Family Breadcrumbs

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Expanding The 1938 Project

Susan Lebold

Breadcrumbs Everywhere I Look

When I first began to think about taking the 1938 family trip in my campervan and writing about it from a 2023 perspective, I thought I knew who the main characters would be - the five people who took the trip, right? And when I thought about who among the five would be the main character of that story I assumed it would have to be my grandfather Fred. After all, he was the person with the big personality who planned all the logistics of the trip, put together the itinerary, constructed the scrapbook I’m relying on, took most of the photos, and was the primary driver.

Once I started getting to know the five travelers, I found myself gravitating towards my great grandfather Frank. I wanted to know more about him. What made him come to Pennsylvania? Why did he settle in Limestone, New York? What kind of life did he have in his community? What became of his 11 children (three of whom were on the 1938 California trip). As questions stacked up and I searched for answers, I quickly realized that shifting my focus to Frank meant that I was also shifting the stories to include family members beyond the five travelers.

I first learned that Frank had a twin brother William when my parents and I travelled to Sweden in 1986 and did some extensive research in the historical archives in Gothenburg, which is where the official records of Redslared Parish are kept. At that time we were much more focused on John and Frank, who my mother knew well when she was growing up. There were many family gatherings that included the children of John and Frank, and many cousins to play with when my mother was a child.

I hate to admit it but after we returned from our Sweden trip I totally forgot about William until my siblings and I were going through my mother’s boxes in 2021 and 2022. These boxes held all the research she had conducted in preparation for that 1986 trip, and also after returning home. When I saw mentions of William in some of her files, my immediate reaction was “William?” “Who is this William? I never knew about him!” (then I noticed that some of the notes in her folders were in my own handwriting, and yet the facts had still managed to float out of my head over the next 30+ years…) Piecing together sparse references to the William buried in my mother’s boxes, we learned that not only was he Frank’s twin who had come over at the same time as Frank and John, but he had apparently died in a logging accident. That was it. That’s all we knew. For me, it wasn’t enough.

I decided that this was a breadcrumb worth following even if it moved me away from the 1938 travelers. I already wanted to know more about Frank’s decision to leave Sweden and what the brothers did after their arrival in the U.S. I now found myself prioritizing aspects of the family history that had nothing to do directly with the California trip. The seeds of my blog and the broader family narrative took root, and I listened to the various breadcrumbs that were calling to me. The rediscovery of William’s existence symbolized the bigger story that includes Frank, but also the other people who impacted his life and influenced his choices, and who had lives of their own. How old was Frank when he lost his twin brother? What was it like for him to lose his twin at such a young age? Was William married and did he leave a family behind? Where was he living when this happened? “Logging accident” is pretty vague. Could I find out more about what actually happened?

My brother the Ancestry.com sleuth got to work, as did I and we were able to weave important pieces of the story together. It helped to know William’s birthdate since he was a twin of Frank, although we had to verify that he did indeed emigrate with Frank and John. One of my relatives my mother interviewed reported erroneously that he had not emigrated with the other two brothers. (such is the nature of personal accounts and memories - they aren’t always accurate; sadly, even “official” records are not always reliable).

The icing on the cake came when my sister Carol and I were camping and researching in western Pennsylvania. I knew that William had died in Wilcox and was buried there. Carol and I spent a day in Elk County trying to close the loop on William’s story. Our success in doing so was one of the most rewarding experiences we had that week. By the end of that important day, with the help of several kind-hearted people at libraries and historical museums (see my references to these special folks in my Top 10 Tips article), we had learned enough to fill in information not only about the accident, but also who William was as a person living in that community. Before returning to the campsite we made sure to pay our respects to William at the old cemetery, situated on a hill at the edge of this small, somewhat isolated town. William’s gravestone sits all alone, the rest of his family long gone and buried elsewhere.

Even though Will had been gone for 35 years before Frank and the others took their trip to California, I felt strongly that he was someone whose story needed to be resurrected, even if it meant veering away from my original vision for the 1938 Project. This was Frank’s twin brother after all, and everything I know about those Larson boys suggests that his loss affected Frank deeply.

And now you know why I’m giving so much space in my blog to the history of Pennsylvania, the history of the trip from Sweden, and now the first years in the United States. To get to the rest of the story of Will, we first need to understand some additional context as these young men settled and married and began having children.

The Early Years After Costello

When the three Larson boys left for America, two of the three left fiancés behind in Sweden. Frank and John’s plan was to get established quickly in Pennsylvania, then send for the young women. Emma, 20, and Augusta, 28, left Sweden headed for New York in April 1882, accompanied by Emma’s older brother Anders, 24. It appears that John and Frank had left the brand new Costello tannery and logging camp (described in my Getting Started in PA article) by that time and were now working in Sheffield, Pennsylvania, where another very large tanning operation was located.

