History of the Guild Family

Dad

Our father, Floyd Raymond Guild, was born at home on a farm in St. Mathias Township, Crow Wing County, Minnesota on December 15, 1904, the same year his cousin seven times removed, Charles Warren Fairbanks, was elected as Teddy Roosevelt’s vice president. Floyd’s father was Daniel William Guild, who was born on May 24, 1877 in Williamsburg, Grand Transverse County, Michigan. Floyd’s mother was Olive Amelia Wooster, who was born on June 12, 1867 in Crow Wing County, Minnesota. Floyd was the fourth child of Dan and the ninth child of Olive. Floyd inherited Olive’s dark skin and long straight nose, his father’s hazel eyes and his grandfather Newton’s thick head of coarse black hair and prominent widow’s peak. He was, after he lost his round boyish face during puberty, hailed by all as the best-looking Guild ever. Floyd had two natural brothers and two natural sisters born of Olive and Dan Guild. They were Bessie, Clarence, Pearl, and Harold Herman—who died of meningitis at the age of 5 weeks. He also had four half-sisters and one half-brother as his mother, Olive, had previously been married to one Clarence Vosburg. Floyd’s stepsisters and stepbrother were Florence, Edith, Gertrude, Myrtle and Ralph Vosburg. All told, Olive bore ten children beginning in December, 1887, at age 19 with the birth of Florence, then for twenty more years to her last, Harold Herman who was born on September 13, 1907 when Olive was 29 years old. Eight of Olive’s ten children survived well into old age. Olive Wooster married her first husband, Clarence Vosburg, a 20-year-old farmer, of Dutch desent, on January 28, 1884 when she was 17. Married in St. Mathias, Minnesota, Mr. and Mrs. Vosburg immediately migrated on horseback to a farm in North Dakota. There, Clarence grew grain crops and corn. Olive bore 4 girls and 1 boy with Clarence Vosburg. After 15 years in North Dakota, they returned to Minnesota in 1898, where they rented a farm near the farm of Dan and Bernal Guild in St. Mathias. Less than a year later, Clarence Vosburg was killed while attempting to lift a huge field rock onto a stoneboat—a large sled-like steel skid pulled by horses—while clearing a fertile planting field. The boulder was being tipped upward when his wedge pole broke causing the boulder to fall backward, instantly crushing him to death. Reports that Clarence was killed by a rock slide, or while blasting a rock with dynamite, or by lightning are inaccurate according to accounts of his daughter, Myrtle Mae Vosburg Prescott as told to us by her son, Orville. Clarence Vosburg’s death in the summer of 1899, after fifteen years of marriage, left Olive, then 30, a widow with 5 children ages 4, 6, 11, 12, and 14.

In 1633, one of our distant Fairbanks relatives—ten generations back from Floyd— a Jonathan Fayerbanke, at age 39 years, sailed from his home in Sowerby, in the West Riding of Yorkshire, Halifax, England to Boston with his wife and children in his own sailing ship. In Halifax, in the spring of 1617, Jonathan had married a pretty redhead named Grace Smith Lee, who was born in 1600 in Yorks, England. Spanning the 9 years from 1618, to 1627, they had 7 children. They were John, Mary, Jonathan, Jonas, George, Susan and another Mary. In 1636, six years after landing in America, Jonathan moved his family from Boston, 40 miles down the Charles River to Contentment, Massachusetts where he built a large home from either his ship’s larger beams and boards or from beams cut from oak in England and shipped to him. The house was erected on 12 acres of government Common Grant Land plus 8 acres of swamp. Jonathan purchased considerable additional lands in later years. The township of Dedham was formed there the same year, and Jonathan and his 3 teen sons entered into the township covenant, promising with 120 others to pay taxes proportionate to wealth and to protect the Christian faith. However, Jonathan did not join the Christian church there for 10 years, having some problems with church doctrine requiring members to make a public declaration of their faith. But the Deacons talked to him in a “loving way” and changed his mind to the result that he “finally declared his abiding faith and made a profound confession to God.” The house he built in Dedham still stands today at 511 East Street. It is the oldest standing timber frame dwelling in America and is a registered National Landmark. It has been owned continuously by the Fairbanks family and has never been mortgaged. It is studied for early American construction methods and several replicas have been erected throughout the United States, one at Boston Commons. Jonathan was a prosperous farmer who ran a self-sufficient estate. He earned the right to wear great boots (thigh high) when his estate grew to the value of $200. Jonathan’s wife, Grace, died on June 19, 1676, in Dedham, Massachusetts. Jonathan died 11 year later on December 5, 1668 at age 74 in Dedham. He is buried in Essex, England. The Fairbanks family was an important and very extended family in Colonial America. Their line can be traced back to 1445 in Yorks, England to a Mr. William Fairbanks. Though they lived in New England, a long-time Loyalist stronghold, (sympathetic to England) the Fairbanks family had many Patriot men in the Revolutionary War. The Fairbanks were intellectual, politically active and some, who became members of the Landed Gentry, held slaves. The Fairbanks family can boast many Yankee soldiers and officers, and naval captains, some of whom were heroes for the Union in The Civil War of the 1860s. Two grandsons of the original Jonathan and Grace Fairbanks of Dedham, another Jonathan, with his own 7 year old daughter and his 15 year old brother, Joshua, were killed in an Indian raid in Lancaster, Pennsylvania in 1697. The wife of the murdered Jonathan was carried away with 6 other town women and held prisoner by the Indians, but was later released through local government negotiation with “horrors of the body and spirit to tell.”

Just three generations before Floyd, a Jason Fairbanks was hanged on September 1, 1801 for murdering Elizabeth Fales. Reports of the day said, “Meeting, as oft they did, by the old apple tree near the birch thicket, barely 80 rods from the Fales’ home, Jason Fayerbanke {old spelling} with mere a knife of 10 cents value did stab Miss Fales in the back while she attempt’d to crawl over a low stone wall and shortly thereafter did cut through her throat.” Jonathan, proclaiming innocence, and, after claiming the event was a botched lover’s double suicide, escaped from jail, and fled to Canada where he confessed to a friend it was Elizabeth’s rebuffing his marriage proposal that preceded his killing her. Soon recaptured and tried, Jason Fairbanks was, at the time, a 21-year-old, six-foot man who suffered a frozen elbow from a botched mercury treatment for smallpox. He was the youngest son of Ebenezer Fairbanks, an elderly farmer of the Dedham property living in the Fairbanks’ family home. Jason, spoiled as a youth due to his deformity, had no occupation but instead pursued intellectual activity. After his hanging, which was interrupted by a violent electrical storm, he was memorialized in endless fables—perhaps similar to those about Elvis Presley in modern times—in legends that tell of Jason having been resuscitated by his compatriots after his hanging and then fleeing to South America, where sightings and tales of his adventures prompted stories “oft and colorfully told.” Charles Warren Fairbanks was included in a branch of the family that moved west to Ohio and was, later, while serving as a senator from Indiana, voted Vice President of the United States to serve with Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt from 1905 to 1909. He was by trade a lawyer specializing in new railroad laws and quite prosperous. Fairbanks, Alaska is named after him. It has been argued that if he had gotten along better with Roosevelt, Teddy might have nominated him for the presidency to succeed him, but they were bitterly divided on important issues according to Indiana historians, so William Howard Taft got Teddy’s nod instead. Almost an American president in our line! Maybe Charles Warren Fairbanks was as stubborn as some of us are. For those who desperately want a celebrity—greater than an American vice president—in the family, the movie stars, Douglas Fairbanks and his son, Douglas Fairbanks Jr., who popularized swashbuckler movies are direct descendants.

