The Hyphen Family Lineage

Note: Researching Walter Richard Huss

Establishing Walter's birth year has been somewhat challenging; his gravestone is engraved with the year 1882, while his WWI Draft Registration card gives his birthdate as 11 Mar 1884. His marriage record from 29 Aug 1910 reports his age as twenty-seven, with a birth year of 1883. The census records from 1910 through 1940 have his age recorded as twenty-seven, thirty-eight, forty-eight, and fifty-eight.

It is important to note that there another man in the same county of similar age and nearly identical age - Kansas-born Walter H. Huss (b. 1879, d. 1906), son of Benjamin and Mary Huss. I have not looked to see if there is a familial relationship between the two men.

Walter's first marriage was in 1910, to Laura (Courtney) Foreman, a widowed mother of three mostly-grown children; Walter was more than a decade younger than Laura. According to Laura's obituary from 1932, she was survived by Walter, her three children from her first marriage, and an adopted daughter, Pauline Huss. Pauline first appears in their household in the 1920 US Census, and was there in the 1930 US Census as a teenager. She married in 1933, and named her parents Walter Huss and Laura Courtney. I am uncertain as to Pauline's actual parentage, as I have found no birth record or other information.

In the months that followed Laura's death, Pauline married, and Walter's son Robert Huss was conceived with Edith Durr, a young woman of twenty (nearly three decades Walter's junior) who had until recently been an inmate in the Indiana Girls' School penitentiary in Wayne Twp, Marion Cty, Indiana. A user-submitted family tree on the FamilySearch.org website indicates that Walter and Edith married "about 1932," but I have been unable to find any marriage record for them. Edith married on 7 Nov 1936 to Orville Newton Aker, and on her marriage license she gave her surname as "Huss," indicated she had been married once prior, and that the marriage ended in divorce in October 1936. Conversely, Walter and his son Robert can be found in the 1940 US Census in Bluffton, Wells Cty, Indiana, with Walter giving his marital status as "divorced."

I have not found further indication that Walter married again at any point after 1940, nor whether he had any children beyond Pauline and Robert.