In addition to working a family back through time, looking for ancestors and the sources that document relationships and biographical information, I also work forward – trying to identify descendants of each of our lines of the Robbins families – in other words, looking for all the descendants of Jacob and Mary Robbins.  Sometimes you come across a name, perhaps a child listed in a family’s census enumeration, and after being initially stymied in the research, it all opens up.  You discover what happened to them: they married, had children, and have many descendants.  Other times you come across people who are literally the last of their line.  Such is the case of Dean Livington Leete.

To tell the story of Dean Leete we need to begin with his great-grandparents, Nathan Thomas Caton and Martha Ann (Herren) Caton.  Martha was the daughter of John and Theodoshia (Robbins) Herren and was a child when the family crossed the Oregon Trail and took the ill-chosen Meek Cutoff across central Oregon.  The Herrens settled near Salem, Oregon, and there Martha met and married lawyer Nathan Thomas Caton.  Nathan was deeply involved in the early, chaotic political history of the state of Oregon.  He appears to have been a pro-Southern Democrat and served in a number of local government positions (his biography could make an entirely separate post).  Possibly because of his politics he packed up his family and moved to Silver City, Idaho, to run a local newspaper.  Before long he and his family had moved north to Washington Territory, living in Walla Walla and Davenport.  At one point Nathan was the Speaker of the Washington Territorial House of Representatives.

The Catons had four children, three of whom lived to adulthood.  Their son, Edwin Harvey Caton, is the progenitor of all the living Caton descendants today.  Another son George was married and had two children who died in infancy or childhood.  Daughter Martha Livinia Caton was the grandmother of our subject, Dean Leete.  Martha was married to Robert E. Leete in 1877 in Dayton, Washington.  We don’t know much about Robert Leete except that he was born in New York, appears to have died before 1897, and was divorced from Martha by that time.

Robert and Martha Livinia (Herren) Leete

Robert and Martha Leete had one son Claude Caton Leete.  While Martha divorced Robert and moved to British Columbia and later remarrying, Claude was close to his grandfather Nathan Caton.  It was probably Nathan who encouraged his grandson to go into local government.  Claude served as county auditor of Lincoln County, Washington for two years as well as doing other work in the local courthouse.

Claude was married to Margaret Livingstone of Kentucky.  He had met Margaret at a Christian church Sunday School convention held in Kentucky in 1909 that Claude had attended.  Their wedding, following their “romantic” courtship, was actually frontpage news in the local Stanford, Kentucky, newspaper.  The paper reported that after the wedding the couple were returning to “their far western home” while visiting Pike’s Peak and Yellowstone on the way.

Claude and Margaret returned to Washington State, where their only child, Dean Livingston Leete was born in 1914.  Sadly, Claude Leete died in 1916.  Some reports had him dying on the train while returning from visiting his wife’s family in Kentucky, while others have him taking up work in the county courthouse in Tipton, Indiana, and dying soon after.  [In three generations the family had traveled from Indiana to the Pacific Northwest and then back to Indiana!]  Whatever the details, Margaret returned to Washington (not to Kentucky where her family was living) with her son Dean.  When Dean was about fourteen years of age, his mother Margaret died in Spokane.  Again, Dean didn’t return to family in Kentucky but was taken in by an unrelated family in Washington.

My thanks to Livingston family researcher Linde Grace who in trying to find out what happened to her mother’s first cousin Dean was able to piece together much of Dean’s life.  Dean kept in touch with his mother’s family and visited back in Kentucky occasionally.

Dean Livingston (“Lucky”) Leete

Dean Leete attended Washington State College in Pullman where he is found in their yearbooks in the mid-1930s.  Upon graduation he went to work for the American Tobacco Company (in the 1940 census his occupation is listed as “salesman wholesale tobacco) and at that point was living in Amarillo, Texas.  In 1942 he enlisted in the military, serving in Texas, and being honorably discharged with the rank of lieutenant.  It is believed that his nickname, “Lucky”, was given to him by his buddies in the military.

He was married briefly in the 1940s to a woman named Wilma (Pickering) Willard, before they divorced in 1948.  The couple had no children and Wilma passed away in 1966.

Dean was socially active in Amarillo, as evidenced by his many mentions in the Amarillo Globe-Times about his involvement in local theater as an actor.  In 1940 he appeared in a murder mystery titled “Through the Night” and “Flight to the West” in 1941.   He was also a Mason and a Shriner.

