Forestville stories: The Coveys, plus some research notes

The Covey family. Back row, L-R: Ella, Daniel, unknown, William, unknown, Phillip, unknown. Middle row, L-R: unknown, Sarah, Uriah, George. Of the two boys on the sides, one is Harmon and the other is James. The unidentified women are likely Ann, Clara, Lizzie and Amanda. Photo courtesy Ancestry.com.

To wrap up this series, I wanted to write a little bit about the Covey family, since the street I grew up on (Covey Road) was named for them. I’ll also include some information at the end about where I got the information I’ve included in these posts, as it was a challenging process and I might be able to make it easier for future researchers. 

The Coveys

To start with, “Covey” can mean a couple of things. In earlier English, the word describes a small flock of birds; a covey of doves or quail, for example. As an Irish surname, it comes from Mac Cobhthaigh, meaning "son of the victorious one." I didn’t trace this family’s ancestry back far enough to figure out which one applies here. But, given that the Coveys had almost a dozen children, a “small flock of birds” seems an apt description. 

Uriah Covey was born in April 1832 in Ohio; his wife, Sarah Ann Purvis, was born August 20, 1838, in Memphis, Missouri. Uriah’s family moved to nearby Clark County, Missouri, when he was a young boy, and he and Sarah married in the state in either 1856 or 1859. 

It’s not clear what drew them to California, but Uriah was appointed to serve on a Sonoma County grand jury in September 1869, and the 1870 census shows them living in Healdsburg along with seven of their children: Ann, 14; George, 13; Clara, 9; Ella, 7; Daniel, 6; Phillip, 4; and Lizzie, who was an infant. 

Uriah seemingly always worked as a farmer, which isn’t surprising given Forestville’s agricultural focus. At least some part of that work involved raising chickens or other birds: “Mrs. Uriah Covey has lost a goodly number of poultry from some cause unknown,” The Healdsburg Enterprise reported briefly in 1889. 

By January of 1874, Uriah was buying up land in Forestville, according to real estate records from the Sonoma Democrat and other local papers. An 1898 map shows that he owned a large parcel just south of the Russian River and just west of Green Valley Creek, near the north end of Martinelli Road today. 

Detail from an 1898 map showing Uriah Covey’s land claim (upper right) and others along the Russian River, including the Ridenhours. Photo courtesy the David Rumsey map collection.

In the late 1870s, Uriah felled an old-growth redwood tree on his land and donated the wood for the construction of the Forestville Church of Christ, specifically its sanctuary and bell tower. Although the church is still standing, it was heavily damaged by a fire in 2019. 

Living near the Russian River and Green Valley Creek had its flood risks, then as now, particularly during the heavy winter rains. “If you wish to know about high waters in this locality, get Uriah Covey interested and he will tell you all about it,” the Healdsburg Tribune, Enterprise and Scimitar reported March 23, 1893. 

Growing up in Forestville in the 1870s when the population was small, many of the Covey children wound up marrying kids from other local families. Ella married Edward Lee Ward, who was born in Forestville in 1858, when it was barely a smudge on a map. 

Daniel, Amanda and William Covey married children of the Ross family, for whom Ross Road and Ross Station Road, just south of Forestville, are named. And James Covey, the baby of the family, born in Forestville in 1880, married Annie Ridenhour, whose family owned land between Forestville and Guerneville. 

In 1919, William and Hattie (Ross) Covey bought the house at the corner of Covey and Davis streets built by Thomas Linton on the Davis land in 1902. This may ultimately be why the road was named Covey, which didn’t get that name until sometime in the 1930s or 1940s; before that, it was called East Street or Foerster Street. 

Uriah and Sarah didn’t live to see their name immortalized; he died in 1909 at age 70 after a long, undisclosed illness, and was buried in Forestville’s Forestview Cemetery. He willed his property and their house to Sarah, who lived until 1921, when she died at age 82 and was buried alongside her husband. 

The last surviving children of Uriah and Sarah lived until 1957. Harmon, born in about 1877, died in May 1957, and his sister Amanda died about two months later. Both are also buried in Forestview. 

Forestville Church of Christ in March 2024, courtesy of Google Maps.

Research and process notes

I used a handful of main sources to trace the histories in this series: Historical maps, deed records, genealogy records, and historical newspapers. 

Historical maps for Forestville are difficult to come by, though there are a handful, particularly on the David Rumsey map collection website. Those maps helped me get some of the names of people who owned the land my family lived on, even if a) the roads weren’t all there and didn’t have their current names, b) the maps were very generalized, and c) most don’t show any structures. 

The Sonoma County Library’s historical archive does have two Sanborn fire insurance maps of Forestville, and Sanborn maps show structures, but they were limited to the town center and didn’t show the areas of town I was most interested in. 

Deed records from the mid-1960s to the present are available to research by the computers at the Sonoma County Recorder’s office, and earlier ones are digitized and available online at this link. This was painstaking, but the most important, work. I needed to know the names of potential owners and roughly when they might have purchased or sold the land, which both genealogical and newspaper records helped with.  

Once I had names, I could use genealogical records (I prefer Ancestry.com, despite its ownership), such as census, marriage and death records, to fill out the details of each person’s life. I also researched them in the invaluable California Digital Newspaper Collection. Luckily, early newspapers had a legal obligation to print real-estate transactions and often had room to report everyday events, such as Malcolm Melville’s larger-than-average egg or Levi Davis’ theories on carp management. And they also offered key details like the location of the Lehn family home, along with deaths/obituaries and family tragedies. These are the kinds of stories that make history more real and engaging. 

