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Owen James Henn -1899
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This is my latest post for the “
52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks”
challenge initiated by Amy Johnson Crow of the No Story Too Small blog. For
more information about the challenge and links to the other blogs participating
in the challenge, please click on the badge in the right margin.
Owen James Henn, my great-grandfather on my father’s side,
was born November 14, 1878 to
John and Elizabeth (O’Brian) Henn in Burnside
Michigan. He was the middle of five children, born five years after his
parent’s marriage. He had two brothers
and two sisters: Otto Henn (1875-1946), Ella May (1876-1942), Floyd O. (1880 –
1943), and Olive “Ollie” E. (1884-1938). By the time Owen was born his father
was a farmer, although the property to become known as the Henn Family farm (one
mile south of Burnside, MI) was not bought until the next year.
I am going to refer to him as “Owen James” even though he
went by “Owen” throughout his life, and even though it's clunky, because there appears to be at least one
“Owen” per generation in the Henn family, albeit with differing middle names.
Using both his first and middle names will help us keep track of what
generation we’re speaking of in the long run.
On August 11, 1896, C. J. Dandel organized the Burnside
Cornet Band and Owen James and his brothers Otto and Floyd became charter members of the band,
which traveled around to local communities playing concerts through 1904. Owen
became the leader of the band. (He’s
wearing his Burnside Cornet Band uniform in the photo above.) On August 10, 1901, they played at Novesta
Corners, MI, and Cass City, MI.
Thereafter, though they had stopped practicing and regularly playing
concerts, the band members met annually at least through 1931 (as per the Cass City
newspaper), and I get the impression from family references that they continued to meet annually for
life.
Owen lived at home and worked on his father’s farm until he
was 22, when he married
Myrtie Mabel Wilcox (21), whose relatives farmed the
property kitty-corner to Owen’s father’s farm. Myrtie was a teacher. Owen James and Myrtie
attended the Brown City Baptist Church. They lived to share 52 years together
and had eight children: Ervin John (1902-1992), Hazel Annette McArthur
(1902-1962), Earl Owen (1904-1904), Lowell Floyd (1905-1984),
Owen Carl(1906-1988), Irma Jane Sutton (1911-2006), Frank Elwyn (1913-1995), and Lucille
Elizabeth Robson (1915-1993.) In 1904, they had to deal
with the sorrow of the death of a child when baby Earl Owen died. It was normal then to give a deceased child's name to a later born child, particularly if the dead child was named for someone the
parents still wished to honor. So the name “Owen” was also given to the next
son born after the baby died, my grandfather,
Owen Carl Henn ["Carl"].
As they started out their married life, Owen James continued to
work as farm labor on his father’s farm. But by 1915, he had his own farm (see
land record for Burnside Township
below); his father had bought each of his children a farm, to be paid into
the estate after his wife died. Over the course of his lifetime, Owen James
became known as one of the “big” farmers in Burnside. He owned 200 acres and
worked his uncle Phil’s 140 acres and his brother Otto’s land (115 acres), and
along with his brother Frank, he pastured “Uncle Tony’s land” (perhaps Anthony
Esper, husband of Ella Mae Henn, Owen James’ sister).
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1915 Land Record for Burnside Township Michigan
Owen's land is just below the space between the 'N' & 'S' in BURNSIDE printed across the middle of the page.
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When he registered for the draft for WW1 in 1918, at 39,
Owen James was described as being of medium height and medium build, with brown
eyes and black hair.
During WW1, emotions -- and paranoia (manifested via the
Espionage and Sedition Acts of 1917 and 1918 and vigilante groups reporting
every perceived disloyalty to government enforcers) -- were running strong in
this country against Germans and other non-Americans and recently immigrated Americans, and most immigrant families in this country
were being particularly careful of how they acted and spoke. Owen James and Myrtie were first generation Americans: Owen James’ father had
emigrated from Germany and Myrtie’s parents had emigrated from Canada. Richard Rubin, in “The
Last of the Doughboys” describes an America where immigrant Americans and their
families had to prove their loyalty repeatedly in many ways. There were several Liberty Bond
campaigns focused directly on immigrant Americans, including one campaign
wherein the posters were loaded with patriotic symbols and the words: “Are You
100% American? Prove It! Buy U.S. Government Bonds.”