A later descendant, seven generations after the famous Jonathan Fairbanks who built the house in Dedham, William Fairbanks married a woman named Marilla Edith Jones, who gave birth to a daughter named Carolina E. “Carrie” Fairbanks on May 16, 1842 in Ira, Cayuga County, New York. Her father, William, had been born in Grand Traverse County, Michigan on June 3, 1815, and migrated back east, probably to New York, as a young man. Some say Carrie’s middle name was Elizabeth, but there is no official record of it. Carrie was Floyd’s paternal grandmother. A mile from the Fairbanks’ home in Dedham there is a cemetery adjacent to old St. Paul Church with a large section of Fairbanks graves. Right next to it is the Guild section containing about 9 early Guild family graves. This points out the fact that the Guilds and the Fairbanks were long-standing families and close neighbors in the early Boston area. Floyd’s father, Daniel William, and Floyd’s uncle, Bernal Almond, and his aunt, Adah Sophrona, were all born in St. Mathias Township in Crow Wing County, Minnesota to Newton Joseph Guild, of Coventry, Vermont, and Carolina E. “Carrie” Fairbanks of Ira, Cayuga, New York. Newton’s linage goes back to 1509 in Scotland, and Carrie’s ancestral line traces back to 1445 in Yorks, England. Newton Joseph Guild, Floyd’s grandfather, owned or held the franchise to operate a pulp mill, owned a sawmill, and a mechanical repair shop. Newton held 39 patents for paper manufacturing (Arnie Guild has the patent papers stating the formula), pulp mill apparatus, scales and stoves and was considered very successful. This is where we see firsthand evidence of the Guild tinkering trait beginning. The Fairbanks side also had its share of inventors, one of whom, Thaddeus Fairbanks, invented, in 1830, the platform scale concept and the first drive-on scale for weighing horse- drawn wagon loads, and later, in 1893, along with a Mr. Morse, earned patents for and manufactured wind-driven engines (windmills) and in 1893 invented the first commercially successful, large, gasoline-driven engine named the Fairbanks Morse fuel-driven, spark-ignited piston engine; a later model of which, coincidentally, powered Dan Guild’s sawmill. Floyd’s grandmother, Carrie was a pretty, petite redhead. Barbara Guild Miller has a nice lock of Carrie’s red hair that she got from Bernal Guild’s wife, Belle, who kept close contact with the Fairbanks family until she died at age 90. Newton and Carrie were married on June 24, 1874, in White Water, Michigan. Carrie died on May 3, 1892 at age 50 of La Grippe, now known as influenza. Newton Guild died of consumption—which by definition in those times included any serious disease of the lungs—9 years later, on May 29, 1901 at the age of 58. Floyd, being born in 1904, never knew his grandmother, Carrie, or his grandfather, Newton. Newton owned land on Lake Wabedo, owned and received royalties on patents of his own as well as royalties on some of his father’s (also named Dan Guild) patents, and was prosperous, at least for a time. We do not know the size or details of the estate that passed to Newton’s two sons, Daniel William and Bernal Almond, and his daughter, Adah Sophrona when he died. Neither do we know what happened to Newton’s patents, but his estate went to Dan, Bernal and Adah. Dan used his inheritance to support his growing family and must have been grateful to get anything as he was just starting his own family with Olive and supporting his 5 Vosburg stepchildren. Bernal used his portion to set out on his own to become a traveling salesman, and Frank Beckman, Adah’s husband, squandered most of Adah’s inheritance on a failed Brainerd furniture store business venture he entered into with two crooked partners. Newton, in a story perpetuated by many old family members, was said to have passed his facial characteristics of an underdeveloped ear and cheek to his daughter, Adah Sophrona, who was said to be very proud to have inherited the family trait. Likewise, the characteristic was once believed to have been passed by Floyd to two children, and similarly by Bernal to a son. We now know this birth occurrence to be Hemifacial Microsomia, a congenital birth condition which is not genetically acquired. It occurs in about 1 out of every 5,600 births, but since its occurrence in our family seemed far greater than chance, it was only natural for the old timers to assume the trait had passed from generation to generation. They were wrong. In reality, its occurrence in successive generations is purely by chance.

