Guiding Questions

 

 

Evidence & Interpretations

     In December 2005, Mike was scratching his head trying to figure out what the blazes happened to Nellie Kinsman Lang after she divorced Frank Lang in the winter of 1871.  Four years before, in December 1866, Nellie had arrived freshly married from Michigan, babe in arms.  Now, in winter 1871, she was on her own, with two small daughters to shelter and feed -- 4 year-old Jennie, and 2 year-old Nellie.  

     All Mike knew was that little Jennie survived to become his great-grandmother.  By the mid-1880s she was married to Cornelius Sullivan and raising a family.  But what happened to Jennie's mother Nellie?  What did life hold for her and her girls after the series of disasters culminating in her divorce in 1871?  He had no idea.

     The only bits of evidence he had to go on were the faded memories of one of Frank Lang's old neighbors in Minneapolis (a man named John Alexander) who thought maybe that Frank's first wife died a long time ago, and her children raised by surviving relatives.  This was from an affidavit in Frank Lang's pension file.  Mike figured Nellie died in the 1870s or early 1880s. 

     Then, later in December 2005, Mike discovered that Nellie was still alive in 1900, and still living with her daughter Jennie, along with her son-in-law Cornelius Sullivan, and her seven Sullivan grandchildren in Northeast Minneapolis.  By now she was a widow, "Nellie Bla---" ("Blaine"?  "Blair"?), listed as head of household (along with Cornelius, in the same dwelling place), worked as a cook, and was able to read but not write.

    Then, in January 2006, Tom found a series of entries in the Minneapolis city directories showing Nellie living with Cornelius and bearing the name "Nellie Blowe" (or "Ella Blowe"), the widow of "Louis."

    "Nellie Blowe"??  It certainly matched the 1900 census.  But what kind of a name was that??  

     Then, later in the winter of 2006, Tom found the unlikeliest of news articles on Nellie Blow's third marriage -- from the Iowa City News in August 1916, for some crazy reason on the Ancestry.com database. 

     Tom says he knew, in his bones, that Nellie had lived to a ripe old age, and he was right.  With the information from the Iowa City News it was easy to find her death certificate. 

     Thus we discovered that Nellie (Ella) Kinsman Lang Blowe Church lived until 1927, dying just a few months shy of her 80th birthday.

     So now the puzzle became figuring out what happened to Nellie and her girls from January 1871 to the year 1900.  A big blank for nearly three decades.  Three decades!  How did they survive these years?  Where did they live?  What did they do?

      With their newly purchased Ancestry.com subscription, Mike & Tom looked & looked for Nellie and her girls.  Nothing seemed to fit.  In the 1880 census, Mike came across an 11 year-old Nelly Lang in Northeast Minneapolis with exactly the right personal data, but living with her "grandparents" in a situation that made no sense for his Nelly Lang:  

     Alabama?  Canada?  There was no Alabama or Canada connection that Mike knew of.  Besides, where was her sister Jennie?  So Mike kept digging.

     Then, in one of those magical "aha!" moments that all genealogists dream about, Mike was searching for the surname "Blowe" in the 1860 census (Nellie's second husband's name) when he stumbled across the following entry for a family in Anoka County:

 

     Mike's eyes just about popped out of his head.  Bailey T. and Margaret Baldwin, living with two boys named Blowe???  Bailey from Alabama?  Margarette from Canada?  The same Bailey T. and Margaret Baldwin listed as the "grandparents" of 11 year-old Nelly Lang in 1880?  Boys of the right age for one of them to have grown up and become our Nellie's husband?? 

 

     Bingo!   

 

     Thus was discovered a new and unexplored path in the quest to discover something of the shards of Nellie and her girls' lives after the catastrophe of Frank Lang and Hastings.

 

     This page once included all the relevant documentary evidence we had unearthed on the lives and times of Nellie and her daughters Jennie & Nellie (Jr.) from their arrival in Minnesota in December 1866 until Nellie's death in 1927.  That was before we decided to put most of this material on another page devoted to the bleau-rossignal-baldwin families, in effect emptying out much of this page. 

