house in that area in the 1900 Census. Maybe cousins to junior Lizzie, all were age 22 or younger--Herman, Bertha, and another Peter Frank, originally of Albert Twp., Montmorency County, Mich.. The three were children of German-born Jacob G. Frank of Elmer Twp., Oscoda County. That middle G makes us wonder if he might have been Peter G. Frank's brother, so Lizzie's uncle.
The potential cousins all used H. as THEIR middle initial, due to THEIR mother being a Holderman/Holdeman. (This name was probably originally spelled as Haldeman, judging from the varied spellings used by that family back in Lancaster County, Penn.)
Perhaps they were not first cousins? That Herman would marry Lizzie's sister Caroline/Carrie a year later (1901, April 4). The marriage of first cousins would raise eyebrows among many. Mennonite and Puritan groups discouraged it, yet it was seen more among them than, say, people raised Methodist-Episcopalian. Trying to marry someone of a similar age AND of exactly the same restrictive religious beliefs could lead to first cousins being the only people who fit the "sameness" idea.
Lizzie's own marriage record, as shown online, mis-listed her as Lizzie W. Franks, not Frank, and slightly mis-spelled the names of her parents. These small errors together made her records hard to find, her relationship to her sister Caroline and other siblings thus unclear. Her parents' list of children at Findagrave, therefore, omitted her until now (Oct., 2015, when we added her name).
Married at 19, she listed her occupation as "Domestic". That matched her granddaughter Nancy's memory that Lizzie had worked in a boarding house, perhaps meeting Edwin that way. Married at 21, he (Edwin) listed his occupation as laborer. That matched his grandchildren's knowledge that he had been, at first, a sawyer of wood and, later, a repairer of saws, traveling between different lumber camps.
Perhaps Lizzie's marriage was the first time someone asked her where she had been born? She instead gave the place she remembered as a young girl, Saginaw, Michigan. She then must have asked someone older in her family to help her give a better answer the next time. Thereafter, she cited Pennsylvania, matching the answer her parents gave for her in her first census, while still an infant. The census taker found her parents with their earliest children, living, temporarily, it seems, in Allegheny County, near Pittsburg, PA, away from the parents' original county of Lancaster, Penn. They were inching toward Oscoda County in Michigan slowly.
Once in Oscoda County, Michigan, her family of birth lived near Amish/Mennonite families, as they had done in Pennsylvania. (The fundamentalist church nearby in Penn., in Paradise Twp, deliberately moved in to Mennonite territory, to try to recruit among the Mennonites. It did not last through multiple generations, so closed later. Even if she went back to or never left the Menonnites, Lizzie's granddaughter Nancy believed that fundamentalists had succeeded in affecting her thinking, as the senior Elizabeth Warren Frank was still fundamentalist in practice.
Susanna Krug was not British, but Swiss-Germanic. She had a very clear Mennonite bloodline dating back to the well-documented Herrs. The Herrs had been very early Mennonites in their part of Penn., namely Lancaster County. If Susannah had lived, then the first Elizabeth Warren might have been raised Mennonite. As it was, she married a man, Peter Frank, himself from a "mixed" marriage, who, we hope, perhaps tempered things for Lizzie junior and the other children, made his wife's fundamentalism seem not so harsh
We assume they had relatives "back home" who remained "Anabaptist" (Mennonite, Moravian, Amish, Brethren). Earlier, her grandfather on her father Peter's side, John L. Frank, was buried in a Mennonite cemetery in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, as were several of his adult children (Margaret G. Frank, who married a Paes, and a Jacob G. Frank). However, her grandmother on Peter Frank's side, Apollonia S. Glanig Frank, was buried in a Roman Catholic cemetery in that same county. Would that Mennonite-Catholic union have been their era's version of a mixed marriage?
See Peter Frank's page for a partial list of his siblings.
Peter Frank may have enjoyed being in a large family as a child, as he had an even larger brood himself. Lizzie the junior always had someone to play with when growing up.
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In progress. Copyright by JBrown, Austin TX, 2105 & 2016. Last updated Mar & June 2016.
THE FRANKS. Her parents, the Franks, had always lived near Mennonites, back in Pennsylvania, so they found the same after moving to Oscoda County, Michigan. Their cemetery in Michigan was started by a Mennonite family, named Kittle (if the name was on the Germanic-speaking end of the Swiss, it may have been spelled Küttel back in "the old country").