According to accounts by Floyd, his father, Daniel Guild worked, before he was married, a small rented farm in St. Mathias County, Minnesota with his brother, Bernal. They grew field (feed) corn and ninety-day russet potatoes to sell or barter for items they needed from others. They kept common livestock—chickens, pigs, and a milkin’ cow—for their own use. When Olive was widowed at age 30 by Vosburg’s tragic accidental death, she walked up the road from her place to Dan and Bernal’s farm in an 1898 snowstorm and asked Dan, who was only 21 at the time, for help. To make her plight more obvious, she dragged three of her littlest kids, Myrtle, Gertie and Ralph with her. It is said, that Olive was devastated by her husband Clarence’s death as they were greatly in love. She could not work the land herself or pay the rent on the farm they had only worked a year, and eviction was imminent. It was a brutal winter and her food supply was running out. She was desperate for a solution. When she appeared on his doorstep, she begged Dan for help. Dan told her he had no money but offered to put them up until Olive could figure out how to find and get help from her sisters on the condition Olive would agree to cook and keep house for them. Olive had not turned to her 6 living sisters first fearing that might break up the family because none of them could possibly take her or more than one child each. Her father, Alanson Holmes Wooster, had died a year earlier, which is reported to be her reason for wanting to return to St. Mathias County to be near her mother, Eunice Adelai Finch Wooster, who was old, frail, and would die within a year. And, it is said, Olive wasn’t even sure where all her sisters lived, having lost track of her Minnesota sisters when she moved to North Dakota with her husband, Clarence Vosburg. Florence, Olive’s oldest daughter, who would have been 14 at the time, and Edith who was 12, were Olive’s little surprise when she moved into Dan’s house. Bernal didn’t like the deception but Dan said, “What the hell. What’s two more, now?” Or so the story goes. Things must have gone pretty well with the new arrangement, because shortly after she had gathered up her meager belongings and moved in, Olive became pregnant by Dan Guild. They were married as Seventh Day Adventists in 1899. Olive was ten years older than Dan, so some say she must have been very attractive to him, as men almost never married older women in those days. Or, perhaps, by convention, not marrying a woman a man had conceived a child with was unthinkable. Dan had been raised a Christian by his very devout mother, Carrie, who, it’s said, each night read long passages from the Bible, sang a hymn in a beautiful voice, and prayed on her knees before their home altar with her husband and three children. Church on Sunday was a given; never an exception, ever. Bernal, Dan’s younger brother by 3 years, continued to work the farm with Dan and lived there until their father, Newton, died in 1901. Bernal used his inheritance to buy a fine horse and a new Colt .45 revolver (now in the possession of Josephine Guild, Bernal’s youngest son Gordon’s wife.) At age 21 and unmarried, Bernal set off on his own to become a traveling salesman selling Singer Sewing Machines on credit door to door in Minnesota. He rode from home to home collecting small payments for the machines he had sold. He met Belle Woodley when he sold her mother a sewing machine and returned week after week to collect payments. Considering that Bernal had the Guild good looks, perhaps the traveling salesman and the farmer’s daughter stories and the legends of the Guild men’s roving eye began that day. By every account, Bernal was good-natured, loved the girls and a good time. He was an incorrigible practical joker, who laughed the hardest when his pranks backfired and he became the victim. Their firstborn, who came soon after Olive and Dan married, was Bessie Amelia, who became Merlin Howard Ringering’s mother. Then in 1901 came Pearl, who looks like Barbara Guild Miller, Floyd’s youngest daughter. They called Pearl “The Innocent” or “Beautiful Angel” after she died at age sixteen of diphtheria. Next came Clarence Newton in 1902, then Floyd Raymond, in 1904 and five years later, Harold Herman, who died five weeks after his birth in 1909 of spinal meningitis. No one knows why Olive named her first son with Dan Guild “Clarence” after her first husband, Clarence Vosburg, or if Dan even knew Clarence Vosburg, though Dan must have, because they lived only a few miles apart. Clarence’s second name, Newton, was given to him by Dan to honor Dan’s father who had died only a few months before his son Clarence’s birth. All this time, Dan was still farming corn and potatoes. In 1904, with Floyd’s birth and before Olive’s oldest Vosburg girls had started to leave to get married, Dan had ten mouths to feed and ten bodies to clothe. They all had a hard life. They were so poor they had to share coats in the winter. Provisions often dwindled to the point that the next meal was in question. Dan and his sons were excellent fishermen and hunters, which helped to feed the large family later on. When they ran out of grain for the cattle, they sometimes cut up their stored seed potatoes for cattle food. Though he had various occupations during his lifetime, he never earned more from any of his efforts than just enough to barely get along. Olive said, “Dan was a pathetic farmer. He worked hard all his life for nothing.” At one time, possibly around 1910, when cars were becoming more prevalent, Dan had, in addition to his poor farm, his own battery fixing business. He rebuilt old car batteries and then resold them or just repaired them for others. He also did radiator repairs. There are accounts of his kids all having battery acid burn-holes all over their clothing. This business was in town and in both Dan’s and Olive’s name. The shop, Dan’s Radiator Shop, was at 506 Laurel Street in Brainerd, Minnesota. Olive demanded Dan return to the farm each night where she could keep an eye on him because she was skeptical of his marital fidelity. This caused great friction between them it is said. By every account, including Olive’s, Dan was a “Good Looker.” Maybe he had a roving eye or maybe Olive just thought he did. No one who might remember can, or maybe will, say. Dan was known to be very inventive and devised many mechanical innovations just like his father Newton, though he never gained any patents for his creations. It was said that Dan could fix anything. Floyd always said his father, Dan, was very mechanically inclined and creative, and that he was a verbal man with many strongly held opinions who was never slow to make his position known. Merlin says he ran his fingers up and down his suspenders the whole time he talked, and both sides of his mouth quivered as he spoke. Dan had other facial tics and suffered from narcolepsy. We are told by Clarence’s wife, Francis, that he was demure in his interactions with others, loved his coffee and reading the newspaper. He wore full suits of wool underwear all year long—even to bed on the hottest summer nights in Minnesota. Olive Guild and her Vosburg children, who were always called, “The First Family”, and the five children she had with Dan, “The Second Family”, were evidently more than she could handle. Her unrelenting arthritis pain, her avowed belief that Dan was cheating on her, and her growing frustration with Dan’s not being able to provide well for their family caused her to become mean in spirit. We need to remember that these were hard times for women running a household. There were no modern conveniences at the turn of the century, especially in the country, so every chore was arduous. A woman had to work hard from well before dawn until late into the evening just to keep up with the cooking, laundry, house cleaning, and clothes making and mending. Planting and attending the truck garden and canning for the winter was an extra duty for women that lasted from spring to early fall. This, at a time when it had become known that germs caused disease, added the burden of a frantic zeal to keep everything clean. Olive’s girls were pressed into hard work at an early age. Some say their hands were always raw from the homemade lye soap used for doing laundry. Hand-sewn gloves to hide their rough hands were a necessity for a woman going out into public. It all added up to long, long, long hours requiring much strength in the body. This staggering amount of hard work, and harsh conditions, often while pregnant, killed many women. No wonder church was so popular—an hour to sit. It was said that Olive Guild’s “Vosburg Brats” were lazy and wanted all of their mother’s attention and resented their stepfather, Dan, and even moreso their half brothers and sisters, Bessie, Clarence, Floyd and Pearl. They wanted Olive buried next to their father Clarence Vosburg but didn’t get their way, we know not why. But, as they grew up together, they all became very close. Although Olive had become a truly mean-spirited woman by any account, reports by Iris, Bob and Bernie Guild, three of Floyd’s kids who knew her, claim she always treated them tenderly and was kindly. We know she was more than proud of Floyd and Clarence in their accomplishments and may have pulled back on her grousing when they came around. Olive suffered terribly from arthritis. She was in constant pain, but nonetheless forced to care for ten people. No wonder she simplified her life by making pancakes seven days a week. (She ground the old maids from popped corn with a wall-mounted grinder and sprinkled them onto Dan’s pancakes.) It’s been told that she had permanent scars on her back from hot irons placed there in attempts to relieve her pain. Some remember the house being filled with bottles of pills and liniment, and said that the minute anyone entered the house she would start complaining about her troubles, predicting she would soon die, and generally tried to make everyone around her suffer with her. Orville Prescott, one of Myrtle’s children, said an aura of Sloan’s Liniment followed her everywhere, even to church. She is said to have been unrelenting in her complaining, and adding to her misery, or perhaps because of it, Olive and Dan fought constantly; mostly about his inability to provide and always about her suspicions of infidelity, which she never proved. Olive was known to spank even her grandchildren with a switch for minor infractions or making too much noise. When small children were in the house, she stuffed cotton in her ears and placed a switch under her apron- string. Stories say she would pick up anyone’s kid and spank them “On good measure.” No wonder they stuck their tongue out at her—something they learned from her—and called her a witch. Her sister in law Adah Sophrona’s 9 kids were the worst by Olive’s account, but she never turned them away. It is said she never once cooked a meal for company, forcing Dan to round up the food when relatives or friends arrived. There is a tale that Olive once in her life made a pie—a cherry pie—and never let anyone ever forget about it and how good it turned out, “If you live to be a hundred, you won’t ever get a piece of cherry pie that good.” Merlin Ringering, Bessie’s son, tells the story of getting even with his Grandma Olive by accident. Seems, when he was seven or eight and visiting them, he peed out the second story window every night instead of going downstairs and waking them up. Trouble was, his Grandpa Dan had dug up a gunnysack of onions and placed them on the porch to dry out. Merlin says his piss soaked those onions really good, and that he didn’t even know it until Olive went to cook up some bean soup and later tried to fry some liver and onions with the contaminated onions. Both dishes had to go into the hog’s slop barrel because they tasted so bad. Merlin got a lickin’ with a willow switch for that but feels he got even, anyway. He really disliked her immensely because she had caused him many undeserved whippings. In 1925, Dan left Olive to live in the radiator shop with Clarence, at which time, Dan gave public notice in the Brainerd paper, stating that because Olive had left his bed, he was no longer responsible for her debts. When Olive read the notice, she immediately walked all the way to town and ordered him to come back home and told him that he was forgiven. (She forgave him?) He did return, but it is said, they just tolerated each other after that, and began acting openly hostile to each other in front of others. They never divorced, however. Olive would just up and leave after a bitter argument and move in with a daughter for a spell, but always, soon after, move back home with Dan. Those mature enough at the time to observe them carefully believe they were actually very close and dedicated to each other, but that both had mighty tempers and were just plain too stubborn for their own good. All of this being true, each of her children loved and adored Olive until her death. Certainly, we know Floyd was reverent in respect of his mother. It’s worth noting that, by every account, the Guild men seem to have had a reputation with the ladies, but this may have been more of a supposition based on the fact they were all so handsome. One Guild woman remembers that whenever a Guild man came around, the unmarried girls became “all giggly and flustered.” It is said that the Vosburg kids were idlers. None ever made anything of themselves, and every Vosburg child died a pauper. Conversely, the four Guild children were bright, ambitious and inventive, and had outgoing personalities. Surely they got this from somewhere. Perhaps, it was the combination of Olive and Dan’s personalities that shaped the Guild kids. Dan Guild was said by some to be a loner and a man of few words, but by others as talkative and forthright and disarmingly honest. Whatever the truth about that, Floyd, Clarence, Bessie and Pearl were all very outgoing, loved to laugh and joke around and had very healthy egos, which we all seem to have inherited. And there is little doubt that Floyd and Clarence got their exceptional skills in tinkering from their father Dan, who got it from his father, Newton. Floyd and Clarence, who was 2 years older, were inseparable when they were young and continued to correspond and visit each other for years in later life. We think Floyd and Clarence attended school until about the sixth or seventh grade. Floyd was a good penman and a good speller. All his life, he signed his name on greeting cards to family members, his kids, and even ones to his wife, “Floyd R. Guild.” He surely loved writing his name. Arnie Guild has a 1918 calendar of Olive’s where Floyd signed his name, “Mr. Floyd Guild” three times as if trying out his signature. Then noted, “Wrote this with Ralph’s pen.” Floyd maintained strong ties to his half brother and half sisters as well as his own siblings in his adult life. Though Clarence, his natural brother, was Floyd’s buddy he was very fond of Ralph—his 10-year-older half brother. He looked up to Ralph as a big brother while growing up and spoke often and fondly of him in later life. Floyd’s Vosburg half-sisters were all married more than once except for Florence and some were married three times. Between husbands, they lived with each other or moved in with Dan and Olive. Myrtle said their mother, Olive, never turned them away, and gladly offered them refuge because, “All men are dogs any way you look at it!”