There’s also a book I found useful at certain points: “Images of America: Forestville” by Penny Hutten and the Forestville Historical Society,” published by Arcadia Press in 2008. Although it’s incomplete, this volume offers a look into the early days of Forestville, using many family photos in the historical society collection that aren’t available elsewhere. 

If you’ve made it this far, thanks for reading. I’ve enjoyed putting these stories together and going deeper into my understanding of the town my family called home for almost 20 years. 

Forestville stories: The Davises, the Lintons and the attempted murder-suicide

Left: Rebecca Lakey and Levi Davis. Right: Lydia Davis with her grandmother (and Levi’s mom), Rebecca Jack.

Content warning for discussion of domestic violence and suicide. 

Levi Davis wasn’t the first settler of Forestville, but he was one of the early ones. 

Born in Indiana in 1822, he married fellow Hoosier Rebecca Lakey in 1842, when she was 15 and he was 19. They lived in Missouri for several years before arriving in California and settling in Petaluma with their flock of eight children. Their youngest, Lydia, born in 1865, made nine. 

Levi was a farmer, which meant he could pick up and move just about anywhere there was good land. By 1870 the Davis clan was living in Forestville, across the street from where the El Molino/Laguna High School campus sits now. Davis Street is named for them. 

I should point out that the Southern Pomo were living happily on the land along the Russian River for thousands of years before settlers arrived, tending the river and the redwoods, including the areas that later became Forestville. This was not untouched, vacant, free land, and probably most of Forestville (like most of Western Sonoma County) was covered with redwoods before settlers came. 

One of the first settlers was Captain Juan Bautista Rogers (J.B.R.) Cooper (brother-in-law to General Mariano Vallejo), who set up shop northeast of town along Mark West Creek in 1834 and built a water-powered sawmill that hastened the destruction of the redwoods. In the 1860s, saloonkeeper Andrew Jackson Forrester purchased 100 acres of land, set up a new saloon and hotel, and named the town (Forrestville, at first) after himself. 

As other settlers arrived, early roads were laid out, and were usually named after whoever built a house there. Travis, Templeman, Anderson, Ross, Covey and Van Keppel roads (and many more) all got their names this way. 

The Davis house in roughly 1890.

Levi built his house on the northwest corner of what became Covey and Davis roads and set up a small farming operation, along with an unusual business: carp ponds. He and neighbor John Reeves Hassell Oliver established large ponds full of the fish for people to purchase and eat. 

In a July 1878 letter to the Santa Rosa Press Democrat, he wrote that Oilver’s carp were suffering. They drained the main pond and found “four ‘water dogs’ (salamanders) and one mud turtle, all of which I think have been living on his young fish,” Davis wrote. The carps’ breeding rates had declined dramatically, and two fish had their tails bitten off. “The necessity of a close watch over our fish ponds is thus apparent. — There is nothing wrong with mine.” 

Lydia and Thomas

Lydia was very young when her family moved to Forestville, and it was likely the only home she could remember. I couldn’t find much information about her early life. Her family doesn’t appear in the 1880 census, and most of the 1890 census was lost in a fire in 1921. 

But in 1889, when she was 24, she married Thomas Linton, who was born in September 1861 outside of Bloomington, Indiana, and arrived in California with his family around 1870. They were living in Vallejo when Thomas’ dad, Sanderson Linton, died in 1871. A few years after Thomas and Lydia married, they bought 15 acres of land in Forestville from George Nathaniel Schaumberg. It was part of a larger parcel that had changed hands a number of times since the 1860s, according to the earliest surviving maps. 

In 1886, the block of land between today’s Covey and Travis Roads, and between Highway 116 and roughly Anderson Road, was owned by a man named Whitney. By 1867, a man named Williams’ name was stamped on the same region. Before 1884, someone named D.T. Callahan acquired it, and they sold it to Schaumberg that year. In 1895, Thomas bought the 15 acres from George, but also sold George about 3.5 acres in a land swap, according to real-estate listings in the Petaluma Daily Morning Courier. 

This may seem tedious, but it was all part of my effort to figure out who, ultimately, built the house my family lived in in the 1980s and 1990s. By working both forward through time, starting with Cooper and Forrester and Covey (I may get to the Covey family in another post) and backward from my family to Malcolm Melville and Minnie Lehn Winkler, I eventually worked out the most likely answer: The Lehns. 

Back row: Lydia Davis and Thomas Linton with their daughter, Maude Grace. Front row: Rebecca Lakey and Levi Davis. Mid-1890s.

But just up the street from the Lehns, the Davis-Linton household was busy. Lydia and Thomas adopted a baby girl, whom they named Maude Grace, who was born in San Francisco in 1891. I can’t help but wonder if she was born to one of the women or girls in the San Francisco Magdalen Asylum. It’s a distinct possibility, but there’s probably no way to find out. 

In 1901 and 1902, Thomas sold off sections of his land to the Santa Rosa Bank, William Lehn and Mary A. Jewett, and in August 1902, the Press Democrat reported that Thomas was tearing down the old Davis homestead and building a “new mordern (sic) residence” in its place. 

A year and a half later, in March 1905, Levi Davis died at home, of cancer. “Man Who Imported Carp Passes Away,” the headline read. He was buried in Forestville’s Forestview Cemetery, along with many of the town’s early settlers. 

Maude Grace

Maude was only 13 at the time of her adoptive grandfather’s death, but within two years she was married to Stuart Faudre, the youngest son of a famous local chairmaking family (which briefly operated where the Lehn winery later set up). Maude and Stuart ran off to Portland, Oregon, and eloped on July 12, 1907, when he was 33 and Maude was 15.  

