On the back of the above photograph is written, “Graydon about 1913.”
Graydon Clemson Crawford was born in Jasper County, MO in 1893 to Clemson Sheffield Crawford (1871-1961) and Lucy Gray (1872-1948).
The below photograph shows “Pvt Graydon in Georgia” but it is undated.
According to the Malheur Enterprise of 15 April 1916, “Graydon C. Crawford arrived from Boise last Saturday to assume his duties as assistant cashier of the Bank of Jordan Valley. He is quartered at the Jordan Valley Hotel.” In August 1919 he married Doris Cecil Dinwiddie, the subject of a previous post. In the Census of 1920 Graydon and Doris were living in a home they owned free of mortgage in McDermitt, NV where Graydon was a bank cashier. In the Census of 1930 the couple and their two children, Joseph Clemson and Jasmine Laura lived in Boise where Graydon was employed as an accountant for “gen motors”.
By 1932 Graydon had taken a job with the Internal Revenue Service and was an agent in Dallas, TX. In 1934 Graydon was living in Tyler, TX and still an IRS agent. The below photograph below depicts the family in Tyler, TX in September 1937. Joe Clem, as he was known, was 17 and Jasmine was 11.
In 1954 Graydon’s job was “Chief, Intelligence Division, Internal Revenue Service” at the office in Tyler, TX and he made $9600 per year. By 1958 he headed up the Tyler, TX IRS office. The following photograph was probably taken during that time.
I haven’t yet found information about Graydon’s death or where he and Doris are buried.
Doris Cecil Dinwiddie was born in 1893 in the town of Jordan Valley, OR, and died in Austin, TX in 1968. On the back of this photograph, which will be displayed at the bottom of this post, someone wrote some helpful biographical information. She married Graydon Clemson Crawford (1893-??) in 1919 and they had two children. We’ll learn more about Doris and Graydon’s journey in upcoming posts.
Her father was Joseph Milan Dinwiddie (1851-1918). He moved to OR from Indiana with his parents in the early 1850’s and eventually farmed a “section” of land (640 acres) adjoining the town. He also operated a “first class hotel and livery barn” in the town.
There were three photographs of the Dinwiddie Ranch in the dozens of photographs I picked up at an antique store in Baltimore. Each one had a description written on the back.
“D Dinwiddie, Jordan Valley, Ore x Grandfather Dinwiddie, Dinwiddie Ranch” Grandfather Dinwiddie, identified by the “x” over his head, must refer to Doris’ father.
“Haying on Dinwiddie Ranch, Jordan Valley, Ore”
“Dinwiddie Ranch first feed in morning taken about 22 mch south side only 1/5 cattle in sight”
Here are two photographs of Doris’ brother, Rufus Milan Dinwiddie (1896-1974):
Rufus spent April 1917-May 1919 in the U.S. Army. In the U.S. Census of 1930 Rufus was enumerated as “widowed” in the household of his father-in-law Charles H. Catlin in Kelso, WA. He married Catlin’s daughter, Florence J., in 1925 and she died in Portland, OR in 1929. He later married a woman named Margaret Edith whose maiden name I have not yet discovered.
Zora Elinor Dinwiddie (1888-1965) was Doris’ and Rufus’ big sister. In the undated photograph below she does not look someone to be trifled with. Her history is confusing. She was married to George W. Spencer in 1906 and they had three or four children before he died at some point before the U.S. Census of 1920. She married a man named Hutchinson and they had a child who was named Milan after her father. She married Robert Lantz in Reno in July 1942 and divorced him in October 1944. She married Theodore C. Baland in August 1952 in San Fransisco and that is where she died. A note on her findagrave.com memorial page, #87841940, states: Cemetery Records indicate that Zora was cremated at Cypress Lawn Cemetery in Colma, San Mateo County, California. However, her ashes were released to relatives. The location of her ashes is unknown.
