Mary A. Howard: Her Illegitimate Child

Purleigh Church: All Saints

In the past few weeks several distant cousins have contacted me, all interested in the same neglected branch of my family. Obviously, with so much outside interest, that branch can no longer stay neglected.

My paternal grandma Aileen Underwood’s mom was Flora Amos, whose mom was Elizabeth Filby, whose mom was Mary A. Howard. Until recently, that was very nearly the extent of my knowledge about Mary A. Howard. I had found her in the 1841 census, working as a housekeeper for her future husband, John Filby. The previous household enumerated was headed by a John Howard, who was of the right age and surname to be her father, but I had never gotten around to seriously researching that possibility.

I had researched the John Filby family forward, finding their children, etc., after 1841, but had done very little on Mary Howard’s roots. Once, someone contacted me with the information that Mary Howard had given birth to an illegitimate child before marrying John Filby, but as I could find nothing to support that assertion in the documents I had compiled, I soon dropped that line of research.

But now a wealth of information has dropped into my lap! Although the Howard branch of my family has been long neglected by me, it has not been neglected by my new-found cousins. The task of evaluating and compiling all this information has been delightful, but also brain-twisting and, at times, downright confusing. It seems a good idea to lay out the evidence and my thinking in a series of blog posts as I reach conclusions.

The most basic conclusion I have reached thus far is that Mary Howard did, indeed, have an illegitimate child. I might never have found him on my own, but he did exist. An abstract of the Purleigh baptismal register, sent to me by one of my cousins, shows the baptism of “Joseph, illegitimate son of Mary Howard, Purleigh, Spinster” on 1 Aug 1841. Although he never appears in the same household as his mother, his name is sometimes recorded as Howard, sometimes Filby, tying him with this family. [I cannot take credit for originating these thoughts; they were sent to me by one of my cousins. But I do agree with them.] In the 1851 census he is found working as a servant under the name Joseph Filby. He appears in the Jul-Aug-Sep 1860 quarter of the Civil Registration Marriage Index, under the name Joseph Howard. Given the volume and page number given, his bride is either Mary Kingsbury or Ruth Peeke. The 1861 census quickly answers that question, as Joseph and his wife Ruth are residing with her parents, John and Sarah Peeke. Their surname is recorded as Filby. In 1871 Joseph, Ruth, and their children are again recorded as Howard, but in 1881, 1891, 1901, and 1911 the household is Filby.

In 1911, conveniently, the person filling out the sheet apparently misunderstood the instructions. Joseph and Ruth are on the first two lines, with the information that Ruth had given birth to 11 children, but only four were still living. The next eleven lines proceed to list all 11 children, with the age they would be in 1911. They are crossed out in blue, but still easily legible.

Sources:

1841 census of England, Essex, parish of Purleigh, folio 23, page 5, household of John Filby; digital images, Ancestry, Ancestry (www.ancestry.com : accessed 8 Oct 2007); citing PRO HO 107/327/22.

1841 census of England, Essex, parish of Purleigh, folio 23, page 6, household of John Howard; digital images, Ancestry, Ancestry (www.ancestry.com : accessed 23 Apr 2017); citing PRO HO 107/327/22.

(Purleigh, Essex, England), "Baptisms 1813-1860," p. 126, no. 1002, baptism of Joseph Howard (1841) (abstracted by Noel Clark); FHL microfilm 1,472,666.

1851 census of England, Essex, Purleigh parish, Rochester ecclesiastical district, folio 347, page 30, Joseph Filby; digital images, Ancestry, Ancestry (www.ancestry.com : accessed 22 Apr 2017); citing PRO HO 107/1778.

Graham Hart, Ben Laurie, Camilla von Massenbach and David Mayall, "England & Wales, Civil Registration Marriage Index, 1837-1915," database, Ancestry (www.ancestry.com : accessed 7 May 2017), entry for Joseph Howard, volume 4a, page 255, Jul-Aug-Sep quarter 1860, Maldon district; citing the General Register Office's England and Wales Civil Registration Indexes.

1861 census of England, Essex, District 3, Latchingdon, folio 45, page 17, household of John Peeke; digital images, Ancestry, Ancestry (www.ancestry.com : accessed 22 Apr 2017); citing PRO RG 9/1089.

1871 census of England, Essex, Parish of Latchingdon Essex, District 3, Snoreham, folio 53, page 23-24, household of Joseph Howard; digital images, Ancestry, Ancestry (www.ancestry.com : accessed 22 Apr 2017); citing PRO RG 10/1673.

1881 census of England, Essex, Latchingdon parish, parliamentary borough and rural sanitary district of Maldon, folio 40, page 2, household of Joseph Filby; digital images, Ancestry, Ancestry (www.ancestry.com : accessed 22 Apr 2017); citing PRO RG 11/1775.