Dean Leete passed away in Amarillo in 1978.  When I first located a Dean Leete (not a common name) who died in Texas, I thought I had probably found the right person.  I approached the local genealogy society in Amarillo for assistance.  They were able to get a copy of his obituary for me and also visited the local funeral home which handled his burial, where they were informed that a local woman, whose name they would not disclose, made the arrangements.  His burial plot in the very large Memory Gardens Cemetery is not marked with a gravestone (my sister was visiting Amarillo and very generously stopped by the cemetery to check out Dean’s final resting place for me!).

Dean Leete led an interesting life, sad in some respects, seemingly full and happy in others.  He was the last descendant of Martha Livinia (Caton) Leete.

(Jacob Robbins-William Robbins-Theodoshia (Robbins) Herren-Martha Ann (Herren) Caton-Martha Livinia (Caton) Leete-Claude Caton Leete-Dean Livingston Leete)

In 1866, Joseph and Nancy (Robbins) Barstow, named their fifth child Benjamin Franklin Butler Barstow, in honor of Benjamin Franklin Butler, controversial Union Army general and future governor of Massachusetts.  Butler was a “political” general, appointed because of his political pull and had no military experience.  Why did the couple name their child for him?  Probably for two reasons.  Joseph Barstow came from Massachusetts and the Robbins family, if not the Barstows, supported the pre-Civil War Democratic Party and Butler was one of it’s preeminent leaders in New England.  In the future the child would be simply known as Ben (though he also appeared as “Butler” in several census records).

Ben Barstow was born when the family was living in the Stafford area, near the boundary between Clackamas and Washington counties, in Oregon.  He was born three years after the death by drowning of his grandfather, Dr. Nathaniel Robbins.  He had two older brothers, two older sisters, one of whom died in infancy, and two youngers sisters, again with only one living to adulthood.  Sadly Ben also lost his mother when he was about six years of age, as Nancy died from the effects of giving birth to her last child in 1872.  Ben’s father Joseph Barstow, who had come around the Horn to Oregon from New England, remained a widower until his death many years later in 1915.

Ben and Christina Barstow, with oldest daughter Iva, c1900

In 1899, Ben Barstow was married to Christina Groshong near the Clackamas county settlement of Wilhoit in the Cascades foothills.  Wilhoit was the location of springs which brought visitors from near and farm.  An article in the local Oregon City newspaper reported at the time: “A number of guests were present and a luxurious wedding dinner was served.  The bride has resided at Wilhoit for a number of years and enjoys a host of friends.”  Over the next several years Ben and Christina had three daughters, Iva, Harriet, and Marie, the last being born in November of 1904. They lived near Wilhoit and Scotts Mills a few miles to the south.   Farming and logging were the primary occupations of the time.

But once again tragedy struck the Barstow family.  Approximately two weeks after the birth of his last daughter, Ben Barstow was seriously injured in a logging accident.

The first newspaper mention of this incident comes from The Silverton Appeal on Friday, December 2, 1904:  “Ben Barstow of Scotts Mills, was serious injured Monday, having met with the misfortune to dislocate his hip.  He was also injured internally, and his condition is said to be critical.  A local physician has the case in charge and reports the patient in favorable way to recovery at this writing.”

Unfortunately, that was not to be.  The following Friday, the same newspaper reported: “Ben Barstow, who was injured at Scotts Mills Monday of last week, a brief mention of which was made in our last issue, died Saturday and was buried Monday.”  Ben Barstow was 38 years old.

That would be all we knew of the incident except the Oregon City Enterprise carried a lengthy description of the incident under the headline “Met Horrible Death.”  Both newspapers disagreed on which day of the week the incident happened (Monday or Tuesday) and which day of the week Barstow died (Saturday or Sunday).

The Enterprise reported,

The details of the accident and consequent suffering are harrowing in the extreme.  It seems that last Tuesday he and another man were getting out raw logs and were hauling them over to a skidway leading to Coal creek.  While hauling a big log over a rough piece of ground it made an unexpected turn and caught Mr. Barstow, who fell while the log rolled onto him, dragging for half its length across the hips and groins of the unfortunate man before the team could be stopped.  Mr. Barstow was alone at the time and when his helper finally arrived he was unable to remove the heavy log and the only thing to do was to haul the log off with the team and this was done.  The injured man could not stand to be carried, so he was dragged by the arm for about 300 yards, put on a sled and hauled home nearly a mile away.  Medical aid was hastily summoned, and an examination proved that the bones in the hips were mashed and the lower part of the abdomen was crushed, causing serious internal injuries.  He appeared to be improving at first, but he was gradually failing, and said himself that he had not long to live.  Saturday night and Sunday morning he appeared quite cheerful and was telling stories and jokes to a circle of friends and relatives.  Sunday morning he said: “Let my boy come in to rubber at me too.”  He called his oldest daughter, a child of about four, his “boy.” When she came in he took her hands, pressed them to his face and fell back on the pillow dead.