Doris had another sister, Elsie Lenore Dinwoodie (1890-1983), and two siblings who did not survive infancy.
The following is the reverse of the portrait of the lovely Doris Cecil Dinwiddie. The handwriting looks masculine, so I am guessing it was written by Doris’ son, Joseph Clemson Crawford AKA Joe Clem. We’ll learn more about him in an upcoming post.
This photograph of the lovely Alice Lydia Gilbert was in a pile at an antique shop in the Hampden neighborhood of Baltimore. On the back someone had written her name, “Alice Gilbert Siddall” and there was a stamp from Brown Photo Service, Minneapolis, MN with the date 7 February 1945.
Who was she and how did her photograph get from Minneapolis to Baltimore? My first tools, ancestry.com and findagrave.com were no help to me. I was looking in MN, for one thing, and combinations of what were apparently two last names got me nowhere. But google.com brought up one hit on the name as shown: An item in the Chester County (PA) Law Reporter of 21 May 2015 concerning her estate listed her name as “STRAY, Alice G., a/k/a Alice Gilbert Siddall Stray, late of Exton, Chester County, PA.” We were on our way.
Alice was born in Chester County, PA, in 1915 and lived there all her life until she died in 2015. According to her obituary, available on her findagrave.com memorial page, she had a long career as an elementary school teacher and was deeply involved in the civic life of her community. Alice survived two husbands, John Edward Siddall (1913-1984), whom she married in 1938 and with whom she had two sons, and Carston Sigvald Stray (1906-2003).
She graduated from West Chester State Teachers College in 1936. Her profile in the yearbook, The Serpentine, listed her nickname as “The Mill” (her father was a miller all his life) and her “Feature: Conscientiousness and domesticity.” Here is her photograph in the yearbook:
I ran across some society page articles which demonstrated a relationship between her parents and some Flickingers. I blogged about a photograph of Walter Flickinger in November 2015. Both photographs were purchased at the same antique shop, so perhaps they originated from the same estate.
I never was able to discover what she was doing in Minneapolis in 1945. She appears to be dressed in formal attire, so maybe someone was getting married.
The above 8×10 photograph has a small note taped to the back:
Albert Lee Stone (1881-??) married Carrie S. Wade ( 1884-1942) in about 1905 and they had seven children, one of whom was Randolph L. Stone (1908-1964).
After weeks of not being able to find out who Albert’s parents were (the 1890 Census is lost to us and I cannot find him in the 1900 Census), it dawned on me that the unnamed Grandpap looked familiar. See the resemblance to Daniel and Ella who were subjects of an earlier post:
Daniel Louis Stone had only one daughter, Jessie E., so she was probably the author of the notes on the back of each of these photographs, but I have not been able to find her after the 1900 Census when she was about 15 years old.
Here is another, undated photograph of Albert Lee Stone:
This head shot appeared in the The Baltimore Sun of 29 August 1935 accompanying an article entitled “Man Missing For Week Is Sought By Family.” According to that article and others, the police were called when customers at Albert Lee Stone’s meat market in the 1100 block of Light Street in Baltimore waited for over an hour without being served on the morning of 22 August 1935. “Occupants of nearby stores told the police that Stone had delivered an order to a nearby restaurant then dropped out of sight, leaving his automobile parked in front of the store.” On 24 August 1935 the Sun reported that “His wife, Mrs. Carrie Stone, was in a highly nervous condition at her home, in Glen Bernie, fearing that her husband, who was in good health, had met with foul play.”
Equity docket case 18523, which I read at the Maryland State Archives, informs that Carrie Stone received a divorce from her husband in 1941. Albert was declared “judicially dead” in 1969 when his children sold some land he had owned. In depositions it was said “he went to work and didn’t come home” that day and was never heard from again. (msa_cm96_000005)
Here is the kicker: According to the Social Security Applications and Claims Index, an Albert Lee Stone who was born in Maryland on 12 February 1882 died on 29 September 1944. According to Albert’s WWI draft registration card he was born on 12 February 1881, and it isn’t uncommon for there to be such a discrepancy in these dates.