Stuart had already been married once, to a woman named Agnes or possibly Nettie, but they’d divorced by the time he married Maude. And it sounds like Stuart was bad news all around: The Petaluma Argus Courier reported in early July, 1907, that Grace (Maude) was missing and that Stuart had “enticed” her from home. “Last Tuesday evening she went to her room as usual, as if preparing to retire for the night. The following morning she had disappeared, and her room had not been occupied for the night.”

If the marriage wasn’t rocky from the beginning, it soon became so. According to the Press Democrat:

“Then from the lips of other Forestville people it was also learned that Faudre had declared on more than one occasion that he would … shoot his wife and then kill himself. Faudre had lived in the Forestville section since boyhood and his marriage to the young woman … occurred when she was about sixteen years of age. It was an elopement, and had a tinge of romance connected with it. … It is claimed that the marriage was celebrated before Faudre had been divorced from his previous wife for a year. She was a pretty girl and as time passed by Faudre is said to have become insanely jealous of her. She left him on a number of occasions, and he went after her and induced her to come back home.”

In the summer of 1907, Maude began seeking a divorce or restraining order (or both). She traveled north to Ukiah to stay with friends, but Stuart caught up with her on Tuesday, September 14. Before locating her, Stuart purchased a revolver. They were seen walking down Perkins Street together that night when a number of people heard him threaten her. 

She said, “I don’t care if you do shoot me.” A few moments later, a struggle began, and he knocked her into the street, firing a shot at her as she fell. “She pleaded with him not to kill her and started across the street. He shot again and she fell and he ran up and shot again as she lay on the ground begging for her life. Several bystanders ran towards them and Faudre ran across a vacant lot and disappeared in the darkness.”

Bystanders helped Maude get medical care while Faudre ran to an apple orchard about a half-mile away, where he knotted a rope into a noose and fastened it around his neck before shooting himself in the head, ending his life. His family brought his body back to Forestville and buried him in Forestview Cemetery. 

Although the newspaper initially reported that Maude’s condition was such as to give no hope for recovery,” she did ultimately survive the shooting. 

Her attending doctor, named Whitlock, told the Press Democrat that:

“she was shot twice in the back on each side of the spine. One bullet grazed the spine. Neither bullet was located as the result of probing and the use of the X-Ray on Wednesday. Dr. Whitlock stated that both bullets would undoubtedly have gone clear through Mrs. Faudre’s body but the steels in her corset prevented."

Perhaps not surprisingly, Maude Grace mostly disappeared from the public record after the shooting. Even though her abuser was dead, her name had been splashed across newspapers around the region, giving her a kind of notoriety that was undoubtedly hard to live with. She remained in Ukiah for some time after the shooting. 

Maude’s mother, Lydia, died at home on January 9, 1915, a few months after a reported surgery. She was buried in Forestview Cemetery. Thomas got remarried five years later to a woman named Lenora Horr. They moved to Santa Rosa sometime in the 1920s, where he worked as a poultryman. Lenora died in 1944 and is buried in Santa Rosa Odd Fellows Cemetery. 

In November 1942, Maude took out a marriage license with a carpenter named R. George McAlister in Tacoma, Washington, but there’s no definitive record showing whether they ever married. On the application, Maude wrote her name as “Margerate” and said she’d been married once before, but was divorced. She and George had been living at the same address in Tacoma for the past six months. 

Her father, Thomas, died July 29, 1957, at age 95, and joined Forestville’s settlers in Forestview Cemetery. Maude had no siblings, and it appears she had no children. I haven’t been able to find any record of her death, when or where it may have happened. If she wanted a private life after the shooting, it appears she got it. 

More Forestville stories: Who was Minnie Lehn Winkler?

Last week, I wrote that Malcolm Melville and Mary Vargas bought the house I grew up in in 1944 from a woman named Minnie Lehn Winkler. But who was she?

She was born Minnie Stridde on May 23, 1878, in California to Carl Stridde, an immigrant from Prussia, and Marie Gustafsson, an immigrant from Sweden. How they met and married is unclear, but Minnie was probably the youngest of seven children. In the 1880 census, the family was living in Santa Rosa, where Carl was a farmer and Marie was a housekeeper. 

As a young adult, Minnie began working as a teacher in the Star school district, a couple of miles southwest of Windsor and northeast of Forestville. She was a popular teacher; at the end of the fall term in November 1899, her students gifted her a gold pen. The school had just undergone a number of significant repairs thanks to William Lehn, a 32-year-old bachelor whose father, Charles, grew grapes and made wine next door. 

Over the next couple of years, William bought several parcels of land in Forestville on the corner of Covey Road (back then called Foerster or East Street) and the county road (now Highway 116) and got to work building a winery of his own. By February 15, 1902, he’d produced enough bottles of wine — which varietal was never specified — to sell 165,000 gallons to the thirsty denizens of San Francisco. 

I can’t say for sure, but it’s very likely that William, with his new income and his building skills, raised the house on Covey Road where my family lived. Records state that the original structure was constructed sometime around 1900, with significant remodeling in 1920. 

Before Lehn’s winery arrived on the corner of Covey and 116, the site hosted a hotel for early travelers, called the Johnson Hotel for its owner, James W. Johnson. In the early 20th century, Forestville was changing constantly. Lehn successfully petitioned the county to bring telephone service to the town in 1903, and was instrumental in bringing an electric rail line to Forestville not long after, perhaps to help him ship so much wine. Johnson moved the hotel a block or so south, next to the railway, and renamed it the Electric Hotel, which freed up land for Lehn to expand his winemaking operation. 

Meanwhile, a romance was blossoming between William and Minnie, who married January 3, 1907 in Berkeley. Their only child, William Duncan Lehn, was born February 24, 1908. He was probably the first child to grow up in the house I later knew as my own. 