His widow Christina later remarried to a man named John Sharp, not known to be any relation to her late husband’s uncle William Sharp.  The girls grew up and married, though Iva, or “Boy” as her father called her, died in the influenza epidemic of the early 1920s.  I was fortunate to correspond with and later meet the youngest daughter Marie who provided information about her family and the father she never knew.

(Jacob Robbins-William Robbins/Absalom Robbins-Nathaniel Robbins/Nancy Robbins-Nancy (Robbins) Barstow-Benjamin Franklin Butler Barstow)

Other than the original thirteen colonies, Kentucky and Tennessee, and Texas, all land in the United States is divided up through the Public Land Survey System, first laid out in the Land Ordinance of 1785.  Also called the Rectangular Land System it divides up land in sections and townships based off of a meridian and a baseline.  It’s a very easy system for describing land and it’s very easy for family historians to find their family’s land with a description from a deed.

In Oregon, the meridian and baseline were established in 1851 by John B. Preston, the first Surveyor General of Oregon.  The baseline was chosen so it wouldn’t cross the Columbia River, while the meridian was set to lay west of Vancouver Lake, a shallow waterway along the Columbia where it turns north in the vicinity of Portland.

The junction of the Willamette meridian and Willamette baseline lies west of downtown Portland in the high hills along Skyline Drive.  I recently visited the spot which is appropriately named Willamette Stone State Heritage Site.

The Willamette Stone

The existing marker is the third in the location.  The first, set by Surveyor Preston, was a red cedar stake.  It was replaced in 1885 by a small stone obelisk, which after being vandalized, was replaced by the current marker set in concrete with an accompanying plaque and some interpretive signage.

Willamette Stone set in concrete

I was interested in whether other meridians and baselines are marked and indeed they seem to be.  The Second principal meridian on which most of Indiana is divided up is located in the woods south of Paoli, Indiana.  The Fifth principal meridian in Missouri, is situated at the confluence of the St. Francis and Mississippi Rivers and is now in a swamp, accessed by a boardwalk trail.

Map of Principal Meridians and Base Lines

As mentioned at the beginning of this post, this type of land description is very easy to use to locate property in the United States.  You can use a website such as Earthpoint to enter the state, meridian, township, and section and get latitude and longitude coordinates that you can enter into Google Earth to find the location on a map.  Here’s one example which shows the general area where Nathaniel Robbins’ Donation Land Claim was located in the 1850s, based on the simple description of something like “South ½ of the South ½ of section 30”.

General location of Nathaniel Robbins land

So you may ask how were land parcels identified in the non-Public Land Survey System states? like Virginia or Kentucky?  By a system called metes and bounds.  Here’s a transcribed description from Nathaniel’s grandfather Jacob Robbins in Montgomery County, Virginia (1783):

“…Beginning at two white oaks and a red oak corner to the same and runneth thence South four degrees East sixty poles to a forked white oak corner to said Ogles [a neighbor] and runneth thence South twenty four degrees East one hundred and twenty poles crossing the River and over a Branch to two white oaks on a hillside South forty five degrees West two hundred and seventy poles to the River and down the same South seventy five degrees West eighty four poles, West fifty six poles, North forty five degrees West one hundred and ten poles to a white oak on a hillside, and thence North fifteen degrees East four hundred and seventy four poles to the Beginning…”

Which is easier to find?  Metes and bounds or Public Land Survey System?  I’ll take the latter any day!

The earliest Robbins “mother” for which I have a photograph is my great-great-great-grandmother Nancy Robbins.  Like a lot of photography subjects at the time she doesn’t look particularly happy, but then she had a hard life, yet a long one.  She suffered numerous tragedies but persevered and is the ancestor of hundreds of people.

Nancy Robbins (1793-1880)

Nancy Robbins was born in 1793 to Absalom and Mary (Ogle) Robbins.  She was raised in Virginia and Kentucky and married her first cousin Nathaniel Robbins in 1813, thereby keeping her maiden surname.