A newly raised Mennonite Church in Oscoda County would burn. Why? No arsonist was named, but it was clearly arson. Groups that historians call "nativists" had become active, pushing to eliminate whomever they had been raised to fear, varying their attacks depending upon what group was present. One example was the revitalized KKK of the early 1920s, which went against foreign speakers, Catholics, the Jewish, not just African Americans. Some group had been posting flyers, saying not to vote for any Mennonites for township officers. The Mennonite farmers did not want to feel beaten, so promptly raised a new church. That church burning happened after she left home, but in her lifetime.
The Franks went northward inside Pennsylvania, close to Lake Erie, then, staying close to the Great Lakes, they went first to an old lumber town on Lake Huron (Saginaw, a lakeside place at Michigan's eastern edge). Saginaw was sufficiently large that her father and possibly an uncle could both find work and save money to buy farmland from the government, chosen out of the small pickings still offered at that point to pioneering "homesteaders". They thus moved both inland and upriver, to Oscada County, to farm amidst forests. Those who farmed in the summer could log in the winter, logs sent downriver to one of the surrounding Great Lakes (Lake Michigan on the other side of lower Michigan, with upper Mich. having access to Lake Superior). The long logs floated down river would then be sawn and shipped elsewhere, to build other people's houses and stores, from Chicago to NY and beyond, generally carried by railroad in Lizzie's era.
LIZZIE. When tiny, the child her parents called "Elisabeth" (with an s, not a z, to make a a prettier sound) was unaware they had moved to Michigan from Penn. In their new place in her era, when might a daughter be so grown she could be counted as an adult? When she finished her education.
When did that happen for her? We know from Censuses that she only finished the seventh grade. Perhaps the local school only went that far, no farther? If her parents had been allowed to only go through sixth grade in Penn., they would have thought the Michigan schools offering Gr. 7 was a major advantage.
She moved a county away from her parents' home. She worked as a housekeeping maid, probably in a hotel or boarding house that served migratory lumber workers, hopefully under the close watch of a house matron or a church minister, hopefully able to befriend other working females like herself.
She would become a woman who could take care of herself.
Decades later, on record traveling into Canada without her husband, she took her three youngest children to visit their migrating father, Edwin, who traveled between lumber camps, sharpening the big saws to proper standards, etc.
She had had many, many siblings. The elder ones moving out early always left more room for the youngest. Would those staying behind naturally be more spoiled, as a result? Their very eldest brother had apparently been left back in Pennsylvania, or returned there, perhaps was counted as an adult while she was still a baby. Would she have counted him as least spoiled?
AN AMERICAN MIX OF RELIGIONS. Lizzie's maternal grandmother, Susannah Krug, was raised in the Mennonite religion back in the Swiss-German part of Pennsylvania. Susannah crossed religious and ethnic lines to marry a British-descended man from the nearby township of Paradise, possibly raised Episcopalian (Archibald Warren). Lizzie's German-speaking father, Peter Frank, had been brought with siblings to America by his parents, all Bavaria-born, reared by a German Catholic mother with a beautiful first name. That was Apollonia Glanig (also spelled Klanig/Klanish, etc.); she married Herr Johannes Frank "over there", who became Mr. John Frank here.) Several of her children and her spouse would be buried in Mennonite cemeteries, while Apollonia is buried in the old St. Joseph cemetery outside her Catholic church. Their children had separated them when elderly; she, living with daughter Margaret; he, with a son. The Census had no category for Separated, so when asked for marital status, she picked "Widowed" from the census list as fitting his not being with her, while he picked "Married", as he wished somebody would take them both. Social Security and pensions, so the extremely elderly lived with adult children and did their best to help out.
HER CHILDREN. What about this Lizzie? She was Apollonia's granddaughter, but instead is known to modern family members as a grandmother to their grandmothers, for example, to the Nancy Williams who had married Tom Norman. She had her own family with children; she was a junior Elizabeth, middle name Warren, while her mother was the senior Elizabeth, but with Warren as her maiden name. You have to check the husband or children to make sure you have the right one Elizabeth Warren Frank. A daughter Lauren had died very young, while they lived in an isolated, mountainous place (out in Idaho?) where getting help was hard.
There would be a big age gap between Lauren's older brother, Kenneth Ward Williams, who remembered Lauren's death, and Ken's two younger brothers, Harold Owen and Donald Edwin Williams, who perhaps would remember little or nothing about her death. Ken turned adult while they were still children, had a better experience of the Roaring Twenties before entering the Great Depression, whereas their youth mainly overlapped the Depression. Their different eras and birth order produced different people.
