A Family Album Surfaces

The reason I took up genealogy many years ago was to see if I could construct a family tree on both my mother's and father's side. For the most part I've been fairly successful in tracing back both sides into the early 1800s, and a few into the 1600s, though like most genealogists I know of I have hit the wall on a couple of ancestors and probably will never find good information about them. 

After a few years I had a printable block diagram family tree with names, date of birth and date of death.  But they were just names with numbers; I didn't know anything about most of them. For me fleshing them out; discovering what they did, where they lived and why, and anything noteworthy about them is what genealogy is about. And sometimes, if you're lucky you discover enough personal information about someone that makes you feel like, "'Hey!...I know who this guy or gal is...I understand them!"  One such person is my maternal great-great grandfather, Bernard Henry Meyer, though he always used the name B H Meyer, which already tells me something about him.

Bernard was born in Hannover, Germany in 1820. He immigrated to the US sometime around 1850. An 1856 Iowa State census lists his occupation as Tailor. An April 16 1856 advertisement in the local newspaper confirms his occupation and the tone of it also says something about him to me.

He didn't stay in the tailoring business very long, By 1863 he was the owner and operator of a saloon on Main Street in downtown Lyons, Iowa, a tough Mississippi River town. These were the wild west days...the days of "check your gun at the bar" days. Perusing the pages of the Lyons Weekly Mirror from those days shows lots of fist and gunfights. Bernard's saloon had to be in the middle of the action. I wonder what he thought of and how he handled those incidents. The following news article indicates to me that he wasn't timid and probably had a temper.

Bernard died in 1879 at age 50 of tuberculosis and left a considerable estate behind him. There is more information about Bernard but not worth getting into, and besides I want to get to the family album mentioned in the post title. Bernard had a younger brother named Anton who had a grocery store not far from Bernard's saloon. Anton and his wife Sophia had six kids, one of whom was Louis B Meyer. Remember that name.

Last week I received an email from a woman in Los Angeles. She said that years ago her mother-in-law had purchased an antique album in a thrift store, for no other reason than that she liked it. The daughter-in-law has it now and was thinking of "tossing it" when she saw a small slip of paper between the pages that had the name Hulda Belle Terrell. Being into genealogy she did some research which ultimately led to me. I didn't recognize the name so dug into my tree and found that she was the wife of my first cousin thrice removed, Louis B Meyer. So thanks to the woman in California who realized what she had and that it might be meaningful to someone, the album is now in my possession. There are 43 photos but unfortunately none of them appear to be Louis or his father Anton. 

The above photo shows Hulda (right) at age 21, and her mother Mary Lucinda Chapel age 44. Knowing their respective birth dates I can date the photo to between December 16, 1893 and April 2, 1894. Hulda married my cousin Louis on September 13, 1894. Her father died on October 30 of that same year. 

The album is not in great shape but it looks to me that in its day it was top of the line quality. Whatever material was on the front cover is long gone. The back is beautiful and feels like soft carpet. I've done some gluing to secure the front cover and am working on preserving the interior photo slips. Hulda had eight siblings with four girls so it's possible that the two ladies shown are her sisters.

I don't know if I'm going to be able to identify any of the people but I'm going to try and if I'm lucky I'll hit on a few. That's what makes genealogy so rewarding.