There came a time in perhaps about 1918, when an elderly bachelor in St. Mathias Township lay dying. He owned 160 acres of wooded land that was located just south of Brainerd and to the east of Fort Ripley. The property had an operating sawmill and a few outbuildings on it. When the bachelor died, his will was read and great excitement accrued. The will decreed that it was his wish that his property and everything on it should be bequeathed to the poorest family in the township. The determination of who that family might be was left to the discretion of the township elders. They met and conferred, and finally announced that the very poorest of the poor—and there were many poor then—was the Dan Guild family. Floyd and Clarence, who by then were teenagers of fourteen and sixteen years, (considered men already in those days) were very excited about this inheritance because it meant they would all fare better immediately and well into the future, if not forever. They could not believe their luck. Indeed, they had all been saved from their pitiless poverty by mere fortune. Olive was ecstatic but predicted, “Dan will ruin it, somehow.” At this time, Bessie, Floyd and Clarence’s natural sister had already left home to marry Ira Ringering, who had just returned from World War I. Floyd’s other natural sister, Pearl, had passed away from diphtheria at age 16 a year before. Dan took title and ownership of his windfall inheritance. As there was no residence on the property, Dan and Olive moved, with Floyd and Clarence, into the granary on the property. You can imagine trying to turn a windowless granary into a residential household. They sealed up the open slat-work to make it livable in the winter and just camped out inside. A large sawmill, which was elaborate and fitted to many applications, had been included in the inherited property list, and would have been available to run. No one remembers if Dan attempted to operate it at that time or not, but he definitely knew how to. One day, not long after their good fortune, around 1918, Dan decided to mortgage the land for $800 to buy 8 cows to start a dairy herd. A poor farmer by everyone’s account, his herd failed to produce a profit, and Dan soon defaulted on the loan and the bank gave a notice of foreclosure, which stated that because Dan had missed on one regular payment the bank had the option to foreclose on the loan and confiscate his property. Unfortunately, the bank no longer trusted Dan to pay and foreclosed, immediately. Floyd and his brother Clarence wanted to cut the birch trees on that land (there were more trees on those 160 acres than could ever be cut according to Arnie Guild) and sell them for their pulp to pay off the mortgage, but Dan refused saying, “Those gul darn trees have been there for umpteen years and I will not now nor will I ever cut them down.” Floyd and Clarence tried to convince him to no avail. They were so disappointed and disgusted with their father’s folly and arbitrariness that they threatened to leave home. But he was stubborn, stubborn, stubborn, stubborn. He just said, “The trees stay. You go ahead and go if you don’t like it.” And they did. Dan lost everything to the bank for want of $200—the farm, the land, the trees, even the cows, and sadly, his sons. After he had squandered everything but the sawmill, he asked permission to build a small house (as a squatter) on Harold Falk’s large farm on St. Mathias Road in return for sawing Falk’s cleared-timber logs into boards. Falk obliged him. Letting people live on their land was a basic kindness people showed the poor in those days. The large sawmill was capable of sawing up to 36-inch diameter logs into boards. He used the sawdust from the sawmill operation to pack and preserve ice blocks cut from a frozen lake on Falk’s property in the winter until summer, when he sold it. The 103 acre farm (still owned by Marvin Falk in 2001) had a large portion of Round Lake on it and two fish-filled rivers running through it. The house Dan built was a small, two-story, tar-paper-covered building of the plainest construction, with one large room up and one large room down. This is the house Iris, Merlin, and Bernie remember. Living and sleeping quarters were separated by tarpaulins hung from ropes. There was also a good-sized barn built for cows and pigs sometime after the house was built.

