Selena Severson’s autograph book

Front cover of albumSelena Severson was born in September, 1862, the fourth of five daughters of Sever and Martha Severson. She was only two years old when her father died of dysentery while serving in the Union Army in the Civil War. Despite this devastating setback, the Severson sisters grew up to be strong, successful women.

Selena grew up with her family in Black Earth, Wisconsin, and in 1880, at the age of 18, enrolled in the Wisconsin State College at Whitewater (now the University of Wisconsin, Whitewater), a rural, four-year, co-educational, residential college founded in 1868 as the Whitewater Normal School. While at Whitewater, she earned her teaching certification and then returned to Black Earth to teach for two years.

After teaching in Black Earth, she returned to Whitewater to finish her degree, graduating in the class of 1887. After graduation, she taught for a year in Berthoud, Colorado, then for one year in Fort Collins, Colorado, and then for two years in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Around 1891, Selena enrolled in a medical college for women in Chicago (presumably the Woman’s Hospital Medical College, which changed its name to the Northwestern University Woman’s Medical School in 1891/1892). She was entered in Illinois’ Official Register of Legally Qualified Physicians in 1895. She practiced medicine in Chicago for a time, and then relocated to Madison, Wisconsin, to be near her family once more.

In this post, I’d like to share with you Selena Severson’s 1878 autograph book, which I just finished digitizing today. Transcriptions and analysis of this book will be provided in a future post. Charlie and Nancy Frey generously allowed me to borrow and digitize this book along with Sever Severson’s diary.

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He’s dead, Jim (or, Down a blind alley)

In the last three posts, I laid out the evidence for my hypothesis that my great-great-grandfather’s death shortly before 1900 was a ruse, and that he had instead lived to the ripe old age of 87, dying in 1965 in Denver, CO.

I felt at the time that this was the simplest explanation that accounted for all of the known facts. Over the last two days, I’ve been digging hard and deep into historical documents to fill in the blank spots in the story. The evolving picture was consistent with the posts I wrote about the death being a ruse. As I mentioned in the third and final post, the alternative scenario was that there had been two Gilbert M. Scherers running around at the same time, who just happened to have been born in the same place on the same date, to families which had the same first names, and with only one of these Gilberts at a time being documented in the historical record. To me, that seemed a greater stretch than the faked death story.

But then I stumbled upon this document—an 1870 census return from Smyrna, Iowa—and everything started to fall apart. On this census is a five-year-old boy named Gilbert M. Shearer, a Gilbert M. Shearer who would have been about 13 years older than the Gilbert M. Scherer I had been documenting.
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A Death Greatly Exaggerated, part 2


Warning—the conclusions of this post are now known to be incorrect.  See the “He’s dead, Jim (or, Down a blind alley)” post for details.


In part 1 of this story, I introduced my great-great-grandfather Gilbert Michael Scherer. According to family tradition, Gilbert died a traumatic death shortly before 1900, when he was only about 22 years old or younger. According to his granddaughter, Anna Cornelia (“Anelia”) Hayes, who wrote a history of the family,

“Gilbert Shearer was building a home in Missouri.  He was working on the roof when he fell off across a tree stump, bursting his abdomen open.  He fell from his house while shingling his roof.  He was taken to a sanatorium, but died four days later. He was buried in Edmond Cemetery, 4 miles north of Powersville, MO.”

This would indeed be a sad end to a short life, if the story were true. It is not.

I don’t know if Gilbert fell off a house, or if he landed on a tree stump and burst his abdomen, or if he was in a sanatorium as a result. What I do know is what I’ve learned through my research; namely, that Gilbert did not die in 1900 as the family (or at least some of the family) was led to believe. Instead, he appears to have moved away and started a new life. At least two family members—his mother Emma and his sister Ivy—knew about his second life, and it’s very likely that his younger brother Leslie also knew that he hadn’t died.
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Native Americans on the Askew homestead

This is the second of two Thanksgiving-themed posts for today. I’ve transcribed an article from the 1938 Wadena Pioneer Journal that documents interactions between Col. Joseph Askew’s children and the local Native Americans who passed by his homestead while Isabelle (born 1868) and Wilfred (born 1873) were still in their school years (approximately 1875–1886).

Native Americans in that area travelled on the Otter Tail trail—part of the Red River trail system of old ox cart trails and trading routes winding from Winnipeg, Canada, to the Mississippi river at St. Paul, MN—which passed through the old Joseph Askew homestead, just yards from the front door of their house. Joseph Askew’s daughter Isabelle “Belle” Askew (later Belle Spencer) told about her encounters with Native Americans in the article (the Askew-related portions are in blue).

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Joseph Askew threshing wheat

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone! Today’s post is the first of two Thanksgiving-themed posts. This first post is a harvest-related post, in which my great-great-great-grandfather, Col. Joseph Askew, is seen running a wheat-threshing operation in Minnesota in the late 1800s.

Before I go any further, I’d like to acknowledge the Wadena County Historical Society and their Executive Director and Curator, Rose Bakke. The photo that is the focus of today’s post is one from their Genealogical Research Center collections, and I would not have been able to find it or take a scan of it without the kind and generous help of Ms. Bakke. I spent a full day in their collections, making wonderful discoveries every few minutes, and I left wishing that I had an extra few days to learn even more from their impressive collections. The Wadena County Historical Society’s Museum is an inspirational place, and I’d like to sincerely thank Rose and everyone who’s had a hand in building, curating, indexing, and databasing their collections for keeping Wadena County history alive.

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Joseph Askew’s 1875 homestead (part 1)

Yesterday all I knew of the location of Joseph Askew’s homestead was that in the spring of 1875, immediately after arriving from Gosforth, England, via Liverpool, New York, and Duluth, Joseph claimed his homestead about five miles east of Wadena. This evening I learned exactly where his homestead was, after finding his 1882 homestead certificate in the U.S. General Land Office records.

In this post, I’d like to share my findings with you—both the homestead certificate and the location of the Joseph Askew homestead.

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Mary E. “Mate” Scott’s obituary (1943)

Mate Scott (aka Mrs. A. D. Peck) was the older sister of my great grandfather Frank Scott. I’m posting her obituary here because when I found it inside a ca. 1895 bible, it added information to the story of Frank and Mate’s father, Horace L. Scott. In an earlier post on Horace Scott, I stated that he died in Alden, Illinois (where he’s buried), at some point between the 1870 census and the 1875 Minnesota census. That was about all I knew about his last years. Facts presented in his daughter’s obituary help fill in some of the blanks. Continue reading