 

     So the purpose of this page changed.  Now we mostly assume our knowledge about the Bleau-Rossignal-Baldwin's, and instead focus more on the Sullivan's, and (to the extent the evidence permits) the Sullivans' relationship to the Bleau-Rossignal-Baldwin's.

     As best as we can tell, what happened is the following:

          1871-1874   Nellie and her girls move from Hastings to Minneapolis.  Nellie meets and marries Louis Bleau (b. 1852).  Like Nellie, Louis can neither read nor write.  Unlike Nellie, he is half Native American Indian, the son of Métis parents (both half French and half Ojibwe) Marguerite Bourdon & Antoine Bleau dit Rossignal.

     Through her marriage to Louis, Nellie and her girls become enmeshed in a much larger kinship network centered on Bailey T. Baldwin (b. Alabama, 1820), his wife (and Louis's sister) Marguerite Bleau Baldwin (b. Red River Territory, Manitoba, 1824) and their children and extended kin and friends.  This has become one of the most fascinating parts of the story:  tracing these French-Canadian Ojibwe-Métis kin networks that Nellie married into when she married Marguerite Bleau's younger brother Louis Bleau.

     How did Nellie and Louis meet?  One plausible scenario, hatched almost entirely from Mike's imagination but consistent with everything else we've learned, runs something as follows:

The year is 1872.  Nellie is desperate - divorced with two small daughters, no skills, no resources, so social support network of any kind.  She needs friends, social connections, a larger extended family.  Without them it's unlikely she'll survive another winter.

After divorcing Frank she heads toward Minneapolis, where most of the jobs are, seeking employment as a live-in domestic servant.  The rail and river corridor along the Mississippi River from Hastings through St. Paul to Minneapolis is developing rapidly in these postwar years.

1873 Map of Minneapolis, www.mhs.org

Bailey T. Baldwin probably takes the train frequently from NE Minneapolis to Fort Snelling V.A. Hospital, to treat his eyes, his hernia, and his other ailments.  Blind, lame, and obese, he needs help moving through the station, getting onto the train, and finding a seat.  He's also harmless and charming, with his Southern drawl and good-natured solicitations of the aid of passersby. 

Eight years later, in 1880, Nellie will be working as a live-in domestic servant in Richfield, only a few houses down from the Fort Snelling V.A. Hospital and right next to the train station.  Her daughters Jennie & Nellie will be living in NE Minneapolis with the Bleau-Baldwin families. 

Bailey's need for assistance every time he gets on and off the train tends to draw strangers to him.  To Nellie and her girls, with their fresh memories of Frank Lang's horrible abuse, the kindly, portly, blind, disabled middle-aged man from Alabama represents no danger or threat.  A harmless, charming stranger. 

Maybe one of the girls is drawn to him.  Maybe Jennie asks impertinently, "Mommy why can't that man see?" or, "Mommy is that man really blind?" and Bailey responds with good-humored charm, a conversation is sparked, and the acquaintanceship is on.

Maybe after bumping into her once or twice on the train, and with Nellie hungry for social connections and fishing for an invitation from a decent and kindly man who obviously knows a lot of people, Bailey invites Nellie for supper.

And maybe this is how Nellie meet Margaret Baldwin's younger brother, the "half-breed" Louis Bleau.

          1873-1878   Big financial Panic of 1873, major economic depression through most of the 1870s.  During this same period a major conflict erupts between Irish and French-Canadian parishioners of St. Anthony of Padua Catholic Church in NE Minneapolis.  The church breaks apart in late 1870s, with French Canadians moving to nearby Our Lady of Lourdes, and the Irish retaining control of St. Anthony of Padua.  Part of a larger set of ethnic conflicts unfolding in NE Minneapolis during a period of explosive urban growth and economic depression.  (Research Note:  We need to find out more about this religious-ethnic conflict.)

         1871-1885   The dozen-plus years that the Bleau-Baldwin family was crucial in helping to raise and care for Nellie's daughters Jennie and Nellie.

        1874   Boxing Day (December 26):  Nellie's second husband Louis Bleau is stabbed to death at a holiday dance in Centerville, Anoka County, Minnesota.  Nellie, her belly swollen with child, perhaps witnesses the event.   Her second husband murdered!