Left: (L-R) Minnie, William Jr., and William Lehn, probably around 1915. Right: William Jr. and Minnie sometime in the 1930s. Photos courtesy Ancestry.com.

The winery endured hardship many times, including in the 1906 earthquake. “The wine tank could not withstand the strain and burst in every direction. I lost in the two cellars about two hundred thousand gallons of wine,” he wrote to a colleague, Leopold Justi, about three weeks after the quake. 

Already, that year’s vines were dry and struggling; someone who’d offered to buy them had backed out. “I believe the best thing is to burn them for I do not believe anyone would buy them at any price.” 

Most years, though, were pretty good for William and Minnie. Newspapers eagerly reported the winery’s impressive output once or twice a year in their occasional “news from Forestville” segments. 

But in September 1915, hardship struck again when the winery caught fire, igniting in the distillery building, damaging buildings and machinery and destroying about 400,000 gallons of wine. Some of that wine, local papers reported, flowed to a nearby hog ranch, where they:

“quaffed copiously and long of the flood of vintage. They drank so much, too, that they became intoxicated so that they could do nothing else save lie down in the crimson stream. The hogs would have been drowned, too, had not the farmer and his men gone to their rescue. They had to be pulled out of the wine, and from Forestville came word Monday that they were still sleeping off their drunk.”

Sanborn map showing the Lehn winery property in Forestville in 1911. The house would have been off the map to the left/north, beyond the cultivated field.

Another misfortune was looming on the horizon. The temperance movement had been building for decades, and several other states had already outlawed the manufacture, sale and purchase of alcohol. Prohibition became law in California on January 16, 1920, wiping out William and Minnie’s livelihood. 

That May, William sold what appears to have been his last batch of wine, according to a local newspaper:

“Word of the sale of another large consignment of Sonoma county wine was told Wednesday by W. D. Wiley, well known Green Valley grape grower and orchardist. Wm. Lehn of the Forestville winery has sold 100,000 gallons of wine at fifty-five cents a gallon, following a previously announced sale of two carloads at fifty cents a gallon. This will be good news to a number of grape growers of the Forestville section, who had their grapes crushed at the Forestville winery last year, the financial return from which depended upon the sale of the wine. Mr. Wiley is one of the fortunate grape growers who disposed of his product in this way last year.”

And in late June 1920, four teens broke into the winery to steal as many bottles as they could get away with, before they were surrounded “by a posse of citizens and taken into custody” and charged with malicious mischief.

In September, William ran a help-wanted ad, seeking a man to assist with farm and ranch work. It’s possible, even likely, that this is when the property began converting to apple-growing. 

On a rainy day in March 1922, Minnie, William, and William Jr. were in a car with their friends, Mr. and Mrs. Charles Newman of Santa Rosa, driving to San Francisco when the car hit a slippery patch of road near San Rafael and went off the road, plunging 20 feet down an embankment. 

William’s skull was fractured and he sustained internal injuries. Minnie’s leg was broken. Charles also sustained internal injuries, and his wife and William Jr. came away with cuts and bruises. 

William died of his injuries the next day. Minnie was hospitalized for months, and finally returned home August 5, 1922; she was still walking with crutches. It’s not clear who looked after William Jr. during this period. 

Love, and perhaps also necessity, led Minnie to remarry in December 1927. Her groom was Edward Winkler, who’d grown up just south of Forestville. He’d been married before, too, to Maude Newell, and they had two sons together, Orlo and Elmer. But by the late 1920s they’d divorced and Maude was living with Orlo in Oakland. After the wedding, Edward and Elmer moved in with Minnie and William Jr. in Forestville, and Edward was employed running a farm operation — possibly at the house. 

William Jr. married Margaret Chalmers when he was 29, and they moved soon afterward to Kings County, California. Minnie and Edward remained in Forestville for many more years, until Edward’s death on July 18, 1942. Minnie, then 64 and potentially still disabled from the crash, probably got tired of rattling around the big old house by herself or struggling to keep up with the farm and home maintenance, and sold the property to Malcolm and Mary in 1944. 

Minnie traveled some in her later years, including to England and Hawaii, and eventually went to live near her son in Kings County, where she died in 1970 at the age of 91. She is buried next to Edward in the Odd Fellows Cemetery in Santa Rosa, while William Lehn rests in a nearby plot. William Jr. died in 1979, at age 71. He and his second wife, Evelyn are buried in Lemoore Cemetery in Kings County. 

An obituary of Minnie’s life confirms that “as a young woman she lived in Forestville at the corner of Covey and Van Keppel roads with her husband, William Lehn, and young son, William.” There’s only one other house on that corner, and it was built in 1952, too late for it to have been their home. 

Next time, I’ll get into the story of Forestville native Lydia Davis, her dad, carp farmer Levi Davis, and her husband, Thomas Linton, who sold the land to Willliam and Minnie Lehn that they built their house on. 

More Forestville stories: Malcolm, Mary, and "Mama" Carr

After my last post about Hichijiro Ito, Tomiye Mizutani and their family apple farm in Forestville, California, my dad and one of our former neighbors reminded me that our properties used to be part of a chicken farm before they were divided into smaller parcels in the 1960s for individual homeowners. 

That sparked another wave of research, and I discovered who lived in our house and ran that chicken ranch: Malcolm Melville (no idea if he’s related to Herman) and his wife, Mary Vargas. 

Malcolm and Mary purchased the land from Minnie Lehn Winkler in October 1944 (we’ll get to her in a future post!). At the time, the land was an apple ranch, according to a family history book titled “The Spilman Papers,” which makes sense, considering that much of the town was apple orchards and there was a fruit-drying operation down the street. They converted the land to a chicken farm in 1949, selling the eggs for “table use,” or home cooking, the history book says. 