1891 census of England, Essex, civil and eccesiastical parish of Latchingdon, rural sanitary district of Maldon, parliamentary division of S.E. Essex, folio 12, page 1, household of Joseph Filby; digital images, Ancestry, Ancestry (www.ancestry.com : accessed 22 Apr 2017); citing PRO RG 12/1397.

1901 census of England, Essex, Latchingdon with Snoreham Entire civil parish, ecclesiastical parish of Latchingdon St. Michael with Snoreham St. Peter entire, rural district of Maldon, Southeastern parliamentary division, village of Latchingdon, folio 13, page 1, household of Joseph Filby; digital images, Ancestry, Ancestry (www.ancestry.com : accessed 7 May 2017); citing PRO RG 13/1690.

1911 census of England, Essex, Deadway Bridge, Latchingdon, Maldon, Essex, household of Joseph Filby; digital images, Ancestry, Ancestry (www.ancestry.com : accessed 7 May 2017); citing RG 78, RG 14 PN 10204, registration district (RD) 196, sub district (SD) 2, enumeration district (ED) 11, schedule number (SN) 2.

Inez (Underwood) Linn: A Pictorial In Memoriam (1917-2017)

 

On 1 Mar 1917, my grandma's youngest sister, Inez Flora Underwood was born. This last Tuesday she passed away, aged 100 years and 34 days.

I am posting several pictures of her found in my grandma's photo albums.

 

These pictures were probably taken in the 1930s.

In two of these pictures, Inez is in front of the Underwood family home in Netarts, Oregon.

The previous two photographs were evidently taken on the same day. Inez is wearing the same outfit and pictured with the same truck in both pictures. In the first, the background is the family home; in the second, the background appears to be the beach at Pacific City, Oregon, a fairly short drive from their home in Netarts. 

This picture appears to have been taken in Happy Camp, just outside the town of Netarts. The headless figure standing behind Inez is my Grandma Aileen.

This last picture is one of my favorites. I'm not really sure what is happening, butI like to think that Ray and Inez are flirting. Ray Linn became Inez's husband on 26 Oct 1940.

The Wreck of the Emily G. Reed

In the town of Rockaway Beach, buried beneath the sand, rests the broken skeleton of a wooden barque called the Emily G. Reed. Over a hundred years ago, in 1908, she foundered in a storm and broke up, the pieces of her hull scattered from the north jetty to just south of St. Mary’s By the Sea, the local Catholic church. Most of the time her timbers remain hidden under the deep sand, and tourists play unknowingly upon the ship’s grave, but every once in a great while the forces of nature shift the sands and the old boards again appear.

The Oregon coast is home to many shipwrecks, and each has its story, but few can equal the drama in that of the Emily Reed. It began early on a Valentine’s Day morning, not long after midnight. Captain Kersel was endeavoring to sight Tillamook Rock in his journey northward from Australia to Portland with a load of coal. For several days the weather had been heavy, and he had to put much reliance on his chronometer, making mathematical computations to determine the longitude.

But then came the terrible realization: the chronometer was wrong. The ship was too far to the east, almost in the breakers. But this realization came too late. “We had scarcely a minute’s warning of breakers before the shock came,” recalled one of the survivors. The Emily Reed hit the beach bow on, and immediately began to break up. The first mate, Fred Zube, was forward, calling all hands on deck. The captain, his wife, and some of the crew were aft when the jolt came. A huge wave washed over the bow, smashing one of the lifeboats. Seamen Abilstedt and Jahunke, as well as the cook, whose name no one seems to have known, “came tumbling out of the forecastle with scarcely any clothing on their backs.” The three of them, led by Fred Zube, were unable to get to the other end of the ship, and their end was deep in churning water, so they quickly jumped into the remaining lifeboat and cut the lashings. Captain Kersel and the others, clinging to the roof of the aft-house, watched as a huge wave broke, and the lifeboat disappeared.

After witnessing this calamity, the captain ordered those who were with him to stay on the wreck until daylight broke. As the sea calmed, he sent his wife below, but he himself remained on the poop. When daylight came, low tide came with it. Some of the crew decided to see if they could swim ashore, first tying a rope to the wreckage. When they jumped overboard, they discovered that they could touch bottom and simply walk to land. The captain, his wife, his second mate, and the three other seamen who had survived all waded to shore.

Captain Kersel then had the sad duty of reporting the deaths of his crew. It was a long list, and most newspapers carried the headline “Eleven Lives Lost,” though, if the cook’s name were truly unknown, it seems the number was actually twelve:

First Mate Fred Zube (or Dubie)

Ship’s Carpenter Westlund

Seaman Sortzeit

Seaman Johnson

Seaman Dickson

Seaman Darling

Seaman Cohenstad

Seaman Gilbert

Seaman Ewald Abilstedt

Seaman Arthur Jahunke

Cabin Boy Hirschfeld

The cook

But then, three days after the wreck, in Neah Bay, Washington, nearly two hundred miles to the north, someone aboard the sloop Teckla heard by a feeble hail. The crew looked out and saw a steel lifeboat slowly drawing near. There were four figures in the boat, three just barely alive and one dead. Their tongues were so swollen from thirst that they could scarcely articulate. But after some much-needed food and drink, the leader of these men was able to tell his story.