Same man? I didn’t try all that hard to prove it one way or the other. Sometimes mysteries never get solved.
It is a mystery to me that a small bunch of documents remain together through who-knows-what-all turbulence and upheaval to be found by me in an antique store. I mean, I know how it happens, technically: someone dies; someone wants to dispose of unwanted possessions; someone performs the service of removing that stuff; someone tries to make a buck buy selling it to me. The mystery is that of all the documents associated with a life, these few somehow come through. Whatever fates made it possible, I’m glad to have spent a few hours looking back at Carrie’s world 83 years ago.
When Mrs. Carrie V. McKnew Day Cramblitt (1866-1937) wrote her step-daughter, Mrs Hilda May Cramblitt Klages (1896-1970) on 25 August 1933 it was a little over three months after the death of her husband and Hilda’s father, Arthur T. Cramblitt (1861-1933) and two days after a horrific hurricane struck the Maryland and Virginia coasts.
Leonard Walton Cramblitt (1884-1942) and Walter Dewitt Cramblitt (1888-1948) were Hilda’s brothers. Another brother, here unmentioned, was Robert Moore Cramblitt (1888-1865). Carrie was not the biological mother of these Cramblitt children, having married Arthur T. Cramblitt in 1918. The children’s mother, Molly/Mollie Moore, died in 1899. Arthur, Mollie, and Carrie are buried together in Mount Olivet Cemetery, findagrave.com memorials 34413134, 34413140, and 34413135.
Arthur T. Cramblitt was a carpenter. It is easy to imagine that their house in Cedarhurst on the Bay was filled with “the work of his hands.”
Carrie’s description of the storm might seem exaggerated but contemporary descriptions in the Baltimore Sun prove it was quite severe. An editorial on 24 August said, “A wind of violence unequaled in recent memory tore into the beach resorts of Maryland and Virginia and immobilized all water traffic inside the Capes.” A 4 September story reported that MD Governor Ritchie had tasked State Conservation Commissioner Swepson Earle (his obit) to assess the damage. Earle reported hundreds of Chincoteague Island ponies had drowned, leaving only three, and that erosion caused by the storm resulted in the loss of about 1200 acres of land.
I don’t know who Pauline is, probably a neighbor. Shady Side would have been the location of the nearest post office.
Carrie listed her address on the back of the envelope. In the 1930 Census she and Arthur were listed as residents there and her biological son, Milton R. Day, was the head of household.
The other documents in this small batch were associated with Hilda:
A certificate of the marriage of Hilda May Cramblitt to Vernon Charles Klages (1894-1945) on 6 June 1918.
A certificate attesting to Hilda’s confirmation by John G. Murray, Bishop of Maryland.
A couple of letters and documents pertaining to Vernon’s death and burial. Vernon died on 16 August 1945 after the E.H. Koester Baking Company truck he was driving struck a streetcar on Hanover Street in south Baltimore. Hilda tried to sue the E. H. Koester Bakery and the Baltimore Transit Authority for damages. Hilda’s lawyer dropped her case after George Pollar, a passenger on the streetcar, lost his own suit on appeal in 1947 because the court found that Vernon was responsible for the crash.
Victor Joseph Crepeau (1922-2007) enlisted in the U.S. Army Air Corps 1941 after graduating from Mt Carmel High School and attending college for one year. When he enlisted his “civil occupation” was in the “Actors and actresses” category. [The photograph below carries the U.S. Army Signal Corps watermark because the Signal Corps took the photograph.] Someone wrote “Vic” on the back of one of the photographs of him, so I’ll call him by that name.