On the other hand, the previous owners placed a help-wanted ad as early as 1919, saying they were looking for a husband and wife team to run a chicken farm, so it’s hard to say for sure when it converted from one to the other. 

Let’s go back to the beginning. 

Malcolm Leslie Melville was born in Chicago, Illinois, on January 18, 1897, to James Melville and Nannie Spilman. He grew up in nearby Wilmette, attended New Trier Township High School and, in 1916, went to Clark College in Worcester, Mass. In 1917 he enlisted in the U.S. Navy and served in WWI, becoming a radioman. After the war, he worked as an assistant radioman at Pearl Harbor, then took a job in 1925 with the Associated Oil Company. They brought him to their San Francisco office, where he served as an accountant for almost 20 years. 

His first marriage was to Irene Neff of Nebraska, in 1920; their son, Malcolm Jr., was born in 1921 or 1922. The marriage was brief, and Irene and their son stayed behind in Illinois when Malcolm moved out to California, where he married Katherine Lovejoy Morgan in 1927. But they split up, too, and Malcolm married Mary Vargas on September 26, 1939. 

They were married at A'ts'ina/Inscription Rock in Morro, New Mexico, under the pines in a “simple but impressive ceremony” followed by “a supper in the Custodian’s cabin.” 

Mary was born April 29, 1901, in Brooklyn, a former town in Alameda County, California, that was later annexed to Oakland. Her parents were Joseph Vargas and Rose Victorino, both of whom were born in the Azores. Malcolm was her first husband and, as he worked as an accountant in San Francisco, she worked as a typist. They lived with Mary’s dad in San Leandro. 

It’s not clear what prompted them to leave the big city and gamble on an apple farm in Forestville, but in 1944, Malcolm was 47 and Mary was 44; maybe they felt it was time to get out of the corporate world. As the chicken business spun up and WWII ended, they hired local Japanese-Americans and trained them to raise chickens, gather eggs and handle other aspects of the business. 

One of those workers was Michiko Kameshima, who later became known as Betty Carr; she later founded Forestville’s Carr’s Drive-In with her husband Henry and, later still, Mom’s Apple Pie. She recently died, on May 19, 2026, at the age of 95. You can read her obituary here. 

Betty (Michiko) Carr with a Gravenstein apple, courtesy of the Mom’s Apple Pie Instagram page.

In the early years at least, it seems like business was good. In 1947, a local newspaper reported, “Mr. and Mrs. Melville have been remodeling their home on Covey Road, which is now considered one of the attractive homes in Forestville.”

A few years later, in April 1952, they had a scare when Malcolm was burning brush in the yard and a cinder floated up to the roof, sparking a small fire. A newspaper reported, “Very little damage was done and all was covered by insurance. Mr. Melville had the fire under control by the time the firemen arrived, but commended the boys on their speedy answer to his call. He feels that much more damage would have been done if he had not discovered the blaze in its infancy.”

Malcolm and Mary’s work with Japanese Americans led the Japanese government to invite them to the country to travel around the islands and speak to farmers about the poultry business. They went twice, in 1956 and 1962, for a few months at a time. 

It appears business took a turn for the worse in the mid-1950s; records show that Malcom and Mary remortgaged their property in 1955, 1957, 1959 and 1961. They formally retired from the chicken business in 1960 and sold the land to Katherine Murdock in 1963, when Malcolm was 66 and Mary was 63. Murdock was the one to subdivide the land, leading to a number of new homes built around theirs/ours in the 1960s and ‘70s. 

The couple retired to Medford, Oregon, where Malcom died in 1972 at 75, and Mary died in 1990 at 89. They’re buried together in Siskiyou Memorial Park. 

When we moved into the house, in early 1980, there were few signs of the former chicken farm or even the apple farm before it, aside from a dilapidated shed and a couple of Gravenstein apple trees. One side of the shed became an occasional playhouse for my brother and I and his friends, and we used the other side as a chicken coop for a while, until raccoons came for most of our hens. 

At the bottom of the garden was a concrete retaining wall and patio that extended beyond the fence and to our neighbors’ yard, where a large round basin in the concrete used to be filled with water for the chickens to drink from. It may still be there. 

I’m fascinated by the idea of “land ancestors” — people who had a relationship with a place before we did. These folks are some of my land ancestors, and I love that they had a close and agricultural connection to the place where I grew up.

Next time, I’ll write about the lives of Minnie Lehn Winkler and her first husband, William Lehn, who ran a successful winery in Forestville in the years before Prohibition. 

Folk art of my Pennsylvania Dutch ancestors

Detail from Twenty-Four Original Barn Stars, Surveys of Berks, Lehigh, Schuylkill, and Montgomery Counties. Photo: of Patrick J. Donmoyer.

One of my favorite things about learning about my ancestors is discovering ones with whom I share similar traits. For example, my 10th great-grandfather, Dirck Goris Storm, was a skilled writer who penned a history of the Old Dutch Church in Sleepy Hollow, New York. Last year, I discovered a creative streak on another branch of my family tree. 

It started with a little zine from Leodrune Press that mentioned Pennsylvania Dutch folk art, particularly barn stars (often called “hex signs” by outsiders). I knew that a number of my ancestors immigrated from Germany to Pennsylvania; although some of them were Mennonites who probably wouldn’t have engaged in barn decoration, not all of them were. So, I thought it would be interesting to see if there were any barn star motifs particular to my ancestors or the places they lived. 

