My Genealogical Travels

Who Was Felicia Blake?

Wed, 30 Nov 2011 20:25:57 -0800

Thirty years ago I found an old postcard and it had a poem on it. It was entitled, "A Woman's Answer to 'The Vampire'" by Felicia Blake. I have always been interested in who Felicia Blake was and this past month did some earnest searching. The story is quite interesting and I don't have all of it yet. In genealogical terms there are no living descendants of Felicia, so no real interest in her out there. But let me back up a bit.

In 1897, Rudyard Kipling wrote his poem, "The Vampire". A google search finds it easily. The poem is through the eyes of a man who is domineered by a woman who basically controls him, thus the term to call a woman a vamp. It is where referring to some women as "vamps" came from. In fact the opening line is, "A fool there was...". The poem was so popular that by 1915 Theda Barra starred as the Vamp in a silent movie called, "A Fool There Was". The movie is available to watch on-line.

Later Felicia Blake's poem showed up and some people have alleged that she wrote it in anger to the movie, but this is just not true. Her poem, that I can find, had an earliest publish date of late 1903 pre-dating the film by 12 years. Also, no anger, as she included "with apologies to Kipling" as part of the title. Her poem along with Kipling's by mid 20th century were listed among loved American poems. But who is Felicia Blake? Here is the rest of the story:

Felicia was born in Cambridge, MA in 1866 to Henry H. & Harriet Blake. Henry was an insurance agent and a native of Westborough. Her mother was from Cambridge. At some point her father relocated to Chicago, but I do not know the details yet. Her parent's wedding anniversary hit the Chicago papers just after the turn of the century and Felicia was in Chicago for it. But in 1885 Felicia was in Washington Territory and married to a Harry Rees at the age of 19. Harry was an officer in the army. Harry and Felicia had two children, Mona and Walter. In Nov 1901 in San Francisco, Felicia was granted a divorce decree from Harry over infidelity. So there is the source of Felicia's anger! Not Kipling's poem, but Harry and therefore the apology to Kipling.

Felicia relocated to Chicago with her children and things started getting a bit strange. Up to 1910 she was listed as a contributor to a magazine in Chicago that advertised positive and alternative thinking. It was called the New Thought movement. Then in 1911 Felicia was in the headlines of newspapers across the country. Early in 1911 the police arrested one Evelyn Arthur See, head of the "Absolute Life" movement. It was a tiny movement but the police arrested See on corrupting a minor. It turns out that Mona Rees also lived with See (she was about 22) as his "high priestess" with the apparent approval of Felicia.

There was a dragged out trial - you can imagine for 1911 - the newspapers reported the police raided Felicia's home and published her poem as an example of her state of mind. Felicia's photo was in the paper where on the stand she described kissing See. Later she testified she was the author of See’s "Book of Truth", that was the source of what the newspapers called his cult. The basic premise was See was viewed as divine and his followers were pure and could not commit sin. Ultimately See was convicted in the later part of 1911. Felicia had been initially arrested too, but no sign of conviction in the papers.

By 1916 or so See got out and returned to Michigan to work on his father's farm. His wife had divorced him over the Absolute Life cult. She had been a Christian Scientist and in Michigan had become a healer of sorts having healed the founder of Post Cereals for one. They had migrated to Chicago and started newsletters and such but it went too far for his wife eventually with the young girls around.

At the height of the trial in July 1911, news reached Felicia that her son, Walter, died in a Mexican hospital. He had volunteered to fight in the Mexican revolution. Felicia and Mona lingered in Chicago for a few years - I cannot say how long - but in 1912 Mona was arrested for injuring two people in an automobile accident.

By 1930 Felicia and Mona were in Texas. I do not know where or when but Felicia married Annis Clem. Clem was a well respected founder of a gravel company and for six years on the Dallas city council. He died in late 1930 and by 1931 both Felicia and Mona were in Oceanside, CA. The thing about Oceanside that attracted her and Mona was the Rosacrucian Fellowship, a spiritual Christian organization that is still there. Felicia became a secretary at the fellowship for the balance of her life. She and Mona resided a couple of blocks from the Mt. Ecclesia center for the fellowship. Felicia still did poetry and some of it has been published in later years in the fellowship newsletters.

Mona passed away in 1961 just shy of her 76th birthday. I am not sure where she was buried, but can guess. Felicia lived until 1963 when she was 97 years old. The mortuary that handled her is no longer under the same name but I was able to find she was cremated and the ashes taken to Mt. Ecclesia. I contacted the fellowship to find out what happened to her ashes and they told me it was their custom to scatter the ashes there to the four winds in a symbolic ceremony.

Along the way I found two Rees relatives who were quite helpful. It seems that Harry Rees had a second wife and another son named Raymond. Raymond never had any children so he distributed out photos to relatives of Felicia, Mona and Walter including a scrap book by Mona of her days with See.