Vic survived a crash landing on 2 February 1944 when the B-24J he and a crew were ferrying crashed near Barnstaple, North Devon, England. They got lost in bad weather and ran low on fuel. Vic, a 2nd lieutenant, was the co-pilot. The pilot, 1st Lt Edward M. Coverdill, and navigator, Sgt George R. Kiefer, also survived. Six other crew members were killed. Vic commanded 50 Airlift Squadron from Aug 1961 to Jan 1963. In May 1968 Maj Gen Ernest Hardin, deputy chief of staff for operations, Tactical Air Command, presented Vic with the Bronze Star Medal for “meritorious service against Viet Cong forces” and the Air Medal for “outstanding airmanship and courage on successful missions under extremely hazardous conditions”. Vic retired from the USAF as a lieutenant colonel (O-5) in 1970. When he died Vic was buried at Arlington National Cemetery with full military honors.
Vic spent a lot of time at what is now King Abdulaziz Air Base in Saudi Arabia. Most of the photographs I’ll be posting in the coming weeks were made while he was operating out of that location. Before 1945 it was called Dhahran Airfield as shown in the below photograph of some presumably airfield employees.
The USAF operated the airfield from 1945 until 1962. They put the new name on a new sign.
Here is Vic with two unidentified colleagues. They are wearing Air Transport Command patcheswhich dates this photograph to pre-1 June 1948. Vic and the officer to his left wear pilots wings over their left breast pockets.
I presume the below photographs show Vic in his office at the airfield.
Judging by the style of Arabic script, the below photograph was taken in Iran or Pakistan. The logo to Vic’s left is that of Phillips. The words in Arabic script below the logo spell out “Phillips Radio” in English, a name which was used by the company in the 1910’s. I suspect the interesting thing about the photo was the Arabic script and the Phillips logo.
The next three photographs below were taken in Iran. The first one has “Teheran Hotel” written on the back and the other two have “Teheran” written on the back. The movie “White Cargo” came out in the U.S. in 1942.
The next four were taken in Pakistan and have “Karachi” written on the back, the first one has the additional identification, “Main Street”.
Vic was deployed to, or stationed in Asmara, Eritrea. The reason I suspect he might have been stationed there is that many of his Asmara photos have a stamp on the back indicating the photos were developed there. In this first photo he is a captain (O-3).
The following two photographs possibly depict Kagnew Station, though I was unable to prove so. One of them has the Asmara stamp on the back.
A couple of other photos were quite interesting. Here is on of Vic and three U.S. Army enlisted men. I think they are posing with a C-47. “CBI” on the door stands for China-Burma-India, connecting this aircraft to the India-China Division of the Air Transport Command. All these factors would date this photo between 1942-1946.
I was unable to further identify the symbol .
The following photograph has the Asmara stamp on the back (Foto Stampe Voghti, Asmara), along with Vic’s helpful commentary: Some of our civilian help being taken to Asmara in one of our aircraft. As you can see our planes are not “plush”. This appears to be a C-47.
Finally, the following photograph shows an aircraft with the tail number visible: 49135. According to online records, tail number 49135 was a C-57. There was no further information on the aircraft. UPDATE, 2 June 2016: Tony Cassidy, an Irish historian who wrote “From a Rock to a Hard Place” about the crash which killed U. S. Consul General George Dailey Henderson, informed as follows: 44-9135 (tail # displayed as 49135) was a late-model Douglas C-54E-15-50 construction # 27360 delivered 23 May 1945 to the USAAF and nothing more was known (until your photographs show it to have gone to Air Transport Command).
UPDATE: In August of 2020 I heard from a man in Germany who had purchased the satchel appearing in the photograph below on ebay. He looked Vic up on the Internet and found my blog and wrote to ask for a photograph of Crepeau to display with the bag, which I sent to him, and he kindly gave me a photograph of the satchel.
Those who follow this blog remember two recent posts which came from a big batch of photographs and documents associated with the Upton family, Daniel Stone and Ella Crouse and 1506 Church Street. The family was centered around south Baltimore City and Anne Arundel County. I bought the material at an antique store in Baltimore.