It was in this
atmosphere that Owen James sold some cattle and took the money to the bank and
bought some Liberty bonds, and when, a month or so later Dolph McNary canvassed
the neighborhood selling Liberty Bonds, he told McNary that he didn’t
want to buy any, instead of saying that he had already bought some, because he
didn’t think it was anyone else’s business whether he bought any or not, according to my grandfather, as told to Grand-Aunt Lucille. McNary told the
whole neighborhood that the Henns were pro-German, and his son repeated it all
over school and started calling the kids the “Kaisers”. Later that was
shortened to calling my grandfather “Ki” and the nickname stuck far longer than
the memory of why it was imposed did. Fortunately for the family, the threat of
being accused of being disloyal did blow over eventually.
Owen James was one of the last farmers to give up farming
with horses and start using a tractor. My
grandfather told a story to Grand-Aunt Lucille, that when a Moline Tractor
dealer opened up in Brown City, the dealer wanted to sell Owen James the first tractor
as it would be a huge boost in sales if he could say Owen James bought a
2-wheeler tractor, or walking tractor, from him (which, as I found out, is a single-axel tractor,
self-powered and self-propelled, which was used to pull and power other
farm implements while the driver walked along side it or rode on the attached piece of equipment– see picture below). Owen James didn’t want it and said
so, but the dealer kept pushing the price lower until he finally said he’d take
it. After he paid for it outright, Owen James took it across the street to the
International dealer and traded the Moline for an International, and took the
IMC tractor home. I guess he really didn’t want to be used as anyone’s
advertisement! I didn’t have enough of a description to find a picture of the
IMC tractor but the Moline tractor was likely the one pictured here.
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Moline Two Wheel Walking Tractor, 1920
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Although he farmed all his life, Owen James also had a
teaching certificate. Additionally, he
served as the Burnside Township Clerk for ten years and at some point was
justice of the peace, according to his obituary.
You have to remember that when Owen James and Myrtie started
their life together they didn’t have electricity or indoor plumbing, or even a
car. They used to tell their daughter Lucille
that when cars were first on the road, whenever they heard one coming, they’d
go outside and watch it go by. One day there was a car coming from each
direction and they were going to have to meet! This was such a big event that
they remembered it until they died. Can
you imagine?
On January 20, 1923, Owen James bought his first automobile, a 1922 Chevrolet Touring Car (see picture below); Grand-Aunt Lucille remembered it as
having curtains that were put in or taken down depending on the weather (she still had the receipt!). About four
years later he bought another, more beat up, ’22 Chevy Touring car for parts. The
beat up one is the car all his kids learned to drive with. His 1931 driver’s
license describes him as age 53, white, male, 5’5”, 150 pounds, with black hair
and brown eyes.
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Advertisement for 1922 Chevrolet Touring Car
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[Note: In 1922, $1 was worth $13.05. The average wage in 1922 was $991 (today's equivalent $12,930), a gallon of gas cost 25 cents (today's equivalent $3.26) and the average house cost $8024 (today's equivalent $104,691); in 1925, a pound of bacon was 47 cents, a pound of bread was 9 cents, a pound of coffee was 50 cents.]
In 1927, Owen James took in a sick uncle, Philip Henn, who had
never married, to help him get well, and he and Myrtie gave up their own
bedroom for him. He never left the bed again, until he died three years later,
still in their care.