In 1977 I took a job at ACDC Electronics at Oceanside in their R&D department. Everyday I drove by the Rosicrucian Fellowship center at Mt. Ecclias. I remembered them from advertisements in comic books when I was a kid in the late 50s and early 60s (the mysteries of life!). I worked about 1000 feet from where her ashes were scattered and where she lived the balance of her life... just about the time I found the postcard in an old box of my grandmother's and first wondered, "Who is Felicia Blake?"

A WOMAN'S ANSWER TO
The Vampire.
Verses by FELICIA BLAKE. (With Apologies to Kipling.)

A FOOL there was, and she lowered her pride (Even as you and I)
To a bunch of conceit in a masculine hide ---
We saw the faults that could not be denied,
But the fool saw only his manly side (Even as you and I)

Oh the love she laid on her own heart's grave
With the care of her head and hand,
Belongs to the man who did not know
(And now she knows that he never could know)
And did not understand.

A fool there was and her best she gave (Even as you and I.)
Of noble thoughts, of gay and grave
(And all were accepted as due to the knave)
But the fool would never her folly save (Even as you and I.)

Oh the stabs she had, which the Lord forbid
Had ever been really planned.
She took from the man who didn't know why
(And now she knows he never knew why)
And did not understand.

The fool was loved while the game was new (Even as you and I.)
And when it was played, she took her cue
(Plodding along as most of us do)
Trying to keep his faults from view (Even as you and I.)

And it isn't the ache of the heart, or it's break
That stings like a white-hot brand ---
It's the learning to know she raised a god
And bent her head to kiss the rod
For one who could not understand.

Rest in Peace, Nellie Canterbury

Fri, 22 Apr 2011 19:30:50 -0700

My article on Nellie Canterbury was written in June 2010. I lamented at the end that I had been unable to determine where Nellie and her husband were buried. Ten days ago a Find a Grave memorial was posted for Nellie showing the tombstone for her and her husband. It can be viewed at:

http://www.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi?page=gr&GRid=68268799

Rest in peace, Nellie.

Who was Nellie Canterbury?

Sat, 5 Jun 2010 10:15:11 -0700

In Sep 1863 my great great grandmother was not quite 17, and married a man who was 32. From the wedding he took her from Massachusetts to California. The rest is family history.

In Dec 1863 my great great grandmother, Ellen, received a letter from a friend, Nellie Canterbury (http://www.mestephil.org/Letters_archives/Letters_Ellen_Watrous.html). Nellie was quite surprised and a little upset that she heard Ellen was now married and in California. Upset as Ellen did not tell her before leaving. Nellie declared that Ellen was the first of all the girls to be married, and pondered when she would.

This got me to thinking beyond the usual genealogical research. Who was this Nellie? And what ever happened to her. Thankfully, in this day of modern technology I was able to profile Nellie in about an hour. The results were somewhat interesting.

Nellie M. Canterbury was the daughter of Nathan and Ellen Canterbury of Chicopee, Massachusetts. Nellie was born about 1850, so when she wrote the letter to my ancestor she was about 13 years old. She was in Ware at the time of the letters. Ware was the home town of Ellen, but in 1863 she was in Palmer as a school teacher living with her Uncle Abel and Aunt Sarah Calkins.

Nellie did not have to wait too long to answer her pondering of her own marriage. On 23 Dec 1874 she was married to Elliott E. Furney. Furney was the son of Russell and Julia Furney. he was born in St. Louis, Missouri, but at the time of the marriage he was a mechanical engineer living in Chicopee Falls, Massachusetts.

Furney was an inventor as well. On 23 Apr 1889 (they were now living in St. Louis) he was awarded patent no. 402,075 for the automatically closing faucet - a device I have always despised as I can never get my hand under the faucet fast enough. This patent was assigned to Nellie and I supposed that was to protect him from an employer claiming assignment. The invention is pervasive enough in our society I suppose they made a good income of of it. But this was not the most curious of his inventions.

In 1914 he was awarded the patent for an improved flying machine as illustrated above. The “improvement” was to include mechanics so the wings of the machine could imitate the flapping of wings of “flying creatures”. From the absence of this type of airplane in commercial use, I will guess an opinion neither he nor Nellie ever made any money from it. It little mattered as he had other, more practical patents, before he died in Jun 1914.

The Furney’s lived in Massachusetts after their marriage, later living in St. Louis. In St Louis, Furney pursued a medical education at the Missouri Medical College in 1875. He practiced for many years in St. Louis before they retired to St. Petersburg, Florida after 1910.

Furney even wrote a science fiction novel in 1891 entitled, “Culture, A Modern Method”. It can be ordered from Amazon.com for $24 today, but is a free download at Google Books.