At its height, the Horton & Crary Company possessed seven different operating tanneries in western Pennsylvania and New York. It is difficult to fathom the sheer quantity of animal hides required to supply these large tanneries that produced the leather that was exported all over the world. The largest of the Horton & Crary tanneries processed up to 350 hides every day. This required 40 railroad cars full of hides to be delivered every 60 days just to the Sheffield location.

To fulfill the unrelenting demand, hides were bought and sold on an international market, and the competition among the leather industrialists when bidding to acquire them was cutthroat. According to historical records, no buffalo hides were ever processed at the Sheffield plant. That was not true in Wilcox, Pennsylvania, however, where William would end up. At that very large tannery, records show that over a five year period 345,000 buffalo or bison hides were processed. The Wilcox plant, in fact, was very proud of its status as the leading manufacturer of buffalo leather during that period. (I don’t know about you, but until I did this research I had never made the direct connection between the extermination of bison herds with the rise of leather production during the industrial revolution - it was a significant and poignant “aha” moment for me.)

John may have had an interest in marrying quickly, due to the scandal he had left in his wake upon leaving Sweden. Swedish records indicate that, back in Redslared Parish, he had promised to marry Josephina Johanson but then reneged after getting her pregnant. Josephina went on to have her baby in March 1880 (John left the parish for America in December of that year), but because the baby was born out of wedlock she was not allowed to give her a proper name. “Oxabeck” (named after the location in Sweden where she was born, with no last name) went on to live a full life despite this inauspicious beginning, and married and had children of her own. Between 1881 and 1884, it appears that John returned to Sweden for a time. Sometime during those years he was both kicked out of his church for his transgression, and then forgiven and reinstated when he made amends and passed a Bible exam.

It appears that Augusta, while married to John, also made at least one trip back to Sweden in those early years because her second child was apparently born in Sweden in 1886. Did she leave John and return to Sweden when she found out about Josephina and Oxabeck? Did John follow her back to beg her forgiveness and make things right with the church? Available records show that John may have been in Sweden in 1884 when Augusta’s first child was born and travelled back to the U.S. that year with his younger brother Linus. When did Augusta go to Sweden and how long was she there? What was the state of their marriage in those possibly turbulent years? After the first two children were born they would go on to have four more between 1889 and 1896 and they stayed married over 50 years. My mother remembered her great Uncle John with loving fondness, although I always referred to him as “the rat John” after learning the story of poor Josephina and Oxabeck. We may never know what really happened, unless one of John’s descendants surfaces and helps fill in some of the gaps!

Frank, on the other hand, seems to have settled in Sheffield for several years while John was going back and forth to Sweden, ostensibly to redeem himself and the Larson name. Frank and Emma married on July 5, 1883, a year after John married Augusta. I believe she probably lived with her older brother Anders during her first year in the U.S. while waiting to get married. Anders accompanied her to the U.S. and the records suggest that he settled in Port Allegany and worked there until Emma was married, after which he returned to Sweden. Anders got married and had a child in Sweden, then returned to the U.S. around 1886 and lived in Limestone, New York, where he had four more children before returning to Sweden, apparently for good, in 1897.

All of the coming and going to Sweden and back during the years these young men and women were marrying and starting families suggests a level of mobility that I had not considered before. For some reason I always thought that the flood of immigrants in the 19th and early 20th centuries were one way journeys, but the departure records in Sweden and the passenger manifests in the U.S. tell a different story of multiple trips back and forth. It makes sense that the work available at that time in the United States was lucrative enough for family members to return to their home countries to see parents and siblings left behind, conduct business, get married, accompany “first-timers” across the ocean, have children, and still have jobs and home bases waiting for them when they got back. The voyage itself in the 1880’s would have taken between 8-10 days from New York to Liverpool, and trains would have been available to get them to Sweden, and then back to western Pennsylvania after returning to the U.S. Affordability would presumably have been a factor for these young adults, but with the volume of traffic between the U.S. and Europe in those years, there was wide variability of prices depending on which direction you were headed, whether you were an adult or child, time of year you were travelling, class of passenger, and even day of the week. I imagine that those who made the trip several times became very savvy with the nuances of finding the best deal, much like frequent travelers today.

Resources

Some of the photographs of Sheffield appearing in this article were obtained from the Warren County Historical Society, Warren County Genealogy, and Sheffield Township websites. On their webpage is the following copyright permission:

Copyright 2008 - 2009 Bill Klauk and the individuals credited for the contribution of specific information contained within the site.
Copyright 2010 - 2012 Penelope Repko and the individuals credited for the contribution of specific information contained within the site.

Unless indicated otherwise in a particular page carrying this copyright notice, permission to use, copy and distribute documents and related graphics delivered from this web server for non-commercial uses is hereby granted, provided that the above copyright notice appears in all copies and that both the copyright notice and this permission notice appear. All other rights reserved.

Special thanks to Bob Imhoff, volunteer historian at the Elk County Historical Museum, for sending me the map of tanneries in Pennsylvania.

Information for the descriptions of the tanneries and life in Sheffield came from the following sources: