52 Ancestors 2025: Institutions - Finding Relatives (or Not)

A few weeks ago, while researching my grandfather’s story, I started looking more closely into his “step-family.” The 1940 census showed that Stephen Reed was living in St. Joseph, Missouri, with his identified wife, Margaret, and her two daughters: Dulcie, who was 20 and listed as married, and Rose, age 15. To learn more about this new family, I began digging further.

I discovered that Dulcie later remarried, and Rose appeared in the 1950 census living in a residential nursing home. I also located her death certificate from 1973. Census records labeled her as “unable to work,” but there’s no clear explanation as to why. What we do know is that by 1950, she was no longer living with family. This prompted me to explore the types of institutions that existed at the time for adults with special needs, whether due to physical or mental impairments.

Historically, Americans who were infirm, physically disabled, or mentally challenged, young and old, were often kept out of sight, either housed by family or placed in almshouses. Some were cared for by religious or charitable institutions. A significant change came with the passage of the Social Security Act in 1935, which provided assistance for older Americans. This spurred the development of more independent residential homes, and it appears that Rose was living in one of them.

The 1950 census lists her as a lodger in a nursing home operated by a widow named Aletha Wells, who lived there with her father, Wayne Urquhart (also widowed). The home was a large Victorian brick house, formerly the Henry Mayer House, likely typical of older residences that had fallen out of fashion and were subdivided into boarding arrangements. Although the federal government had started providing grants for hospital-affiliated nursing homes a few years earlier, homes like this remained common.

The Wells home had 13 lodgers. With the exception of Rose, who was just 25, the others were all aged 75 to 93. This type of institution resembled a rooming house more than a modern nursing facility. Residents lived in individual or shared rooms, used common bathrooms, and likely ate meals prepared by a hired housekeeper. Medical care would have come from local doctors making house calls. The round-the-clock nursing care we now associate with nursing homes typically didn’t exist outside of hospital-based institutions at that time.

The Wells nursing home faced challenges after 1950. Wayne Urquhart died in 1952 and Aletha in 1956. After her death, the home likely became nonviable, leaving the lodgers to find new arrangements. Some may have found other boarding houses, some may have transitioned to more formal care facilities, and some were probably taken in by family. That last option appears to have been Rose’s fate.

At some point after 1950, Rose returned to live with her mother, Margaret Branstuder Stephenson Blanton, and stepfather, Oscar Blanton, in St. Joseph. She died there in 1967. Margaret passed away in 1974, and her sister Dulcie in 2007. We still don’t know the nature of Rose’s condition, but clearly she needed support, whether institutional or familial, for much of her adult life.

One of my goals in exploring this branch of my grandfather’s extended family was to learn more about Rose and ensure that her story was not lost. Through census records, death certificates, and FamilySearch entries, I’ve been able to help restore her rightful place in the historical record.

52 Ancestors 2025: DNA – New Mysteries

My previous interactions with DNA were all in the lab—learning the structure of the bases, snipping strands, and isolating them from bacterial fermentations. But these “blueprints of life” have become a powerful tool for genealogists, too. So, my wife and I took the plunge: we ordered his-and-hers 23andMe kits, spit into the tubes, and sent them off and eagerly awaited the results.

Her results arrived first and weren’t especially surprising. With grandparents who emigrated from the region now known as Poland (a country that technically didn’t exist in its modern form in the early 1900s), it was no shock to find her DNA was nearly 100% Eastern European—mostly Polish, with a significant Lithuanian component. (Comment: “We paid $50 to find out I’m Polish?”)

Given how fluid the borders have been in that part of Europe, it makes sense that her genetic matches spilled outside modern Polish boundaries. But the results did solve one mystery. When her maternal grandfather arrived in the U.S., the ship’s manifest listed him as “Hebrew.” That was likely a clerical error, as there were no Ashkenazi Jewish markers in her DNA.

My results, however, answered a few questions, and raised a few more. As expected, my background came back as almost 100% Northwestern European, primarily British and Irish. Maybe that explains why I get misty-eyed when I hear bagpipes or old English folk songs, and why I find comfort in drab, rainy days.

But one unexpected result caught my attention. With so many known ancestors from France, Belgium, and the Netherlands, it was puzzling that there were no genetic markers tied to those regions. Perhaps those lines were simply diluted over time. There were, however, markers associated with the Rhine River region—fitting, given the prominence of the Rhenish Palatinate in my genealogical research.

The real surprise? My German ancestry appears to be primarily Bavarian. I haven’t found any records of Bavarian immigrants in my tree (at least not yet) so it’s back to the records to explore some German lineages in greater depth. Perhaps I need to be on the lookout for Anglicized surnames that could provide clues.

I haven’t yet started comparing my results with those of various cousins, but that may be the next step. One thing’s for sure: this isn’t the end of the DNA story. Our children and grandchildren now carry this genetic legacy forward into the next generation, and maybe they’ll be the ones to unravel the remaining mysteries.

52 Ancestors 2025: Oldest Story

 

One of the things I’ve been learning as I dig deeper into my family history is that some ancestral lines trace their American origins back to the early 1600s in New England and New Netherland. Yet these stories were never passed down—those early immigration tales simply faded from family lore. Even many of the migration stories, including trans-Appalachian journeys, just trail off somewhere.

Another thing I’ve discovered is that some earlier genealogical research took fanciful turns. I can’t possibly have that much royal blood in my veins! Message boards often post warnings about early 20th-century genealogists-for-hire who told clients what they wanted to hear, latching onto prominent names here and there. One tree on FamilySearch even went all the way back to Adam and Eve—though my genetic tree places “Eden” firmly in Africa.

But one family line seems to have preserved its stories: my maternal grandmother’s family, the Fasts. They were immigrants from the Rheinpfalz (Palatinate) region in what is now Germany. After arriving in America, they settled in Frederick, Maryland, and later in southwestern Pennsylvania. I’ve written previously about one noteworthy member of the family, Christian Fast, but for the most part, they were ordinary farmers descended from modest villagers. Still, their story managed to survive through the generations.

Maybe the annual family reunions, held in two family centers in Ohio and Missouri, helped keep those stories alive. Or perhaps it was the work of a few dedicated family historians who wrote down what they knew and gathered records. In any case, these stories, dating back to the 1700s, remain part of our family’s living memory.

They also serve as a reminder of the pitfalls of incomplete stories or sloppy research. For years, it was assumed that the “Fast” surname originally was “Faust”—a name loaded with literary and cultural baggage (think: Doctor Faustus, a Faustian bargain). One family historian from the Ohio branch even changed his surname to “Faust” and published a well-known book found in many genealogical libraries: By Way of Rotterdam by Wirt G. Faust.

The story went that Nicklaus Faust (later anglicized to Fast) married Cadarine Danner and emigrated from Zweibrücken to the New World. But since no records could be found in Zweibrücken, despite repeated searches, another cousin, Robert Fast, found a more likely candidate while on a business trip to Germany. He located records for Nicklaus Fast of Göcklingen, who married Catharina Dörner of Ilbesheim. They sailed to America on a ship that also happened to carry a man named Nicklaus Faust—hence, the source of the confusion.

Of special note: one privately published Fast genealogy observed that John Jay Fast, the great-grandson of Nicklaus, married Hannah Robbins Day, described as “of New England stock.” Hannah’s Puritan New England roots open up another fascinating set of stories—fodder for a future set of blog posts.