          1875   Nellie bears her third daughter and names her after her late husband:  Louise Blow.

        1875-1879   Widow Nellie Kinsman Lang Blow probably working as a domestic servant, and her girls probably living partly with her and partly with their new grandparents, Bailey T. & Marguerite Baldwin and their extended family in NE Minneapolis.

          1880   The girls (Jennie, 14, Nelly, 12, Louise, 5) are living in Minneapolis as members of the Baldwin-Bleau family network.  Their mother Nellie Blow, 32, is working as a live-in domestic servant in Richfield, adjacent to the Fort Snelling barracks, and presumably commuting weekly by train along Hiawatha Avenue to stay in close touch with her girls and the Baldwin-Bleau family.

          ca. 1883   Jennie Lang, 17, marries Cornelius Sullivan, 24, a lone Irishman who recently migrated to Minnesota from Maine.  They set up house in NE Minneapolis.  Mother Nellie Kinsman Lang Blow, 35, moves in with them. 

            1885   Nellie Blow and Cornelius & Jennie Sullivan are living together in NE Minneapolis.   Nellie's daughter Nelly Lang, age 15, is working as a domestic servant down the block with the Stockton's.   Daughter Louise Blow, 10, is living nearby with Edward & Adelaide Thibodeau, probably friends of the Bleau-Baldwin's (see the mysteries of edward thibodeau).  The basic picture is of a partially broken family being held together mostly by the force of Nellie's will.

          ca. 1883-1905   A 20-plus year period in which Nellie lives with Cornelius & Jennie and their growing family.  Jennie starts having kids in 1886 and stops nine years, four girls, and three boys later.  By 1900 there are ten people in one cramped house in NE Minneapolis -- seven kids, two parents, and one grandma.  Grandma Nellie, still illiterate, works as a cook.  Cornelius exerts a strong ethnically Irish identity, and his wife Jennie, we suspect, does not push back, having learned as a small child not to challenge powerful and assertive men.  The Sullivan's develop a family fiction that they are 100% Irish.  In fact Jennie is half English, half German, and their children thus only half Irish..  

          The simmering Irish-French Canadian ethnic conflict makes for a potentially divisive set of relationships between the Sullivan clan and the Bleau-Baldwin clan.  Sometime in the 1890s, Nelly Lang marries "Ace" Atkins, an Anglo from Vermont.  Perhaps she opts out of this ethnic conflict, choosing neither side.  Louise Blow probably marries (see 1916 Iowa City News article, below), but when and to whom is not known.  Perhaps she embraced her French-Canadian heritage of the Bleau-Baldwin's, and rejected the Irish heritage of the Sullivan's.  All remain in NE Minneapolis, as far as we know. 

 

     So for the three daughters, the hypothesis is:  Jennie assumes more of an Irish ethnic identity, Louise gravitates more toward the French-Canadian, and Nelly adopts neither.

          ca. 1906-1915   Nellie, ages 58-67, moves out of Jennie and Cornelius's house and in with her granddaughter Mary Sullivan Church (Aunt Maime) and her husband Henry Church in SE Minneapolis.

          Aug 1916   Nellie, 68, marries Charley Church, 53, Henry Church's father.   Her marriage to her granddaughter's husband's father – Maime's husband Henry's father Charley -- creates a very confusing set of relationships, a circumstance so peculiar that it hits the wire services as a queer "human interest" story, sandwiched between oddball snippets about 100 year-old pickles and human manikins.  By this time Nellie remains close to only one of her daughters:  Jennie.  The other two, Nellie and Louise, don't even come to the wedding.  Probably for a combination of reasons – ethnic, religious, personal – both are mostly estranged from their mother.

          1916-1927    Nellie and Charley live in NE Minneapolis till Nellie's death on March 29, 1927.

         1920s-1930s   By now all the Sullivan kids have carved out their own lives.

         

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     These census pages suggest that Nellie & her daughters lived near downtown Hastings near the Mississippi River and railroad tracks, in an ethnically-mixed working-class district, with hotels and grocers nearby.  We exclude Frank from this observation because Nellie's divorce papers suggest that Frank was nowhere to be found when the census-taker came around in summer 1870, and that Nellie provided his personal data.