When radios started being sold to the public, those in rural
areas with no electricity would buy them and power them with car batteries
brought into the house, and it was listened to with headphones as the radio didn’t
come with speakers at the beginning. Myrtie’s uncle Albert had one of those. Grand-Aunt Lucille recalls that her father,
Owen James, eventually got a radio after they came with speakers, but it was
still hooked up to car batteries in the living room of the house. She said that “Dad and the boys
all had to be home by 7:00 PM each night to hear the Amos and Andy show", a
popular radio comedy that ran live shows nightly from 1928-1943. (Here’s a six
minute sample of The Amos ‘n Andy show, recorded on the eve of the 1928
election – mislabeled 1929:
http://youtu.be/16vmYLXKdn8;
there are recordings of other Amos ‘n Andy radio shows on YouTube as well that
run about thirty minutes each. And here’s a short, interesting article on the show:
http://www.otr.com/amosandy.html.)
Owen James and Myrtie didn’t get electricity until 1935. All
of their children were nearly grown by then.
The first four had homes of their own and the youngest three would be
married with a year. It was a time of changes and of losses. In 1938, Owen James’ youngest sister died, at age 53, only
five days after contracting pneumonia. It
had to be hard a hard time for him.
When he registered in the Old Man’s Draft for WWII, in 1940,
Owen James was 62 years old. He did not get called up in either
World War.
His wife, Myrtie passed away in 1953, after a short illness.
Owen James lived 9 years longer. He was active until the end, when he, too, died
after a short illness. Approximately a month before he died he wrote a letter
to his daughter Hazel, who was in Chicago at the time, explaining that he was
going to Lucille’s to watch the Rose Parade on television and would stop by
Hazel’s house to water the plants. He died on February 8, 1962, at age 83. Funeral services
were held Saturday in the Carman Funeral Home, the Rev. Erwin W. Gram, pastor
of Brown City Baptist Church, officiating. Burial was in Burnside Twp.
Cemetery.
Grand-Aunt Lucille’s book (Members of the Flock) says that she and he watched John Glenn
orbit the earth together just before he died but that happened two weeks afterwards.
However, ten months before, the Russians had sent Yuri Gagarin into orbit around the
earth. Just think, in his lifetime he used horses to farm, then the first tractors, saw the first cars, got
electricity for the first time in his home at age 57, saw airplanes cross the skies
for the first time, and just before his life ended saw a man go into space. Wow!
[P.S.: I just noticed that Owen James' father,
John, was the Census enumerator for the 1900 census! Dolph McNary was the enumerator for the 1910 Census, and Owen James Henn was for the 1930 Census.]
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I’ve discovered, to my dismay, that either not as many historical
Michigan newspapers are online as I found in Ohio for Mom’s side of the family,
or they are more difficult to find. I’d like to find local newspaper stories on
Owen James. I figure he had to have made the paper through the Cornet Band and
through being Town Clerk, at minimum.
I’m shy on stories and records after 1940 and would like to
fill in the last 22 years of his life better.
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Federal Census 1880,
1900, 1910, 1920, 1930, 1940; draft registrations for WWI & WWII; CASS CITY
CHRONICLE, FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 18, 1914, p. 1 & FRIDAY, AUGUST 28, 1931., p.1
(Rawson Memorial Library Collection.
http://newspapers.rawson.lib.mi.us/search/);
"Michigan, Marriages, 1868-1925," index and images, FamilySearch
(https://familysearch.org/pal:/MM9.1.1/N38F-DHW : accessed 27 May 2014), Owen
Henn and Myrtle Wilcox, 02 Sep 1901; citing Romeo, Oakland, Michigan, v 3 p 523
rn 187, Department of Vital Records, Lansing; FHL microfilm 2342519;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-wheel_tractor;http://thecostofliving.com/index.php?id=148&a=1; http://the.honoluluadvertiser.com/article/2006/Jun/18/op/FP606180308.html; "The Last of the Doughboys", by Richard Rubin; “Members of the Flock” by Lucille
Henn Robson
.jpg "Wm & Sarah Sharp -1852 New Brunswick Census")
.jpg "Mary Jane (Currier) & George Butler Wilcox 65th Wedding Anniversary")