Nancy’s parents, Absalom and Mary Robbins, give permission for her to marry; brothers George and Micajah are witnesses.

The first tragedy Nancy suffered was the loss of the couple’s first child, Harriet, in 1815.  After the birth of their second child, Nancy and Nathaniel left Kentucky for Bond Co., Illinois, where they lived briefly.  While there, their third child, Absalom, died in 1819 from the effects of a burn.  Moving back east to Decatur County, Indiana, the couple had ten more children, all of whom lived to adulthood.

With Oregon fever at a height, Nathaniel and Nancy made the difficult choice to cross the continent to Oregon.  Did Nancy have a voice in the decision? or did Nathaniel just announce they were leaving?  The family set out in the fall of 1851 to winter over in Missouri, before setting out on the Oregon Trail in the spring of 1852.

They left Missouri in mid-April, and they hadn’t traveled far, in what is today southern Nebraska, when the emigrants were struck with cholera.  A fast-moving disease, those stricken could be gone before they knew it.  That’s what happened with three of Nancy’s children.  Two daughters, Amanda Minerva and Bethiah Emmeline, died on May 31^st, having been stricken early in the day, daughter Mahala followed the next day.   Two days after that, son-in-law Absalom Barnes, who had left his own family back in Indiana, and was married to Bethiah Emmeline, followed his wife into the grave.  Nancy and Nathaniel would now raise their orphaned Barnes grandsons.  The travelers had to keep moving and the three daughters were buried in one grave, Absalom was buried further along the trail, and the Robbins family moved on.

Family stories recount that many of the emigrants were ill, including Nathaniel, for whom the wagon train would stop until he felt better, but there is never any mention of Nancy Robbins being ill.  You can imagine her cooking, cleaning, nursing, and mourning, out in the elements month after month, along a hot and dusty or wet and muddy road.

When the wagon train arrived in eastern Oregon, Nancy lost her granddaughter Sarah Jane Robbins, aged about five or six.  And after the family arrived in Oregon City, their destination, grandson Gilman Robbins, not yet eleven years old, died and was buried in a location now unknown.

The family settled in the western part of Clackamas County and filed their donation land claims.  The couple and their children began building their lives in their new home and Nancy was the matriarch of an expanding family.  We don’t know a lot about Nancy’s personal life beyond her role as a mother.  We do know from the census that she could not read or write, not uncommon for an upbringing on the Kentucky frontier.  We also know that she made wine!  She won second prize for her current wine at the 1863 Oregon State Fair in Salem.

Tragedy continued to stalk the family however.  Oldest son William Franklin Robbins was out bear hunting in 1856, when he reached down for his rifle and it went off, killing him instantly.  Youngest daughter Angeline, who was said to be in poor health, died in 1862, at age twenty.  Then, in December of 1863, Nathaniel Robbins, Nancy’s husband of half a century, drowned in the rain-swollen Tualatin River.  Nancy endured those events, and there was more to come.

In 1872, the youngest surviving daughter, Nancy, named for her mother, died shortly after her last child was delivered.  The following year, bachelor son John Dow Robbins, was found murdered on his land claim.  His murderer was never found.  In 1877, son-in-law William Sharp died after falling from his barn’s roof.

Nancy, the tough old pioneer that she was, finally succumbed at the age of 87, to what the 1880 Mortality Schedule seems to describe as “acute pleurisy.”  By my count, she was survived by four children (five children-in-law) and 41 grandchildren.  I did not try to count her great-grandchildren.  One of her last surviving grandchildren was Nancy Lucinda Barstow, named for her mother and grandmother, who was 12-years-old when her grandmother died and who, herself, lived until 1961.  These two Nancy’s lives covered 168 years of American history, from the presidencies of George Washington to John F. Kennedy.  What would Nancy senior have thought of that?

(Jacob Robbins-Absalom Robbins-Nancy (Robbins) Robbins)

The last couple of posts dealt with members of the John and Ruth (Anderson) Robbins family of Decatur County, Indiana.  This post does too, though the focus is more on a Robbins in-law.

John and Ruth Robbins had a small family for their time.  Instead of the large number of children farming families tended to have, this couple only had four children that we know of:  Mary Ellen, William Anderson, Sarah Ann, and Nathaniel.  The eldest, Mary Ellen, was married to Calvin Paramore and while they had seven children, all died in childhood, never married or had no living descendants.  The youngest, Nathaniel, died in infancy in 1824.  That leaves two children whose family lines continue today.  Last week’s post was about the Snooks and the Schumachers – they were descendants of Sarah Ann (Robbins) Snook.  The post before that one was about Jacob Gates Robbins, a son of William Anderson Robbins.  This post also deals with descendants of William Anderson Robbins.

