The Hyphen Family Lineage

Note: Researching Minerva M. Swain and family

I have not found much information for Minerva, owing mostly to her death in her mid-twenties, after which her husband left for other parts of the country while their sons Rufus and Roy went to live with other family members - first with their maternal grandparents, Stephen and Sarah (DeWitt) Swain, and later with Minerva's younger sister Norma (Swain) Grush and her family.

For Minerva, the only confirmed records I have found for her are the 1880 US Census record for her parents' household, her 1897 marriage record, the 1900 US Census for her own household (with her husband and her oldeset son), and her Indiana Death Index record from 1903.

Establishing her husband's identity has been a challenge; in their marriage record, he is named Bertram J. Clark, son of George Clark and "Maria Mecland" (later determined to be Harriet Mechling), born in Adams Cty, Indiana, and age twenty-four at the time of the wedding (just a few days before Christmas 1897). I have not managed to locate any records that I can confirm belong to his parents, though I would have expected to be able to find them (with their young son Bertram) somewhere in Indiana in the 1880 US Census.

In the 1900 US Census listing for the household her shared with his wife and son, he was named "Bert Clark," an Indiana-born twenty-six-year-old farm laborer. By 1910, Minerva had died, and their sons were living with Minerva's parents. I had not been able to find records for Bertram initially, until the 1917 World War I draft registration card for Rufus named his closest relative Bert Clark of Chicago, Cook Cty, Illinois, with an address on Waveland Avenue. Incidentally, Bertram's draft registration card gave his name as "Bertram Joaquin Clark," and named his second wife (Mary Clark) as his contact. The address Bertram gave on the card was the same as the one listed for "Bert" on the card for Rufus, providing confirmation of the connection.

Bertram remarried in 1907 in Kane Cty, Illinois to Mary Louise Gerschwiler, the Iowa-born daughter of Casper Gerschwiler (possibly a Swiss immigrant arrived in Louisian in 1854, and a veteran of the Civil War who served in the Union Army from Missouri) and Katherine Reichert (his younger bride, born in Milwaukee, Milwaukee Cty, Wisconsin). After that 1907 marriage record and the 1917 draft card, the next record I have found for Bertram is the 1920 US Census listing for this household - naming him, Mary, and their eleven-year-old Illinois-born son Ogden, and placing them in Chicago, where Bertram worked as a letter carrier for the Postal Service. I have not found listings for the family in either the 1910 and 1930 Censuses, but the family appears again in Chicago in the 1940 US Census, this time with Ogden as the only one given an occupation (file clerk). Mary died in 1944 in Chicago, and Bertram (misnamed on the record as "Bertrand") appears to have died a year later in Los Angeles Cty, California. After the 1940 US Census listing, I have not found further record of Ogden, though Bertram's obituary indicates that he survived his father.

Returning to Minerva's sons, Roy died an untimely death when he was crushed by a rail car at a stone quarry a few months before his seventeenth birthday. Rufus married in 1922, and had three children prior to his death in his mid-forties. All three of his children married (two of them a week apart in March of 1943), and at least two of them had children of their own to continue Minerva's line.