On his death bed, when asked what he would have changed, Lizzie's son Ken had said he would not have been so judgmental, quite an insight. Different listeners would have experienced different kinds of judging from him, but this apology was meant for all of them. One judging that can be discussed was Ken's not wanting his brother Harold to be so active in unions.
THE BABY. In addition to those surviving boys, there was one more, a "tail-end baby", perhaps "a surprise", little Marguerite, now the only girl in a family of older boys. Are such children sometimes allowed to self-indulge too much, the parents "too worn out" from rearing the older children to do much correcting or too fearful of repeating past mistakes, so they under-correct?
We might think this when we contrast Marguerite's many marriages and serious partying to the other ways her life could have gone. The 1940 Census showed her 16 and married, her first husband, Russell Parker, a seemingly good guy, but also "too young", working in a bakery. They lived with her parents, as they could not afford to live apart? Sociologists tell us that maybe 80% of the "too young" marriages end with at least one person very unhappy. There would be other husbands for Marguerite, but not all would be nice to her prior children. One was shockingly not nice, yet she stayed with him anyway. Knowing this, why did junior Lizzie not invite Marguerite back, with her kids, into the family home? Was everyone too fearful of that spouse?
Marguerite finally had a good husband at the end, one who "lasted". He liked doing his family history, so Marguerite then did her family's future genealogists a big favor by writing up dates, names and places, for both Edwin's parents and his mother's parents. That was back in the 1980s. She gave the list to a Jenny LaMore who put the info on the web before she died, in the 2000s, wonderful of her to do that for us, even though she died before we could thank her. Where did the names and dates come from?
Was Marguerite entrusted by her father with the French family bible? Perhaps the one Edwin's mother, Mary Eliza, bedridden and elderly, gave to her son Elmer to take to California, to defend her "snowbirding" brother A.O. French's right to a Civil War pension? Proving what the family all knew to be true, that he was who he said he was? The pension officials almost dis-regarded it, as it was missing the page with the publication date, but then decided to accept it as proof of identity anyway.
Edwin Williams' Puritan-influenced attitudes toward education would trump the Pennsylvania ones of Lizzie. The more education, the better. Unlike her older brothers, Marguerite did not do any college, but, at least had finished high school, which was four years more than the majority had done, seen by looking at 1940 Censuses. The eldest Ken, a Roaring 20s product, had two years of college, majoring in civil engineering at the Univ. of Idaho. His younger brothers would manage at least one year somewhere (not Idaho? as Lizzie junior had moved them to Spokane, Washington?). However, both the Depression and joining the military for WW II would take their toll, as Harold Owen Williams only did one year.
MARY ELIZA, MOTHER-IN-LAW. Edwin's mother, born Mary Eliza French, taking the surname of Overacker from the last man who left her widowed, grew up in the bottom row of Michigan counties. Mary Eliza's parents, Ransom French, who died young, at 50ish, and Rebecca Farley, his wife, together produced another daughter who was a teacher (Mary E.'s older sister Climena French) and a son who would fight in the Civil War, but did a year of college first (Mary E.'s older brother, A.O. French).
We don't know what Mary E. did school-wise, but the money meant to prepare for college or teacher's school had probably run out. She had only been 3 at her dad's death; her mother had a younger daughter who was sickly, plus several in their teen years. By the 1860 census, with Mary E. in her early teens, her brothers away from home (no room at relatives' houses?) and about to go off to the Civil War, it was clear that her mother had been reduced to living with different relatives, moving around, trying to get by.
After the littlest one, Olive, died, Rebecca and Mary went west, post-Civil War, following Mary's older sister Climena. Climena had taught and married in California, pre-Civil War, the timing produced a husband with better prospects for future happiness. Mary Eliza came of age post-Civil War, when few men were not war-damaged or "too old", but women married them anyway, as young women then were expected to do. Her first, editor of a Salinas newspaper, Melville Byerly, had seemed a good match, but was not healthy, so died. Things "went from bad to worse" thereafter. Finally, a widowed and re-married Mary Eliza returned from California to Michigan with California-born Edwin and his older brother. She must have wanted better for her own children than she had received. Her return made it possible for Edwin to meet junior Lizzie, who would have been unlikely to leave Michigan to meet him.
A CHAIN OF MOTHERS. The college attendance seen in junior Lizzie's sons had to be Edwin's doing, not Lizzie's? From appearances, it seems all siblings in Lizzie's family were expected to work as early as possible, forgoing a better education. If there was no HS where they lived, then there was no going to college, either, as finishing HS is a pre-requisite in most states. Perhaps Marguerite spent more time with Lizzie than with Edwin, explaining why she did not pick up the same values as had her brothers?