Diving into a big batch of material is a lot more fun than working with one photograph or document. A real family out in the world branches in all directions, but a box of photographs and documents creates a virtual family limited by the interests of, and resources available to the family history buff who originally collected the material.
There were more than 100 photographs and documents in the box. I was working my way around the edges, blogging about people on the periphery of the virtual family’s core as I built a family tree to figure out who everybody was and how they were related.
The photograph that was going to be the focus of my third blog post from this material depicted a bride and groom on their wedding day in 1947 and the bride’s parents. My research led me to discover that the bride is still alive at 93. Then, incredibly, one afternoon as I was boring my wife with the details of what I had learned about the four people in the photograph, she told me she is acquainted with a daughter-in-law of the bride.
After a couple of weeks of exchanging emails with the bride’s son, today I packed up the whole mess and shipped it off him. He is very interested in genealogy and luckily has his mother, and her 91-year-old brother, to help him with his research.
George Albert Winterer (1900-1960) of Pottsville, PA was Chief Burgess of Mechanicsville, PA. He was the son of Joseph Winterer (1868-1924) and Sarah J. Eyler (1871-1955). The three of them are buried in Charles Baber Cemetery in Pottsville.
He married Eva Irene Weiss in 1922 and they had one son, George Allan Winterer (1924-1974). They were still married in 1935 but by 1940 George was divorced and, along with his son, living with his widowed mother. In the late 1930’s he married Elizabeth Katcher and they remained married until his death.
The photo is 2.5″ X 3.5″. I purchased it at an antique store in Baltimore, MD, in January 2016.
***Update on 28 March 2016*** A niece of George’s saw the blog and contacted me. I sent her the photograph on 1 March 2016.
This photograph was in a box of stuff I bought on The Avenue in the Hampden neighborhood of Baltimore. The box contains dozens of photographs centered around the Upton, Griffith, Hahn, and Pumphrey families in Baltimore City and Anne Arundel County, MD.
Pictured are Daniel Stone and his second wife, Ella. This matches genealogical records for Daniel Louis Stone (1852-1918) whose second wife was Ella Crouse (1863-?). They were married circa 1883 after the death of Daniel’s first wife Elizabeth (1849-1881).
According to the U.S. Census, in 1910 four of Ella’s six children were living. Ella’s widowed father, Frederick Crouse (1824) was living with the family as was Daniel’s 13-year-old niece, Lizzie L. Pumphrey.
Ella lived on Light Street in Baltimore as late as 1928, listed as Daniel L. Stone’s widow.
Daniel, Elizabeth, and Ella are listed on a gravestone in Baldwin Memorial United Methodist Church in Millersville, Anne Arundel County, MD. Daniel’s findagrave.com memorial is #64696232.
This undated photograph, probably from the 1920s, depicts part of 1506 Church Street in the Curtis Bay neighborhood of Baltimore City. At first I thought the building was a private residence. It turned out the building is part of a church. Described as a “Greek Catholic Church” in the MD Department of Assessments and Taxation record, it is identified as the Saints Peter and Paul Ukrainian Catholic Church according to this website.
Here is what the building looks like today:
This photograph was in a box of stuff I obtained from Strawberry Fields, the same box where I found the Venice Etta Thayer Steward post card. The box contains material associated with the family of William T. Upton Sr. (1888-1973) and his wife Ruth Ann Griffith (1893-1984). There are dozens of photographs of Uptons and Griffiths, many inscribed on the back by the same hand as the above photograph. Watch for more on these families, unless a family member who wants this material comes forward.
which dates this photograph to pre-1 June 1948. Vic and the officer to his left wear pilots wings over their left breast pockets.
The next four were taken in Pakistan and have “Karachi” written on the back, the first one has the additional identification, “Main Street”.
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