Dan raised corn on the Falk property. He and Olive lived there for a long time and well after all their children had left home. In the driveway there sat a big rock that Floyd and Clarence inscribed with the saying, “The Devil is buried here.” It is still there. Speculation on why they wrote it there is rampant throughout the family, but neither Floyd nor Clarence ever admitted why or even if they wrote it. From time to time, one or another of the grown girls moved back home between marriages. When Myrtle Mae was 22, Olive noted on her 1918 wall calendar, in the July 27th space, in her own hand, “Myrtle had a big day today. Sold 52 dozen minnows.” Another note two days later, on July 19th, said, “Took down the [minnow] sign.” Minnows were commonly used as fishing bait and for mosquito abatement as they eat mosquito larvae which hatch in open, still water. Dan and Olive lived with Myrtle’s son Orville Prescott and his wife for a time in later life, and both eventually went in and out of nursing homes where Bob, Bernie and Floyd saw them for the last time. When Dan lost the property he had inherited to the bank, Clarence traveled to Flandreau, South Dakota to live with his sister, Bessie, and her husband. Bessie had left home to marry Ira Ringering in 1919, upon Ira’s return from serving in the army in World War I. Bessie and Ira had courted before the war while she was still living on the old farm with Dan and Olive. Ira, Olive, and Dan all got quarantined to that farm by the sheriff when Bessie contracted diphtheria in 1917. Ira took care of Bessie night and day and fell in love with her, according to Merlin. Floyd and Clarence “took off a-runnin’” when they spotted the sheriff coming to avoid being included in the quarantine. After Dan lost the property, Floyd went to live with his Uncle Bernal Almond Guild and his aunt Belle in Bimidji, Minnesota. Bernal, who was called Uncle Bernie by everybody, and for whom Floyd named his son, Bernie, raised horses on his farm at that time, and Floyd, only half-kidding, told Bernie that Bernal had been a horse thief who got away with it. Bernal was Floyd’s favorite relative and spoke fondly of him often to his sons. He learned everything about horses and how to joke around from him. Bernal taught Floyd to feed the horses pulling the buggy green apples so they would fart and embarrass and titillate Floyd’s girlfriends. When Floyd returned for a visit after Floyd married, Bernal helped Floyd rig the muffler on his first Model-A Ford to cut out when a wire inside the car was pulled. Merlin said, “It made one heck of a noise.” This was also to impress girls, of course. Shortly after his stay with Uncle Bernie, in 1921, Floyd moved to Moline, Illinois after taking Gus Falk, Harold Falk’s grandfather, up on his offer to get him a job at John Deere Plow Works in Moline, where Gus worked in a supervisory position. Floyd had met Gus when Gus came to visit his son on his annual fishing trips to Brainerd. He rode to Moline in Gus Falk’s car. Floyd stayed friends with Gus all his life. This is what Merlin’s brother, Arnold Ringering (Floyd’s nephew), said about that in a letter to Merlin. “Floyd was a proud man, and should be proud of himself because he advanced from the sheltered country boy to ending up better than any of his relatives. When Gus Falk found him in the country and saw that he had the making of a great young man, he took him to Moline and gave him a job.” When Floyd returned to Minnesota to make up with his father, he was hailed by all as the one relative who had really “made it.” Floyd’s many new cars and new clothes were, no doubt, the proof. From then on, though, Floyd was careful not to flaunt it because he didn’t want his relatives “mooching” off of him. It is not surprising that Floyd was a hero to all the poor relatives he left behind as well as their offspring—his nieces, nephews and cousins. They always awaited his return and hailed him as the favorite relative of all time. All his half sisters, made a big fuss over him and contrived complicated and devious schemes to get him to come back to Minnesota to live. But he just laughed about it. Young Merlin, for one, worshipped him. Merlin, proud to have a widow’s peak like his Uncle Floyd, combed his hair like Floyd and even tried to make his eyebrows grow like Floyd’s. Merlin, to this day, says, “Yep” very rapidly, exactly as Floyd did. Both of Floyd’s parents lived well into old age. Dan died on September 1, 1947 at the age of 70 of atherosclerosis and general decline, and finally of pneumonia brought on by a fractured hip. He was senile in his last years. Olive, after suffering from arthritis all of her adult life, died in 1951 at age 81 from complications of congestive heart failure, a broken hip and pneumonia. She was also senile. Floyd made many trips, with Ethel, his wife, and three of his seven children—Iris, Bernie and Bob—to Brainerd, Bimidji, Worthington and Rochester, Minnesota to visit his brothers, sisters and parents in later years—usually for Forth of July family reunions. Floyd, who was only 9 when she died, never spoke of his Aunt Sophrona, perhaps because of that family tragedy. Sophrona, as she was called, was said to be a beautiful redhead who was proud to have inherited a family trait, her father Newton’s smallish right ear. Adah Sophrona Guild Beckman was born in 1875 and died at age 38 of tuberculosis. She bore 9 children, one of whom, Samuel, died at age 2, when he climbed up on the kitchen table and drank fly poison kept there in an open jar. Her husband, John Franklin “Frank” Beckman, widowed with their 8 surviving kids, married a terrible woman named Clara, who physically abused his 18 month old daughter, Edith (not to be confused with Floyd’s half sister, Edith Vosburg). Dan and Bernal never approved of Frank Beckman because he was dumb and “German” and blamed him personally for the tragedy that follows. Clara, of whom we know no other details, abused the youngest stepchild, Edith, by beating her with a horsewhip as she ran through a doorway, also, by burning her knee with a hot iron and making her sit in ice cube baths for wetting her pants. Frank, unaware of this abuse at first, had Clara arrested immediately upon discovery. She was tried and sent to prison for a good long time. Little Edith recovered and turned into a loving woman who treated her own children tenderly. She said later in life, “The love my dying mother gave me as a baby was enough to last a lifetime.” The family was saddened and mortified by these events but covered up the crime and prison sentence with a story that Clara had a brain tumor. They all lied to protect Frank, who everyone blamed for marrying Adah in the first place and not seeing the abuse sooner in the second place. Frank, soon after however, married a woman named Mary who loved all of Frank’s kids. Mary healed little Edith and raised and loved Frank’s children. They had no children of their own. Edith’s daughter, Gerri Beckman Payne, supplied some of the details of Adah Sophrona’s life and little Edith’s tragedy. Frank Beckman was a carpenter and handyman. He squandered Adah’s inheritance from Newton on a bad business deal. Later, he had the first “booze” bar in Minnesota, a resort on Wabedo Lake, called Frank’s Place, about 5 miles from Longeville, Minnesota. The bar is still there. It is not known if that land was bequeathed to Adah Sophrona by Newton, who is known to have owned land on the lake. After his mother died, Floyd stopped going to Minnesota. Floyd’s brother Clarence, who was a successful farmer, his wife, Francis, and his family visited Floyd and his family in Moline several times. Floyd’s half sisters, Edith and Gertrude, who were very eccentric in manners (had none) and in dress (like floozies) visited Floyd and his family in Moline, unannounced, only once anyone can remember. But that once was enough as they were outspoken, irreverent and unrestrained in their carrying on, and completely terrorized Ethel who said, “I cannot imagine anyone acting like that in front of children, let alone in public!” Floyd’s life after moving to Moline and his married life are well recounted in the stories of his seven kids told in this book but for completeness, following is a brief history of that time. Floyd met Ethel Katherine Williams, who he called a “Looker” and a “Honey” on a blind date in about 1926. They went roller-skating. Their courtship was mostly spent dancing (they were both fabulous ballroom dancers) at the Turner Lodge and going on weekend picnics. On November 6, 1928 they were married by a Justice of the Peace in Moline, Illinois. Frank Melton, a work associate, (who nicknamed Floyd “Casey”) and his wife, Elva, stood up for them. They all went to a movie after the ceremony. They remained close friends with the Meltons their entire lives. Ethel and Floyd had seven children: Iris Lee, Bernard James, Robert Ray, Carol Mae, Delores Ann, Diana Joyce, and Barbara Kay. Floyd enjoyed the birth of 10 grandchildren before he died and Ethel 18 grandchildren, plus 10 great grandchildren. Floyd worked his entire life for John Deere Plow Works. He held positions as a machinist, as a forge operator tempering steel plowshares, and later as a line inspector. For about a year during the Great Depression of the Thirties, Lloyd, Ethel’s brother, a truck driver himself, got Floyd a job driving a gravel truck on a WPA road-building project after being laid off for that time from John Deere. Except for occasional episodes of malaria, Floyd enjoyed, until the very end, excellent health his entire life. Floyd was not afraid of hard work, or expressing his opinion. He loved to kid around and to get a rise out of people and was quite taken with himself—and knew it, but just couldn’t resist showing off anyway. He did this all his life. He was fiercely loyal and dedicated to providing for the well being of his family. There is no doubt that he was a good father and loved his wife and his seven children dearly. His life was entirely defined by his dedication to family. Floyd died on May 23, 1968 at the age of 64 of acute kidney failure, after having a severe stroke two years earlier from which he never fully recovered. Floyd is buried at Riverside Cemetery in Moline, Illinois with Ethel right next to him.