I quickly learned that barn-star styles are determined much more by the artist than by the family that hires someone to paint their barns. There’s a popular misconception that these stars were painted on barns to keep witches away (hence “hex signs”) and protect the livestock inside. Instead, they’re more likely inspired by celestial themes that were common among the Pennsylvania Dutch, both before and after they came to the United States. Other patterns of shapes, such as flowers and hearts, are also common. 

(That being said, farmers did hire folk magicians — practitioners of Brauche/Braucherei or “Powwow” — to bless and protect their barns and livestock, and to perform healing spells for sick cattle and other animals. Petitions written on small slips of paper were occasionally found tucked into barn walls and other places, reflecting this practice.)

John Bieber. Chest over Drawers, 1789. 01.13.18.

I didn’t find any barn stars specifically associated with my ancestors, but did find something else: An intricately carved and detailed dower chest made by one of my ancestors’ brothers and nephews. 

My 6th great-grandfather, Conrad Bieber, was born in 1725, probably in Germany. He immigrated to Pennsylvania sometime before 1743. Conrad’s father, Johannes, was also born in Germany and arrived in Pennsylvania in 1739. Conrad had a brother, Jacob, born in 1731 before the family immigrated. 

While Conrad moved to the Shenandoah Valley in the 1750s to join a Mennonite community there, along with his wife, Maria Magdalena Kneisley, Jacob remained in Pennsylvania, specifically in the Oley Hills area of Berks County, and began a woodworking business with his son, John. I knew I had ancestors from the Oley Hills area, and when I searched for the location and the name Bieber, these beautiful wooden chests popped up. 

An article in Reading Eagle about one of the chests reads, “Thinking that John or Jacob Bieber made a mistake with his compass drawing of a perpendicular hex sign, we noticed that this unusual designed chest had six edelweiss flowers sprouting from three white flat hearts on each corner of the dower chest with the elaborate tulip shaped escutcheon design in the middle. They were not barn stars, but an edelweiss flower theme which spread their flower like petals standing upright in each cheek of the flat hearts! A native Rhineland symbol of love used by John Bieber in the 1780s on his dower chests.”

Jacob Bieber, Johann Bieber. Chest over Drawers, 1776. 01.24.22.

A very similar chest is in the Barnes Foundation Collection in Philadelphia. Another similar one, made for Magdalena Leabelsperger, is in the Philadelphia Museum of Art. (I have a 6th great-grandmother named Magdalena Lionsberger, but her birth and death dates are different from the ones associated with this chest). The Barnes collection also has this Bieber chest, which has some different motifs but is clearly from the same makers. 

Although I’ve never been a woodworker, seeing this level of artistry and skill makes my heart glad. It’s an honor — and also reassuring — to know I come from people who enjoyed making beautiful things with their hands. 

The Storms of Sleepy Hollow

Philipsburg Manor, Sleepy Hollow, New York, photographed by Daderot in 2005, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

One branch of my family tree includes many folks who were among the first settlers of the legendary town of Sleepy Hollow in New York. Even better, their family name was Storm. 

A side note before we get started: Sleepy Hollow wasn’t always called Sleepy Hollow. The little village north of Tarrytown was most often called North Tarrytown from its incorporation in the late 19th century until 1996, when it officially changed its name, staking its claim to the Washington Irving story. 

One of my earliest ancestors to settle in Sleepy Hollow (in Haudenosaunee territory) was my 10th great-grandfather, Dirck Goris (or Gorisszen) Storm. He was born in 1630 in Leiden, in the Netherlands. He married Maria van Montfoort in 1655, and they had a son, my 9th great-grandfather, Gregoris Storm, in 1656. The family, including two other children, traveled to North America in 1662; Maria gave birth to a daughter during the journey. 

Before arriving in North America, Storm had served as the Town Clerk for Oss, in the Netherlands. When they arrived by boat -- at the foot of Wall Street in Manhattan -- Storm became involved in local affairs right away. He owned property, including a tavern on Beaver Street, and later served as Town Clerk for communities in Brooklyn. In 1670 he became Secretary of the Colony. In 1691 the British sent him north to Tappan, where he became the first Secretary and Clerk of the Sessions for Orange County, New York. Later that decade, Dirck and Maria were recorded as members of the Old Dutch Church in Sleepy Hollow, not long after the church was built. 

The Old Dutch Church in Sleepy Hollow, built in the 1690s and seen here in a postcard from 1907.

He was also a skilled writer, and the church members asked him to write the history of the church, dating back to 1697. His book, Het Notite Boeck der Christelyckes Kercke op de Manner of Philips Burgh, offers a rare look at early colonial life. He died in 1716, and is buried in Sleepy Hollow. 

The original village was quite small, with several large and active families that sometimes intermarried. My Storm ancestors married Van Tassels at least three times: Pieter Storm, son of Dirck, married Margaret Van Tassel in 1696, and Elizabeth Storm married Lt. Cornelius Van Tassel in 1756. A third marriage played a small role in one of the spookiest stories of all time.  

Sleepy Hollow was well established by 1820 when Washington Irving -- who had lived in nearby Tarrytown and socialized in Sleepy Hollow -- wrote his famous short story about the Headless Horseman. The character of Katrina Van Tassel was inspired by a flesh-and-blood daughter of the Van Tassel family. Although historians believe the actual girl was Eleanor Van Tassel; her aunt, Catriena, inspired the name. Eleanor’s grandparents were Jacob Van Tassel and Aeltie Alberts Storm. They married in 1724 in the First Reformed Church of Tarrytown. 

Dirck Goris Storm’s descendants remained in and around Sleepy Hollow for generations. Gregoris lived in North Tarrytown much of his life and is also buried in the Sleepy Hollow cemetery. Likewise his son, Derck Storm, who was born in 1695 and died in about 1762. His son, Hendrick, was born in 1709 and lived until 1793; his son, Gregorus, was born in 1731, baptised in North Tarrytown, and lived until 1807. Most or all have headstones in Sleepy Hollow. (So does Washington Irving.) 

