Seeking and Finding Nellie with the Help of Ancestry.com

By Michael J. Schroeder

September 2007

A couple of years ago I was scratching my head trying to figure out what the blazes happened to my great-great grandmother Nellie Kinsman Lang (b. 1848) after she divorced Frank Lang (Franz Lange) in January 1871.  Four years earlier, in December 1866, Nellie had moved from Burr Oak, Michigan to Hastings, Minnesota, babe in arms – that babe being my great-grandmother Jennie Lang.  Now, in the biting cold Minnesota winter of 1870-71, the young mother Nellie was on her own, with not one but two small daughters to shelter and feed – Jennie (4) and Nelly (2).

All I knew was that little Jennie survived to become my great-grandmother.  By 1885 she was married to my great-grandfather Cornelius Sullivan and raising a family in the Irish section of Northeast Minneapolis.  But what happened to Nellie?  After she divorced Frank Lang she seemed to vanish into thin air.

I had no idea.  I also didn't have a subscription to Ancestry.com, and was pretty much of a greenhorn when it came to hard-nosed genealogical research.  The only evidence I had were the faded memories of one of Frank's old neighbors in Minneapolis who thought maybe Frank's first wife died long ago and her children raised by relatives.  This was from an affidavit in Frank's Civil War pension file.  I figured maybe Nellie died in the 1870s or 1880s.

Then a kind and generous collaborator whom I'd met online via Ancestry's message boards sent me the 1900 census page from Northeast Minneapolis listing Cornelius, Jennie, and their seven children – and Nellie!  Holy smokes!  Pouring over the page I tried to absorb the changes of the preceding 30 years.  By now she was a widow, Nellie Blowe, head of a household along with her son-in-law Cornelius, sharing the house and working as a cook.  Most important, I learned that Nellie in 1900 was living with my then nine year-old grandmother, Genevieve – the woman who six decades later taught me about the sweet taste of applesauce and the meaning of love.  To learn that Nellie had helped to raise Grandma – what a treasure it was to learn that!

Then my brother Tom found a series of entries in the Minneapolis city directories showing Nellie living with Cornelius, under the name Nellie Blowe (or Ella Blowe), widow of Louis.

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

Then, searching Ancestry.com's databases Tom found the unlikeliest of news articles, describing in some detail Nellie Blow's third marriage -- from the Iowa City News of August 29, 1916.  To this day I have no idea why this obscure newspaper page sits poised to be lit upon in the Ancestry.com database, but I'm sure glad it does!

Long before finding the Iowa City News article, Tom said he knew in his bones that Nellie had lived to a ripe old age.  He was right.  With the information in the article we easily found her death certificate.  Thus we discovered that she lived until 1927, just a few months shy of her 80th birthday.  The next spring Tom found her gravesite, which we reckoned hadn't been visited in over 70 years.  Another real treasure.

So now the puzzle became figuring out what had happened to Nellie and her girls from winter 1871 to summer 1900.  A big blank for nearly three decades -- three decades!  How did they survive?  Where did they live?  What did they do?

With our freshly purchased Ancestry.com subscription (by now convinced it was well worth its modest price), we looked and looked for Nellie and her girls.  Nothing seemed to fit.  In the 1880 census we found an 11 year-old Nelly Lang in Northeast Minneapolis with exactly the right personal data to be our Nellie's daughter, but living with her "grandparents" in a situation that seemed to make no sense:   with one Bailey T. Baldwin, 60 years old and born in Alabama, and his wife Margaret Baldwin, 57, born in Canada.

Alabama?  Canada?  There was no Alabama or Canada connection we'd ever heard of.   Besides, where was Nelly's sister Jennie?  So we kept digging.

Then in one of those magical "aha!" moments that all genealogists dream about, I was searching for "Blowe" in the 1860 census when I came across a family in Anoka County (just north of Minneapolis) that included Bailey T. and Margarette Baldwin, three Baldwin children, Ekan Blowe, 15, and Felix Blowe, 13.

My eyes about popped out of my head.  Bailey T. and Margaret Baldwin, living with two boys named Blowe?  Bailey from Alabama?  Margarette from Canada?  The same Bailey 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 grow up and become Nellie's second husband?

 Bingo!

Thus we 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 her marriage to Frank.

Since then we've learned a great deal about Bailey T. Baldwin and his wife Marguerite, from many different sources, many in Ancestry.com.  One Ancestry friend contributed an extraordinary item – a long feature story in the Minneapolis Tribune dated Sunday, July 2, 1899, profiling the remarkable lives of Bailey T. Baldwin and Marguerite Bleau dit Rossignal Baldwin.  You see, Marguerite's first husband had been the brother of Pierre Bottineau, famed in the history of the Upper Midwest as an Indian scout and guide.  It turns out that Marguerite and Bailey had led exceptionally eventful lives.  These really were some remarkable people.  And their lives entwined with Nellie's in some pretty complicated ways.  Family life, as we all know, is rarely simple.

Whatever happened to Louis Bleau, Nellie's second husband?  That's been a big mystery.  Then just a couple of days ago, a dear friend I'd met months earlier via Ancestry.com's message boards sent the answer:  Louis Bleau was murdered, stabbed to death at a holiday dance on December 26, 1874 in Centerville, Anoka County, Minnesota.   At the time his wife Nellie's belly was swollen with child.  She was probably at the dance with him.  She may have seen it happen.  What a horrible episode.  We look forward to uncovering newspaper stories and, we hope, court records describing the event.   But mostly we look forward to finding something that will shed additional light on the life of this still enigmatic character.

            Nellie gave birth to her third and last child, the daughter Louis Bleau never lived to see, in 1875.   She named her Louise Blowe.   What happened to her remains a mystery.  In 1880, at age 5, she was living with her two half-sisters in the home of Bailey's son William; in 1885, with another French-Canadian family in Northeast Minneapolis, not far from Bailey and Marguerite and their "granddaughter" Nelly Lang.  After this Louise seems to vanish, just as Nellie seemed to vanish (in our understanding) a couple of years ago.

            The mysteries endure.  But the process of finding answers also endures.  And that process of discovery is made exponentially more powerful with tools like Ancestry.com's robust search engines, expansive databases, and easy-to-use message boards.  Simply put, this kind of work would not be possible without Ancestry.com.  Every advance we've made in understanding Nellie's life has resulted, directly or indirectly, from Ancestry's resources.  This is not a sales pitch.  It's the truth, pure and simple, from a dogged researcher who's glad to say he's cut his genealogical teeth on the wonderful services offered by Ancestry.com.

            All of this material is explored at greater length on Mike & Tom's website, FamilyHistoryFiles.com.  Just go to the Documents Home and click on Nellie.

            Thanks for listening and happy hunting!