John Robbins and family

William Anderson Robbins had several children besides Jacob Gates.  The two that had descendants were William Marion Robbins and Charles Francis Robbins.

Charles Francis Robbins, Sr., was the proverbial small-town boy made good.  Born in Decatur County he became an attorney in Indianapolis.  He was married to Venora (“Nora”) Hammond in 1883, they had one son Charles Francis Robbins Jr. (born 1886).  The law must have been very lucrative in Indiana’s capital city, because by the late 1890’s they were touring Europe and living in France.  They do not appear to have returned to Indiana.  Not found in the 1900 census as perhaps they were still in Europe, they are in the 1910 census living on West 85^th Street in Manhattan, where Charles’ occupation was listed as “own income.”  Charles Sr. died in 1914.

A.G. Spalding & Bros.

Son Charles Francis Robbins Jr. was destined for the business world and specifically the international sporting goods company, A. G. Spalding.  By the time he registered for the World War I draft in 1917 he was a manager at Spalding and in the 1920 census he was listed as vice president at Spalding.  Between those two years Charles Jr. was married to Elizabeth Brown, a niece of the company’s founder, A. G. Spalding Sr.  By 1930 Charles Jr. was president of the Spalding Company and his family had moved to Llewellyn Park in West Orange, New Jersey.  He and Elizabeth have descendants through their three sons.

But – back to Nora (Hammond) Robbins, wife of Charles Francis Robbins Sr.  After her husband’s death Nora continued her international travel.  And it was a trip in 1923 which became the basis for her small book, Hitting the High Spots of My Trip Around the World, published in 1938.

Venora Robbins passport application

In this book, dedicated to her son Charles Jr. and her three grandsons, Nora Robbins describes her trip around the world.  She crossed the continent to San Francisco, where she boarded the ship SS President Cleveland and sailed for Honolulu.  After a visit to the Hawaiian Islands, Nora continued on to Japan, then China, Korea, the Philippines, Hong Kong and Macao, Southeast Asia (the future Vietnam and Cambodia), Indonesia and Singapore, then on to Ceylon, across the Indian ocean to the African coast, then up the Red Sea to visit the highlights of Egypt, and then on to Europe, stopping in Venice, Paris, and from London returned to her “little old New York.”  She had been gone from the United States for almost 13 months but later Nora returned to France where she had a villa on the Riviera, living there into the 1930s.

Title page of Venora (Hammond) Robbins book

What’s fascinating about Nora’s book is that she was travelling soon after the end of World War I but before some of the worst events preceding World War II.  For example, she describes visiting the “very interesting” city of Nanking, later the scene of the notorious “rape of Nanking” by Japanese soldiers a decade later.  She reported:  “The tombs of the rulers of the Ming dynasty are here.  Long rows of stone animals are on either side of the road leading up to their temple.  It was a beautiful October day and the trip out through the country in rickshaws was delightful.”

In visiting Beijing (then spelled Peking) Nora espouses her philosophy of travel:

The whole wonderful city was most impressive.  Peking! – that I had so long dreamed of – and I was there!  It is a very happy thing to have a first experience.  You have thrills of pleasure that never come with the second one.  I am sorry for anyone who has “seen everything:”  No chance to see for the first time – which is the best of all.

Towards the end of her travels, when she was in France, she describes the former battlefields of the first world war.  “We were in dugouts; saw trenches and barbed wire entanglements; the great cemeteries of the French, Italians, and Germans; the cemetery of the Americans at Belleau Woods.  Where the English are buried there are the blooming roses.  Always flowers!”

At the beginning of the book she writes:

It is so commonplace a trip today, to circle the globe, that it is almost presumptuous to essay an entertainment of others with one’s own experiences.  There-fore I venture forth on even a brief recital of my own with much hesitation, as most of you have probably seen more and know more about what you have seen that I do.

I’m not so sure of that.  Overall, Nora’s book is a delightful account of travel in a bygone era.

(Jacob Robbins-William Robbins-John Robbins-William Anderson Robbins-Charles Francis Robbins, married to Venora (“Nora”) Hammond-Charles Francis Robbins Jr.)