What to think, when looking back to Lizzie the junior (a woman bravely at home, alone with kids, while her spouse rotated across distant lumber camps), Lizzie the senior (brazenly fundamentalist), and the mysterious Susannah Krug Warren (a Mennonite who died too young to raise her daughter in the same faith)? Looking at the earliest and middle links in that chain down the path to Marguerite, some observers might say that Mennonites can be quite varied in tolerance of other faiths and quite varied in willingness to adopt other ideas. Lizzie the senior's father was not Mennonite (Archibald Warren), perhaps was indifferent, but, then, a fundamentalist church arrived in their township called Paradise, ready to proselytize, clearly intolerant of "other ways". Was a brand new religion a way for a child without her "real mother" to feel that she mattered? Senior Lizzie's two stepmothers, married by Archibald Warren, would have busy with the many children.
The first stepmother's death may have driven home the idea that loving mothers don't last, but your list of memorized bible lines will always be with you? Would the senior Lizzie have seen education as a threat to all the memorized lines? Junior Lizzie watched her sons become more educated than Marguerite, but also watched Marguerite become more educated than herself. All may have seemed well.
Young Lizzie's wedding showed signs of a different religious conversation than what senior Lizzie would have delivered. The groom, Edwin Williams, came out of Puritan beginnings, but once towns stopped subsidizing a town church, his people generally turned from undesignated Puritan to Presbyterian, when there was a choice, sometimes to Congregationalist, with some in the family clearly doing a U-turn and favoring Methodist-Episcopalian. Becoming a Baptist was rare and not lasting. A minister pronounced vows for Edwin and Lizzie, not a Justice of the Peace Religion mattered to them. Their minister was Congregationalist, but "not any old Congregationalist". He had been employed as a minister to a youth group of women. The ceremony took place, not in the county of the bride's parents, as often done, but in Lewiston, MI, where Lizzie had gone to work some years earlier. Was it easier for her new friends in town to attend than her old relatives from back home?
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MARRIAGE
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Nov. 30, 1899.
BRIDE: Lizzie W. Frank, domestic, age 19.
Father: Peter "J." Frank [should be G.]
Mother: Lizzie Warren.
Reported herself as born Saginaw, Mich. [Not the case. She did not remember her birthplace of Pennsylvania, too tiny when her family left; she would learn her true birthplace later. Was this a sign her parents were not at the wedding, that this was an elopement? Or, were her parents merely in another room?]
GROOM: Edwin N. Williams, laborer, age 21.
Born in California, to Louis Williams and Mary French.
Witnesses:
Elmer Byerly (Edwin's half-brother).
Eliza Craig (unknown).
Officiant: Stephen Vaughn, "Minister of the Gospel"
SOURCE: 1899 marriage record, handwritten, captured on microfilm. FamilySearch.org/ark:/61903/3:1:S3HT-67LS-PR9 (Corrected for spelling errors.)
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SIDE NOTES: Minister born England, 1862. Immigrated, 1882. Married in 1895 to Luella Coryell in Grand Rapids, Kent County, Mich. They led a young women's group inside their church, so he may have also been the bride's minister.
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THE MAIN STORY IS DONE--SIDE STORIES.
NAME PATTERNS. The families of Lizzie's parents often used surnames as middle names. Among the English-named Warrens, its use was occasional, not for every child.
On her father's side, they were more consistent. all children had their mother's surname as their middle name.
For Peter Frank's mother, born Apollonia Glanig, dialect caused K and G to mingle, making a sound half way between the two letters, so the listener sounding out a name might THINK they've heard either. Due to the sound mix-up of K and G at the front of Glanig, the German-speaking, Bavaria-born father of Lizzie junior, Peter G. Frank, might also be seen as Peter K. Frank. Overall, Glanig/Klanig was pronounced something like Klanisch, judging from a survivor's guess on Peter's death report.
Perhaps following the same pattern, Lizzie the junior used W. as a middle initial in her own name, as did many of her huge brood of siblings, except perhaps some of the younger ones. Our best guess is that, in all their cases, that W stood for Warren, the maiden name of their mother, the senior Elizabeth.
Again, Lizzie's marriage took place in Lewiston, Montmorency County, Michigan. A resort town now, it was, in her time, a place that offered work to the young offspring leaving the area's few farms, in an economy that instead depended more upon lumbering. Lizzie and Edwin both resided and worked in Lewiston pre-marriage. To show how common "working in town" was for the young adults, three other young people named Frank shared a house in that area in the 1900 Census. Maybe cousins to junior Lizzie, all were age 22 or younger--Herman, Bertha, and another Peter Frank, originally of Albert Twp., Montmorency County, Mich.. The three were children of German-born Jacob G. Frank of Elmer Twp., Oscoda County. That middle G makes us wonder if he might have been Peter G. Frank's brother, so Lizzie's uncle.