The latter Gregorus Storm and his wife, Jannitje Williams, had at least three children, including my 5th great-grandmother, Mary Storms, who was born in 1760 in Haverstraw, just up the Hudson River (and on the other bank) from Sleepy Hollow. It’s unclear to me why she went by Storms instead of Storm; her brothers, Jacobus and Johannis, didn’t. Mary married Joseph Allison in 1781 and they had 11 children together. Mary died in 1829. The Allison lineage carried down to my grandmother, Frances Allison Nesbitt, whose middle name comes from that line. 

As with the other ancestors I’ve written about, I’d love to visit Sleepy Hollow, walk the streets they may have walked, visit their bones at the Sleepy Hollow cemetery, and find out just how haunted the village really is.

The Mennonites of Massanutten in the Shenandoah Valley

The White House, built in 1760, photographed in 1929. Built by my fifth great-grandfather, Martin Kauffman Jr., for Mennonite services.

My family tree is (perhaps oddly) full of religious leaders. 

One of my grandfathers was a Southern Baptist preacher, the other a traveling evangelist. My fourth great-grandfather, Robert Frazier Jones, was a Methodist minister who built his own log church outside Atlanta in the early 1800s. 

And several of my ancestors were Mennonites whose parents fled persecution in Europe. These families started out in the Mennonite community in Pennsylvania and ultimately moved south to Luray, Virginia, where they created a Mennonite settlement in the Shenandoah Valley. They included the reverends John Roads, Martin Kauffman, Sr. and Martin Kauffman, Jr. 

Four married couples, my sixth great-grandparents, were among these settlers of the valley next to Massanutten, a mountain named by the indigenous people of the area, most likely the Algonquins. Among them were Joseph Roads and Mary Strickler; Abraham Brubaker and Barbara Miller; Conrad Bieber and Maria Magdalena Kniesley; and Martin Kaufmann, Jr., and Mary Lionberger. 

Their great-granddaughter (and my third great-grandmother), Rebecca Roads, was born in Luray and moved to Licking County, Ohio, where she married my third great-grandfather, Isaiah Winegarner, in 1831. 

Joseph’s father, John Roads, was born in Switzerland in 1712 and immigrated to the U.S. when he was in his early teens. He married Eve Catherine Albright, whose parents were from the village of Gamburg, Germany, and they were among the first settlers of the “Massanutting Colony,” which was established in 1726 or 1727 in Luray. Although the majority of these early settlers were Mennonites, a few were Lutherans or Calvinists, according to the Spring 1994 issue of the Shenandoah Mennonite Historian newsletter. 

The journey could not have been easy. “The Massanutten settlers pushed a hundred miles beyond the Potomac and the frontier settlements into the heart of the wilderness, where they could expect no aid from their friends in Pennsylvania nor from the Virginians across the mountains,” Harry Miller Strickler, one of my distant cousins, wrote in his book Massanutten, Settled by the Pennsylvania Pilgrim, 1726.

“When those Swiss pioneers located this spot they found scenery not unlike their own beautiful Alps in Switzerland, not so sublime probably, not so awe-inspiring perhaps, beautiful scenery nevertheless -- ‘God-like scenery for God-like men for God-like purposes.’ The scenery is too beautiful, and too much like Heaven must be to be described by the most facile pen. So I will not attempt it, but advise you to go and see it for yourself,” Strickler wrote.

There were undoubtedly indigenous tribes living in the area at the time who were, at the very least, displaced by the new settlers. And more settlers kept coming. By 1758 there were at least 39 Mennonite families in the area, including my 6th great-grandparents. Strickler was born in the community. Brubaker was born in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and had moved to Luray by 1750. Miller, too, was living in the settlement by 1750. Bieber and Kniesley were married in Berks County, Pennsylvania, and arrived at Massanutten in 1756. Kauffman was born in Lancaster and came to the settlement before 1740, when he was still a young child. Lionberger was born in nearby Hawksbill Creek, and was living in Massanutten by 1760.  

Both Joseph’s and Martin’s fathers became important religious leaders in the nascent Mennonite Church. But Joseph’s family suffered a significant tragedy. In August of 1764, historians say, eight “Indians” and a white man, who some claimed was Simon Girty, attacked the Roads homestead. They were likely looking for money, as John had quite a bit hidden in a niche in the cellar wall. John and Eva were both killed, along with six of their children; Joseph and six others survived. The attackers set fire to the homestead, destroying it, but the hidden cache of money survived. 

This information comes from A History of Shenandoah County, Virginia, by John W. Wayland, written in 1927, and there’s a similar account in Strickler’s book. While it’s widely accepted that several members of the Roads family died on the same date in 1764, I can’t speak to the accuracy of the details. 

Another view of the White House.

Martin Kauffman, Jr., built a two-story house he called the White House -- because of its white-washed stucco exterior -- in about 1760. The building was used for Mennonite services for many years. In 1770 a new religious man arrived: John Koontz, a Baptist who converted many of the Mennonites to his faith, including Martin Kauffman, Jr. 

When the Revolutionary War broke out in 1775, the Mennobaptist community split; traditionally, Mennonites are pacifists who don’t support war. “Martin Kauffman, having first been a Mennonite ... retained most of their principles after he became a Baptist. These principles caused a division in the White House Church during the Revolutionary War, and Kauffman became the minister of a small number who did not believe in ‘slavery, war, or oaths,’” according to Strickler’s book.