Grandpa

Edward Williams was born with the name Emanuel (Manny) Lehman near Astoria, Illinois in 1882. His parents were Pennsylvania Dutch (German-Americans) by nationality and belonged to the Church of the Brethren, known as Dunkers because their baptismal rite included three dunkings under river water. It was a German, Christian religious sect that originated in Germany in 1708 with a mere eight members. They were persecuted for their strict religious beliefs and driven from Germany to Holland. They came to America seeking religious freedom in William Penn’s Free Lands Offer to settle in Germantown, Pennsylvania. From there, they moved west, where some split off to become the Church of Christ and Seventh Day Baptists. The Church of the Brethren Dunkers remains today. Dunkers are pacifists, eschew frivolities, live simply, do not enter into lawsuits and were the first religious group in America to publicly denounce slavery. Manny’s parents, Michael and Lizzie Lehman, owned a large farm in the Dunkers’ community in Astoria, Illinois. They had migrated west from Hershey, Pennsylvania, according to one living Lehman relative. Emanuel had a sister Mary and two brothers, Henry and Harvey. Emanuel was said to be handsome and strong as a young man, with a full head of straight jet-black hair and fair skin. He kept all his black hair except a touch of white at the sideburns until the day he died. As a teen, he was smitten by an attractive girl who liked to go dancing, a frivolity which was strictly forbidden by his religion. He went to a dance with her in defiance of his father, anyway. The next day, his father banished him to a distant farm for a spell of intensely hard labor to put an end to this “dancin’ phase.” Ironically, the girl never married, it is said. Later, Manny, as he was called in his youth, and his brother, Harvey Lehman, owned The Sunshine Store, a very successful general (combination hardware and grocery) store in Astoria, Illinois. At age 17, Manny married a woman in Astoria we know little of. It was reported, long after he died, by his daughter, Ethel, that he had found his young bride in bed with another man about six months after they were betrothed. Upon this discovery, he pulled the man outside, beat him brutally, and left him for dead. He then, allegedly, ordered his horrified wife to the yard and set the house on fire. He fled to the Sunshine Store and secretly withdrew half the cash from the cash register and replaced it with a note to his brother, Harvey, saying he was leaving town for good. He went to the bank and withdrew half their savings and fled by train to Newburg, North Dakota where he settled in as a farmhand on a wheat farm. Later, he took a job managing a lumberyard, which had a restaurant and dance hall attached to it. Subsequently, he became its accountant and prospered. Sometime between 1905 and 1910, he changed his name to Edward Williams. It is speculated that he changed his name to evade being captured and brought to trial for killing his first wife’s lover, but we know that he secretly corresponded with his brother, Harvey, and learned he had not killed the man at all, and that the first wife had disappeared. So the name change might simply have been to elude a bigamy charge when he married Agnes Tomitum.