The potential cousins all used H. as THEIR middle initial, due to THEIR mother being a Holderman/Holdeman. (This name was probably originally spelled as Haldeman, judging from the varied spellings used by that family back in Lancaster County, Penn.)
Perhaps they were not first cousins? That Herman would marry Lizzie's sister Caroline/Carrie a year later (1901, April 4). The marriage of first cousins would raise eyebrows among many. Mennonite and Puritan groups discouraged it, yet it was seen more among them than, say, people raised Methodist-Episcopalian. Trying to marry someone of a similar age AND of exactly the same restrictive religious beliefs could lead to first cousins being the only people who fit the "sameness" idea.
Lizzie's own marriage record, as shown online, mis-listed her as Lizzie W. Franks, not Frank, and slightly mis-spelled the names of her parents. These small errors together made her records hard to find, her relationship to her sister Caroline and other siblings thus unclear. Her parents' list of children at Findagrave, therefore, omitted her until now (Oct., 2015, when we added her name).
Married at 19, she listed her occupation as "Domestic". That matched her granddaughter Nancy's memory that Lizzie had worked in a boarding house, perhaps meeting Edwin that way. Married at 21, he (Edwin) listed his occupation as laborer. That matched his grandchildren's knowledge that he had been, at first, a sawyer of wood and, later, a repairer of saws, traveling between different lumber camps.
Perhaps Lizzie's marriage was the first time someone asked her where she had been born? She instead gave the place she remembered as a young girl, Saginaw, Michigan. She then must have asked someone older in her family to help her give a better answer the next time. Thereafter, she cited Pennsylvania, matching the answer her parents gave for her in her first census, while still an infant. The census taker found her parents with their earliest children, living, temporarily, it seems, in Allegheny County, near Pittsburg, PA, away from the parents' original county of Lancaster, Penn. They were inching toward Oscoda County in Michigan slowly.
Once in Oscoda County, Michigan, her family of birth lived near Amish/Mennonite families, as they had done in Pennsylvania. (The fundamentalist church nearby in Penn., in Paradise Twp, deliberately moved in to Mennonite territory, to try to recruit among the Mennonites. It did not last through multiple generations, so closed later. Even if she went back to or never left the Menonnites, Lizzie's granddaughter Nancy believed that fundamentalists had succeeded in affecting her thinking, as the senior Elizabeth Warren Frank was still fundamentalist in practice.
Susanna Krug was not British, but Swiss-Germanic. She had a very clear Mennonite bloodline dating back to the well-documented Herrs. The Herrs had been very early Mennonites in their part of Penn., namely Lancaster County. If Susannah had lived, then the first Elizabeth Warren might have been raised Mennonite. As it was, she married a man, Peter Frank, himself from a "mixed" marriage, who, we hope, perhaps tempered things for Lizzie junior and the other children, made his wife's fundamentalism seem not so harsh
We assume they had relatives "back home" who remained "Anabaptist" (Mennonite, Moravian, Amish, Brethren). Earlier, her grandfather on her father Peter's side, John L. Frank, was buried in a Mennonite cemetery in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, as were several of his adult children (Margaret G. Frank, who married a Paes, and a Jacob G. Frank). However, her grandmother on Peter Frank's side, Apollonia S. Glanig Frank, was buried in a Roman Catholic cemetery in that same county. Would that Mennonite-Catholic union have been their era's version of a mixed marriage?
See Peter Frank's page for a partial list of his siblings.
Peter Frank may have enjoyed being in a large family as a child, as he had an even larger brood himself. Lizzie the junior always had someone to play with when growing up.
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In progress. Copyright by JBrown, Austin TX, 2105 & 2016. Last updated Mar & June 2016.
Family Members
Siblings
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Mary W Frank
1861–1885
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Susie W Frank Rockwood
1863–1939
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Sivilla W Frank Wall
1865–1944
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George Warren Frank
1866–1952
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Amelia W Frank Hill
1870–1952
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John W Frank
1871–1873
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William Warren Frank
1874 – unknown
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Martin W Frank
1878–1900
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Florence W "Flora" Frank
1881–1884
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Caroline W Frank Frank
1882–1977
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Blanche Irene Frank Stroube
1885–1952
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Earle Archibald Warren Frank
1888–1970
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