Nellie subsequently lived in St. Petersburg, Florida until 1936, perhaps with a good retirement from all the patents and Elliott’s medical practice. Elliott and Nellie had no children, so no descendants exist - little to no research has been conducted on them. This article is the most comprehensive I know of. I did not find where they are buried. I would like to see their final memorial.

I know of no letters still existing from Nellie to my great great grandmother after 1863. But she did not need to have to worry about her future, she had a good one.

The brief research I did for this article consisted of record images at Ancestry.com for the census records, Furney’s medical death notice, and the Florida Death Index for Nellie’s death; New England Historic and Genealogical Society for the image of their marriage records; Google patents to search on Furney’s patents; Amazon.com and Google books for Furney’s novel.

A Genealogy Filing System that Has Lasted

Sun, 9 May 2010 22:30:30 -0700

I started this project in 1977 without a clue as to where it was going. This predated the commercial Internet, or even the ready availability of a computer to store data. It did not take long to realize I was quickly amassing notes and had to figure out, quickly, a way to file things. Even in those days other genealogists recommended filing in binders by family lines/surnames. The first thing that struck me was that it did not allow for cross filing easily without a lot photocopying, work, and sounded limiting.

Without much thought I started taking the notes, documents, etc. that I was accumulating and established a sequential numbering system as I filed random documents. Each document was a source, so the first one was S0001, the second S0002, and so on as things randomly fell into my hands. I would then take each document and file it in a manila folder closed on three sides and label it with the number and a one line description. These I stored in a filing cabinet, or storage boxes. With that done I could extract the information on each document and start filling out pedigree charts and family group sheets by hand. I used note cards to write extensive notes from sources. I tended not to type any sheets or notes as I found out in college I really sucked at typing error free.

As I came across old boxes of photographs, I repeated the filing system, but with a P prefix and the name of the person, or persons, in the photos.

By 1981 I decided to by a computer - a TI 99/4A. That experience is a story into itself, but with it I got a word processor. Now I could type and easily correct my errors. I went back over some of my sources and transcribed biographies, notes, and even documents. I created indices to my source and photo filing systems. Through the years I converted those files to text files, Wordstar, Word Perfect, Word and into Adobe Acrobat. This way I avoided retyping massive notes.

When I graduated to a PC clone, I was able to create folders to store these files. I was one of the first to buy an affordable (not so much so in those days) scanner and start scanning photos. All in the name of saving soft copies of what I had in the storage boxes. As years went by I had to rescan some files for better resolution because I has started so early.

In the 1980s I used the PAF software first from the LDS church, I graduated to Family Tree Maker (which I hated) to Ultimate Family Tree, then back to FTM. Finally in 2007 I went to using a Mac and started using Reunion. This was a breakthrough for me as up until then my use of citing sources in the database was difficult with the software used. Transferring between programs never went well. So in 2007 using Reunion, I started over from scratch aligning my “S” files to the source list in Reunion and creating a new “SC” (source citation) directory. This directory contains fully scanned and cited sources - 780 of them at last count. Any old “S’ files are not in the directory, but the number in noted in the notes field for each tagged person from many years ago. So traceability exists.

With Reunion I also for the first time employed tagging photos to the database in a useable way. By this point all photos are scanned and all sources are scanned. There is no dependence on physically pulling a document.

As the Internet rose in the 1990s, I established a web site with selected profiles. I used the domain, kapnet.com. It was tedious and limited, so eventually I let the domain lapse. Today, I have the mestephil.org domain. Once again, my Reunion database publishes nicely to a web card system, that includes not only source citations, but the option of the scanned documents along with all scanned photos. It is a complete database system that can be easily maintained. Additionally, I use iWeb to create a template welcome page with all links to my information: sites I use, my database and all its features. I use Reunion to upload cited gedcom files to Rootsweb and Geneanet. I upload to Ancestry as well, but again Ancestry (the FTM folks) does not translate source citations. I have just started a feature on my web site for old letter scans and transcriptions. Again, I use a sequential “L” filing system as I randomly scan letters.

Today I maintain a structured file system so my database can find referenced files consistently. The file system uses my sequential numbering system just like I established in 1977. SC for source citations, P for photos, L for letters, C for cemetery photos, B for large batch files like old scrap books and photo albums that I wish to maintain relationships. My web site database has a special notes field with links to a person’s tombstone memorial on Find a Grave. I have nearly 250 places of burial located now out of a published database of 3,600. I have now established another special notes field in the published database that provides a link directly to letters written by that person. This is a fledgling effort as of today, but will grow quickly. When I publish the cited GEDCOM files to Rootsweb and Geneanet, these special fields carry through there as well.