Martin Jr. and many others created a new church, the Mennonite Separate Independent Baptist Church, resuming services at the White House. He also petitioned the General Assembly of Virginia for a military exemption similar to the one given to Quakers and traditional Mennonites, but the petition was denied. 

The separatist church began to disintegrate, but Martin Jr. and some of his followers moved away from the Shenandoah Valley, starting a new community called New Lancaster (now simply Lancaster) in Fairfield County, Ohio. His White House remains standing in Luray, and was listed in the National Register of Historic Places in 2013. And my Winegarner ancestors -- dating back to Isaiah Winegarner and Rebecca Roads -- have been in Ohio for generations. 

While this group of Mennonites eventually led to the birth of my great-great paternal grandfather, Cyphus Winegarner, others descended from the same community are also found in my paternal great-grandmother’s line. Blanche Barr, who married Cyphus’ son, William Winegarner, is descended from Mary Strickler, who was part of the Shenandoah Valley Strickler clan, and from David Pence and Barbara Ruffner, whose families also lived in the Massanutten colony. It’s clear that the folks who left the colony remained close after relocating to Ohio, intermingling and marrying for at least a couple more generations. 

I have never been to Virginia, but would love to visit the area my ancestors lived. In addition to the White House, there’s some indication that a few of the other original homesteads are still around, possibly including Hope Farm, which was built on the land where the Roads family was burned. Those who were killed in that incident were buried near the banks of the Shenandoah River, just downhill from the house. I hope their spirits are at peace.

The Nesbitts of Berwickshire and County Down

My grandmother, Frances Nesbitt, was born in November of 1908 to Frederick Nesbitt and Louise Howell. But I didn’t learn until I was an adult that Nesbitt was the name of a longstanding Scottish clan with a lot of history behind it. 

The name is associated with the lands near Edrom in Berwickshire, Scotland, close to the English-Scottish border. Historians believe the name may have come from a geographical feature in this area; “nese” means “nose” in Middle English, while “bit” means “mouthful,” “piece of ground,” or possibly “bend.” The family name dates back to at least 1160, when William de Nesbite was listed as a witness to a charter by Patrick, Earl of Dunbar to Coldingham Priory.

The Nesbitts established two fortified houses in the 12th century, East Nisbet and West Nisbet. East Nisbet, now known as Allanbank, was located on the Blackadder Water near Allanton, although the original tower no longer exists. West Nisbet remains, and was extended in the 1630s to form the bulk of the present house, located in the Scottish borders. 

(There’s also a Nesbitt Castle in Zimbabwe, which was built in the 20th century by Theodore Albert Edward Holdengarde and then restored by Digby Nesbitt, a businessman from southeastern Zimbabwe.)

Nesbitts have two clan tartans, a primary one and one for dancing/performance, plus a badge that features a boar and the phrase “I byd it,” meaning “I endure.”

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Nesbitts pepper Scottish history, participating in the wars of Scottish independence and the Scottish civil war. Alexander Nisbet wrote a definitive book on the history of heraldry. His son, Philip, was knighted; he was later captured in battle and executed in Glasgow in 1646. Two other sons, Alexander and Robert were killed in the Scottish civil war. In the 1700s, some Nesbitt families moved to Ireland, and later to North America. 

My ancestors were part of this migration. I can trace my grandmother’s lineage back to what is now Northern Ireland; her grandfather, James Corry Nesbitt (that’s him with the tartans, above), was born in November of 1847 in Clanmaghery, a village in Tyrella, Ireland, and came to the U.S. in 1866, when he was 19. He moved to Ohio, where he met and married Elizabeth Woollard in 1880. According to the 1880 census, he and Lizzie lived at 260 East Town Street in Columbus, Ohio, and he worked as a dry goods retailer. The 1900 census shows James and Lizzie living with her parents at 247 East Broad Street in Columbus, and his occupation as “traveling salesman.”

Much of the 1890 census records were famously destroyed in a fire in 1921, but in those intervening years James and Lizzie had at least one child, my great-grandfather, Frederick Cookman Nesbitt, born in January 1881. In 1910 James and Lizzie were still living with her parents; he’s listed as working as a “com traveler” for a “cerfiet house” (if anyone’s got guesses, please comment below). They remained living at the Broad Street house in the 1920 census, after Lizzie’s parents had died, and James was working as the treasurer of an organization; which one isn’t listed. James Corry Nesbitt died in October of 1928; Lizzie lived until March of 1948.

James’ ancestors, including his father, William Nesbitt; his grandfather, Robert Nesbitt; his great-grandfather, also William Nesbitt; and his great-great-grandfather, James Nesbitt, lived much or all of their lives in Ireland, particularly the Woodgrange area of County Down. With the elder James the trail goes cold. We don’t know when or where he was born, or when he died. His son, William, was born in 1730, ostensibly in Ireland, and died in 1798 in Woodgrange. 

James’ father, William, came to the United States for at least a couple of decades. In the 1870 census he, and his wife Margaret, are listed as living in Ward 6 of Brooklyn; his occupation is listed simply as “Laborer.” They are shown living with their daughter, Ellen, and a 21-year-old William Nesbitt, likely a nephew or grandson. In the 1880 census, he and Margaret are shown living at 89 Carroll Street in Brooklyn, still with Ellen and William. He has no occupation identified, although by that time he was nearly 70. He died in 1888 at Clanmaghery. Clanmaghery Road, now also called the A2, still runs through Tyrella today.

I have not visited these regions of Ireland, though I’ve been to several other parts. Someday I’d like to see Tyrella and Woodgrange, and walk the coast near Clanmaghery Road. I’d like to visit the remaining Nisbet House and explore Berwickshire. I wonder if it will feel familiar.