Mom

Ethel Katherine Williams was born in Newburg, North Dakota to Edward and Agnes Tomitum Williams on January 28, 1911. She was the firstborn of three children. She was petite, had bright red hair, very fair skin and brown eyes. (See age note at end.) Her mother was a tall full-blooded Norwegian immigrant, who was born Agnes Tomitum. She came to America, married Edward and became a U.S. citizen through the government sponsored Immigrant Work Program. She left at least three sisters behind in Norway. We know nothing, at this time, of her parents or if she had any brothers. Ethel said she spoke with an accent but had learned English and spoke it flawlessly. (Ethel did not know her mother’s national decent until later in life.) She had black hair, wore beautifully tailored clothes and loved to embroider and cook. She was an excellent seamstress and tailor who made her own patterns for the entire family’s clothing including her husband’s suits. She once delighted Ethel by making her a pair of knickers based on a picture Ethel had seen in a new Sears Roebuck catalog. Ethel was thrilled to amaze her friends by being the first girl in school to have them. Newburg, North Dakota is at the foot of the Turtle Mountains, near the banks of the Mouse River on the Sioux Line Railroad. Harsh winters were a constant in this bleak land. For years, Ethel told her children stories about dealing with the unbelievable amounts of snow and the trials of bitter-cold weather. Tunneling out of the house to get to the barn in snow banks so high they reached second story windows and skiing over fences to get to school were commonplace in North Dakota winters. Ethel said she had learned to walk on tiny snowshoes even as a child. Ed and Agnes had three children all told: Ethel Katherine in 1911, Lloyd in 1912 and Ralph in 1914. When Ethel was born, the Church Recorder guessed at Ed’s full name and formalized it to Edwin instead of Edward in Ethel’s birth record. Ed earned a good salary as an accountant. They had a beautiful home, beautiful furnishings and clothing and wanted for nothing. Their life, though they worked very hard and lived in a harsh environment, was very, very good. In 1916, at the age of 2, little Ralph developed double pneumonia and was rushed to the distant hospital on a horse-drawn sleigh lying upon a featherbed and covered up with straw through a snowstorm. He was given a blood transfusion. But he died anyway. This tragedy broke Agnes’ heart. At a point in time in about 1921, while Agnes was laid up in a sanitarium suffering with tuberculosis, Ethel, who was 10, and her brother, Lloyd, who was 9, were sent to live for four or five months with their grandparents, Michael “Mike” and Millisa “Lizzie” Lehman, in Astoria, Illinois. They made the trip to Astoria by train and according to Ethel, were terrified the whole trip. She said, “I think we just sat there on the hard train seat hugging each other and shivering all the way from North Dakota to Astoria.” Lizzie was characterized as a fat little grandma with a very pug nose. (Aha! The Guild Nose!) Lizzie was well known for her beautiful quilts. Neighbors could keep track of her latest creations because she kept her quilting frame set up in her living room where it could be seen from the street through a doorway. Michael Lehman was known for his strict discipline, which Ethel learned of during her stay. She recalled, “He was a tough one.” Ethel never questioned why her father’s brothers and sisters and his mother and father had a different name from him. She was told the “bigamy” story after Iris’ birth in 1930, by Ed’s sister in law, Mary, and Ethel didn’t tell her own children until they were adults. Agnes Tomitum Williams died of consumption and complications from swine flu in 1922. Note that in those days any serious disease of the lungs was referred to as consumption, but Agnes actually had tuberculosis. Ed, unable to keep up a big house, moved them all into a boarding house, where, with a little help from Mrs. Howe, the kindly woman who ran it, he managed to raise Ethel and his son, Lloyd, by himself. Then, grieving the deaths of his wife and young son or bemoaning his past, he began to drink heavily, leaving Ethel to more or less care for herself and Lloyd, and then, even for her father. Ethel was only eleven. It was 1922. Ed continued to manage the diner and a dance hall attached to the lumberyard for a while after Agnes’ death. Ethel tells of the night she got caught by her father smooching in the back seat of a car with a really terrific dance partner.

She was banned from the dance hall after that. But Ethel dearly loved to dance, and though her father had become severely depressed by her mother’s death and was becoming harder to deal with because of his drinking, she managed to have fun in high school. She attended all the dances, and thanks to her many friends and their parents, who treated her very well, she was pretty happy. Her friends called her “Brownie” for her big brown eyes and another nickname she gave herself was “Ets.” Ethel and Lloyd attended Catholic school in North Dakota but were baptized and confirmed in the Lutheran church (Agnes’ Tomitum’s Norwegian religion, it is assumed) and graduated from the tenth grade—the final grade in those days. Ethel was merely 14, though she thought she was 16 due to being misinformed of her birth date by her mother and father—we know not why. She received a certificate stating she was qualified to attend any college in the state, which she desperately wanted to do, but Ed Williams said girls didn’t need an education, and that Ethel should instead get a job so she could help pay for her own clothes. She had become a clotheshorse and loved being well dressed her entire life. She worked as a typist in a doctor’s office in Dunseth, North Dakota. Ethel often said she was a good typist. Ethel moved to Moline with her father and brother Lloyd in 1926 when she was 15. She married Floyd in 1928 at the age of 17, She was introduced to Floyd by her best friend, Mary Hill, who thought Floyd Guild was a very special guy she would like. Floyd was said to be an excellent dancer and took Ethel to all the dances at the Turner’s Hall where he belonged to the Glee Club, as he had a good singing voice and loved singing. He became an advanced tumbler and competed with the Turner’s Tumbling team. Floyd was very proud of his muscular body and made a biceps muscle for his kids whenever they asked him to. Ethel said she thought he was a “dream boat” when they met. Ed Williams lived on and off with Ethel and Floyd in his early years in Moline and permanently beginning in about 1934, when he suddenly stopped working, possibly because he was severely depressed. Before then, he held several jobs no one can recall. Ethel’s brother, Lloyd Williams, was married soon after arriving in Moline. Then he divorced and never remarried. He never had children. At some point, he moved from Moline to Savannah, Illinois. The jobs he’s known to have held there were as a bartender before the war and as a chauffeur to a rich eye doctor, after. He joined the army early on in the war. He was a semaphore expert in the Army Signal Corps. Lloyd was honorably discharged just before the war ended. As a result of injuries he incurred in an amphibious landing in New Guinea, he later suffered a collapsed lung for which he had two surgeries. One of these surgeries was in 1965, preventing him from attending his father’s funeral, which upset Ethel terribly. He eventually disappeared from Ethel and her family’s lives, much to their sorrow. Ethel’s kids all liked him very much and got excited whenever he came to visit. His legacy to the family was teaching everyone how to make bread and butter and peanut butter sandwiches on a piece of folded-over white bread, and then how to dunk them in cocoa for breakfast, a tradition that lasted all through their childhoods. Grandpa Williams lived at home with Ethel and Floyd from 1934 until his death. He helped Ethel raise her kids, did housework, gardening and canning, and did not take an outside job again until quite late in life. When he did work, he gave his entire earnings (except the dollar a week he spent on whiskey) and his entire savings to Ethel and Floyd, including the two thousand dollars he withdrew from his Postal Savings account, for the addition of the two bedrooms and the bath to the house on 39th Street. He told Ethel and Floyd the little house would never hold seven teenagers. He was seriously injured on the job at the Herman Nelson Corporation when he slipped off a catwalk into a vat of metal stripping acid and burned his leg from the ankle to the knee quite badly. He was treated successfully with Tryptar, an experimental drug that chemically removed the dead skin so the wounds could heal rapidly. His leg healed completely with the help of two skin grafts. Ed stopped working after the accident and started walking with a cane. Called “Grampa” by his seven grandchildren and “Gramps” by Floyd, he was really loved by everyone. His favorites were Delores and Bob but he was fond of all the kids. They all knew he was a great help to their Mom, who adored him. Ed Williams, who liked his whiskey, would sometimes get drunk at Harvey’s Bar in Highland, and Floyd would have to go pick him up. Once, Floyd had to go looking for him when he showed up missing entirely and finally found him sleeping in a railroad boxcar. Ed Williams died of a heart attack on February 22, 1953 at age seventy-one and is buried in Riverside Cemetery, in Moline, Illinois. He has no headstone. After Ethel married Floyd and gave birth to a daughter, Iris, she worked sorting buttons in a button factory, where she was paid by the pound. Her next job was as a telephone operator. She also worked for a while at the Moline candy factory where they made Nibs Licorice Bits. Ethel Guild gave birth to seven children. The first child, Iris, a daughter, in May, 1930, the second, a son, Bernie, after the Great Depression ended in 1936, and the remaining five: one more son, Bob, then 3 more daughters, Carol, Delores, Diana each also born about eighteen months apart and finally Barb, who came three years after Diana. Some reports say Ethel’s father, Ed, was more or less permanently on Floyd’s case for keeping her pregnant all the time. But Ethel loved having babies, and often told her kids she would have had even more if only she could have afforded them. She nearly died from a goiter in 1934 at twenty-three years of age. It was successfully operated on by a doctor who, oddly, himself later succumbed of the exact same malady. She wore her scar or “thyroid necklace” as she called it, the rest of her life. This hypothyroidism occurred before iodine was added to salt, and the Illinois soil provides none to things that grow there. Ethel took thyroid tablets from then on. Though she was advise to wait 5 years before having more children, two years later, she was pregnant again with Bernie. Stories of Floyd and Ethel Guild’s life together with their family are well—if not exhaustively—documented in the individual stories told by their seven children in this book. After all the children had left and Floyd had died, Ethel was by herself but continued to lead a full and satisfying life. She spent time with her handcrafts, became an artistic expert at creating Christmas ornaments and played cards at her home or at her friend Florence Britz’s home almost every evening. She took in Carol and Chris after Carol’s divorce, and then Dee and Susy after Dee’s divorce. She loved helping to raise her grandchildren. Ethel adored babies above all. She spent three months of the year with her daughter, Diana, in Florida and often made visits to her other children’s homes around the country. Her lifelong dream was to go to Europe. In 1979, Ethel’s son, Bernie, sent her to Germany for a long holiday with her daughter, Carol who was living there with her husband, Charlie and their son Chris. Bernie joined them and they all toured Germany and Denmark in a huge government- issued Mercedes. Ethel loved that trip. On April 22, 1988 during a yearly visit to her daughter Diana’s home in Hollywood, Florida, Ethel died at age 77 from complications stemming from an ovarian cyst surgery and precipitating congestive heart failure. She is buried in Riverside cemetery in Moline Illinois next to her husband Floyd, with the wrong birth date on her pre-engraved head stone. It says, “Born 1909,” but should, as she learned late in life, read 1911. But that never bothered her, because she was delighted to find she was two years younger than she thought when she researched her birth records to get a U.S. Passport. Ethel was a hard-working dedicated mother above all. She gave pure unqualified love to each and every one of her 7 children and each one loved her back with all their heart.