Backup is easily accomplished to: time machine incremental backups, whole image backups, but the best is I subscribe to MobileMe and backup my entire genealogy file structure - all 15GB. This includes all structured directories, my primary database, all in process file directories and my web site directories.

In 33 years I have not altered or abandoned my filing system. I still maintain old physical documents and photos in the storage boxes, but all are scanned, uploaded and backed up. I can access any file on my Mac Book, or online from any computer - even view anything from my iPhone. The filing system has not let me down.

People ask why not put it into a book? I could say the expense of publishing a tome that will gather dust, but even electronically publishing a book is limiting. This is a story that never ends and the present format can continue to be improved for a more polished story. More importantly the story can easily be extended and added on to bring these ancestors to life and not be forgotten.

I still have many boxes of files never organized and indexed. Plus the information being scanned and published comes in so fast, I cannot keep up with it. I will spend the next 25 years continuing to fill end the life stories of these ancestors and relatives. I expect my filing system to last that 25 years with no trouble.

How Amelia Calkins became Amelia Wright

Mon, 12 Apr 2010 22:31:10 -0700

Amelia Calkins was the daughter of Abel Calkins & Esther Mixter. She was born in Monson, Massachusetts on the 21st of March in 1820. In 1843 she married Benjamin Franklin Goff in Palmer, Massachusetts. Benjamin and Amelia were the parents of Ellen Maria Goff, the subject of previous articles I have written. All this I am sure and have documented.

In the family copy of “An Illustrated History of San Joaquin County, California” is a biography of Benjamin Watrous, Ellen Goff’s husband. In the biography it only says of Ellen’s mother: “...the mother, born in March, 1820, came to Stockton in July, 1872...” But go out to the Rural Cemetery and in the Watrous family plot is a tombstone for “Amelia Wright”. It is inscribed with “Mother” on the top. and “Amelia Wright, Mar. 21, 1820, May 26, 1899, Native of Mass.” How did she get the name, Wright?

The legend in the family is that Amelia had married again after her first husband had died in 1859. That marriage was said to be a bad marriage, but I have found no evidence - no letters - to confirm or deny this.

For years I searched for a marriage in California where Amelia Goff would have married a person named Wright. I also searched Massachusetts for the same thing and never found any evidence.

With the advent of the modern Internet it has been possible to find more databases accessible to search. The New England Historic and Genealogical Society has made available to members Massachusetts town records. Finally I found the marriage record for Amelia’s second marriage... but to an Ephraim Fenton. Not to a Wright.

On May 9th, 1869 Amelia married Ephraim in Brimfield, Massachusetts. Ephraim was born in 1804. He was a farmer and in 1826 he married Lovina Nichols in Brimfield. Lovina passed away in 1865. I have not yet documented children to that marriage, but there may be some.

But Amelia came to California in 1872, three years after marrying Ephraim - and never went back. A further search if the NEHGS town records databases find Ephraim’s death record where it says he died a widower, but he died in 1880 - the 5th of February to be precise. Amelia was his wife (I have found no divorce record), and she was alive and kicking. I guess technically the death record is correct, as Ephraim was the widower of Lovina. However, the mystery of Amelia becoming Wright is not solved. A search of Massachusetts town records shows no further marriages for Amelia.

One weekend day I made it to the Stockton library’s main branch - a rare opportunity for me. The library has a nice little genealogy section now. I have not been there in many years. This is thanks to the San Joaquin Genealogical Society. Many of their publications are there. I sat down with their publications and finally hit gold in their “Marriage Records of San Joaquin County, California, Volume II January 1866 - December 1884.” In that volume is the marriage record of Amelia Fenton to one Thomas Wright on the 5th of September 1880. Seven months to the day after Ephraim Fenton passed away.

I do not know much about Thomas Wright yet. There was one Thomas Wright in Stockton in 1880. He was born about 1828 in Tennessee and was a shoemaker. The census was taken in early June when he was a lodger. This Thomas Wright in 1870, according to the census, was living in Mariposa with his wife, Julia, and two teenaged children, Mary and Joseph. Julia was listed as Italian. The children had been born in Virginia. By 1880 julia is living in San Francisco with her now married daughter and their family. I do note that here Julia is listed as French.

By the time the 1900 census comes out, Thomas has disappeared. Perhaps he has died as well as Amelia. In the family records I have there is no mention of either Ephraim Fenton or Thomas Wright that I have found. But I need to go back through piles of letters from the times and re-examine them in light of this new information. I also need to do a more thorough search on Thomas Wright and his background to fill out his life.

When Amelia Wright passed away the estate went through probate in San Joaquin County and the executor was her grandson, Fred Watrous. the only heirs were her surviving children and the children of Ellen. No Thomas Wright. I still wonder how they met and what happened to him.