They were, in fact, from the wreck of the Emily Reed, the lifeboat which the captain and the others had thought to be swamped. The wave, instead of swamping them, had swept the lifeboat to sea. They were alive, but without supplies. They had no food, no water, and only one oar. Fred Zube had a broken arm. A biting wind blew most of the time, and we know that Abilstedt, Jahunke, and the cook were barely dressed. The boat had been banged around in the wreckage, and had been punctured in several places, and the men had nothing with which to bale out the water.

They wore out their knives cutting away a compartment built into the boat, but once they wrenched it off they were able to use it as a baler. They set their course, clumsily managed with the single oar, away from shore, hoping to fall into the shipping lanes and thereby meet a steamship. The shore on this part of the coast they thought to be “desolate,” which wasn’t exactly true, but wasn’t much of an exaggeration, either.

On the second night, they saw lights on the shore, but it was too dark to chance venturing in. The cook declared he couldn’t stand the thirst anymore, and he took a drink of seawater. It was not long before he became delirious and lay down in the water at the bottom of the lifeboat.

The next morning, jubilation! There was a big steamer, and she stopped near them. One of the men shook the cook awake. “Don’t you want to be saved?” he asked, pointing to the steamer. The cook stood up, watching the ship. But apparently it had not seen them after all, for it was soon under weigh again. This seemed to break the cook’s spirit, and within a half hour he was dead.

The Tattoosh Island lighthouse appeared in the distance a few hours later, and they drew together their strength to steer the boat into the bay. “Sunday seemed the worst day we were out. We kept seeing all sorts of vessels passing back and forth but none of them would answer our hail. We were generally too far off to be made out plainly, I guess,” said Fred Zube. That is, until they finally met up with the Teckla.

With this news, the death toll of the wreck of the Emily Reed dropped from twelve to nine. Few people had seen the wreck, the area being largely uninhabited, but one Elmer D. Allen later described it thus: “Among the last of the proud, old sailing ships, she lay fast in the sand, broken in two with a pile of coal two stories high; masts, spars and sails toppled and her cargo of coal dumped to the center holding firmly the fore and aft. The beach was strewn with wreckage and coal.”

The area where it had met its fate, known at the time as Garibaldi Beach, soon changed its name to Rockaway, and settlers began to swarm in. The wreck on the beach awaited them, with its wealth of salvage. The pioneers stripped it of its copper, selling it for scrap, and after each storm collected the coal that washed up. The sands eventually crept over the old wreck, hiding it from view most of the time, but even today residents will sometimes find coal after a storm.

 

  

A few weeks ago the Emily Reed made one of its rare appearances, for only the third time within my memory. I took the opportunity to make the drive to the beach and take the pictures featured on this page, and the occasion became a spontaneous family reunion! My parents were there, and my uncle and aunt also drove down to see the reclusive shipwreck.

Selected Sources:

“Disastrous Shipwreck,” The Argus, 19 Feb 1908, p. 7, col. 8; digital images, Trove (http://trove.nla.gov.au/ : accessed 2 Apr 2017), Newspapers: The Argus (Melbourne, Vic.: 1848-1957).

“Eleven Lost on Emily Reed,” The Spokesman-Review, 15 Feb 1908, p. 17, col. 1; digital images, Google News (https://news.google.com/ : accessed 2 Apr 2017), The Spokesman-Review: Jun 16, 1889-Dec 31, 2007.

“Emily Reed Disaster,” The Sydney Morning Herald, 11 Jun 1908, p. 8, col. 6; digital images, Trove (http://trove.nla.gov.au/ : accessed 2 Apr 2017), Newspapers: The Sydney Morning Herald (NSW: 1842-1954).

“Perils of the Sea,” Barrier Miner, 6 Apr 1908, p. 6, col. 6; digital images, Trove (http://trove.nla.gov.au/ : accessed 2 Apr 2017), Newspapers: Barrier Miner (Broken Hill, NSW: 1888-1954).

Lori Tobias, “Shifting sands reveal 102-year-old shipwreck off Rockaway Beach,” The Oregonian, 29 Dec 2010, online archives at OregonLive (http://www.oregonlive.com/pacific-northwest-news/index.ssf/2010/12/shifting_sands_reveal_102-year-old_shipwreck_off_rockaway_beach.html : accessed 2 Apr 2017).

“Survivors of the Emily Reed,” Lewiston Evening Journal, 18 Feb 1908, p. 1, col. 5; digital images, Google News (https://news.google.com/ : accessed 2 Apr 2017), Lewiston Evening Journal: Apr 20, 1861-Jul 26, 1980.