52 Ancestors: #10 Granville Bailey (1876-1897)

Granville Bailey, age 21
posted with permission of Christina Inman
Click to make bigger

Amy Johnson Crow of the blog “ No Story Too Small” issued a 52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks challenge for this year. The challenge: have one blog post each week devoted to a specific ancestor. It could be a story, a biography, a photograph, an outline of a research problem — anything that focuses on one ancestor  (click on the badge in the right sidebar to be taken to her blog for details and weekly roundups of all the participating blogs).

This week I didn’t have a lot of time to do research as I had other things to do on the weekend (like taxes, among other things). I am working on several people in the Bailey branch of the family who will provide interesting stories, but they aren’t ready to write up yet.  

I’ve chosen this week to write up my great-grand uncle Granville Bailey who tragically died young. I don’t know very much about him. Writing these posts every week are very good for bringing to the fore front how much I don’t know about a person and for giving me ideas of where I should look next on the person I’m writing about.

Granville Bailey was born in approximately 1876 in Kansas to my great-grandparents Edward C. and Martha Emily (Wolfington) Bailey, two years after their marriage.  The year before they lived in Ottawa, Kansas in Franklin County, according to the 1875 Kansas State Census, and I know that four years after his birth they lived in Putnam, Kansas in Anderson County with Granville, his older brother Howard, his younger brother Lloyd  (one of the Lloyds), and his younger sister Myrtle who was just a baby at the time (1880 U.S. Census). His father was a fruit grower then.

I don’t have any record of where the family was in 1890 because the census for that year was largely destroyed in a fire in the basement of the Commerce Building in Washington, D.C., in 1921. Before researching Granville, I knew that the family had moved to Findlay OH by 1900 since they were there for the 1900 U.S. Census, I had thought that perhaps the moved was precipitated by a desire to move away from bad memories after Granville died since Granville was not on the 1900 Census and the back of the picture indicated that he was 21 years old in the picture and that Granville had died in an accident in or near Chicago as a young man – I’ve found nothing to confirm or deny that yet.

In doing more research to write up this post I discovered that he died probably in either late October or early November  1897, and that the family had already moved to Findlay by that time. The Rutherford B. Hayes Presidential Center Ohio Obituary Index indicates that Granville’s obituary, or an article about his death, was written on page 1 of the “The Weekly Jeffersonian “ (Findlay Ohio),  on 3 November 1897. As it is a weekly paper I can’t say for certain that he died in November.  In any case, it appears that Granville died within a year of the picture that heads this post being taken, at age 21. It is sad that he didn't get to have a life.

Aggravatingly, unlike the other (later) Findlay papers, The Weekly Jeffersonian's archives have not been given to NewspaperArchive.com, Newspapers.com, GenealogyBank.com, or the Library of Congress' chroniclingamerica.loc.gov. Or anywhere else. Usually if a paper is online I can find the article, as you know. (Think Myrtle, lol!) There is a form I can fill out to order a copy of the article for only $3.00. I haven’t done that yet, but I will. Originally I’d thought I’d only order documents on direct line ancestors, but I’m curious and I want to know more about this young great-grand-uncle! I'm also trying to find newspaper articles in Illinois. It also occurs to me now that I ought to check the 1885 Kansas Census -- if I can't find them that might indicate that the family moved to Ohio to be closer to other family shortly after Edward filed for military invalid benefits (he was a blacksmith the rest of his life - I don't know what sort of injury he had yet as I haven't got that file yet).

If anyone reading this knows more about Granville and what happened or about his family, please contact me through the comments or through the  e-mail address which is listed on  the “Contact Me” page of the blog. I would be delighted to hear from you.