Grandpa

Edward Williams was born with the name Emanuel (Manny) Lehman near Astoria, Illinois in 1882. His parents were Pennsylvania Dutch (German-Americans) by nationality and belonged to the Church of the Brethren, known as Dunkers because their baptismal right included three dunkings under river water. It was a German, Christian religious sect that originated in Germany in 1708 with a mere eight members. They were persecuted for their strict religious beliefs and driven from Germany to Holland. They came to America seeking religious freedom in William Penn’s Free Lands Offer to settle in Germantown, Pennsylvania. From there, they moved west, where some split off to become the Church of Christ and Seventh Day Baptists. The Church of the Brethren Dunkers remains today. Dunkers are pacifists, eschew frivolities, live simply, do not enter into lawsuits and were the first religious group in America to publicly denounce slavery. Manny’s parents, Michael and Lizzie Lehman owned a large farm in the Dunkers’ community in Astoria, Illinois. They had migrated west from Hershey, Pennsylvania according to one living Lehman relative. He had a sister Mary and two brothers, Henry and Harvey. Emanuel was said to be handsome and strong as a young man, with a full head of straight jet-black hair and fair skin. He kept all his black hair except a touch of white at the sideburns until the day he died. As a teen, he was smitten by an attractive girl who liked to go dancing, a frivolity which was strictly forbidden by their religion. He went to a dance with her in defiance of his father, anyway. The next day, his father banished him to a distant farm for a spell of intensely hard labor to put an end to this “dancin’ phase.” Ironically, the girl never married, it is said. Later, Manny, as he was called in his youth and his brother, Harvey Lehman, owned The Sunshine Store, a successful general (combination hardware and grocery) store in Astoria, Illinois. At age 17, Manny married a woman in Astoria we know little of. It was reported, long after he died, by his daughter, Ethel, that he had found his young bride in bed with another man about six months after they were betrothed. Upon this discovery, he pulled the man outside, beat him brutally, and left him for dead. He then, allegedly, ordered his horrified wife to the yard and set the house on fire. He fled to the Sunshine Store and secretly withdrew half the cash from the cash register and replaced it with a note to his brother, Harvey, saying he was leaving town for good. He went to the bank and withdrew half their savings and fled by train to Newburg, North Dakota where he settled in as a farmhand on a wheat farm. Later, he took a job managing a lumberyard, which had a restaurant and dance hall attached to it. Subsequently, he became its accountant and prospered. Sometime between 1905 and 1910, he changed his name to Edward Williams. It is speculated that he changed his name to evade being captured and brought to trial for killing his first wife’s lover, but we know that he secretly corresponded with his brother, Harvey, and learned he had not killed the man at all, and that the first wife had disappeared. So the name change might simply have been to elude a bigamy charge when he married Agnes Tomitum.

Mom

Ethel Katherine Williams was born in Newburg, North Dakota to Edward and Agnes Tomitum-Williams on January 28, 1911. She was the firstborn of three children. She was petite, had bright red hair, very fair skin and brown eyes. Her mother was a tall full-blooded Norwegian immigrant, who was born Agnes Tomitum. She came to America, married Edward and became a U.S. citizen through the government sponsored Immigrant Work Program. She left at least three sisters behind in Norway. We know nothing, at this time, of her parents or if she had any brothers. Ethel said she spoke with an accent but learned English and spoke it flawlessly. (Ethel did not know her mother’s national decent until later in life.) She had black hair, wore beautifully tailored clothes and loved to embroider and cook. She was an excellent seamstress and tailor who made her own patterns for the entire family’s clothing including her husband’s suits. She once delighted Ethel by making her a pair of knickers based on a picture Ethel had seen in a new Sears Roebuck catalog. Ethel was thrilled to amaze her friends by being the first girl in school to have them. Newburg, North Dakota is at the foot of the Turtle Mountains, near the banks of the Mouse River on the Sioux Line railroad. Harsh winters were a constant in this bleak land. For years, Ethel told her children stories about dealing with the unbelievable amounts of snow and the trials of bitter-cold weather. Tunneling out of the house to get to the barn in snow banks so high they reached second story windows and skiing over fences to get to school were commonplace in North Dakota winters. Ethel said she had learned to walk on tiny snowshoes even as a child. Ed and Agnes had three children all told, Lloyd in 1909, Ethel Katherine in 1911 and Ralph in 1914. When Ethel was born, the reporter got his name wrong and reported it as Edwin instead of Edward in Ethel’s birth announcement. He earned a good salary as an accountant. They had a beautiful home, beautiful furnishings and clothing and wanted for nothing. Their life, though they worked very hard and lived in a harsh environment was very good. In 1916, at the age of 2, little Ralph developed double pneumonia and was rushed to the distant hospital on a horse-drawn sleigh lying upon a featherbed and covered up with straw through a snowstorm. He was given a blood transfusion. But he died anyway. This tragedy broke Agnes’ heart. At a point in time in about 1919, while Agnes was laid up in a sanitarium suffering with tuberculosis, Ethel who was 8 and her brother, Lloyd, who was 10, were sent to live for four or five months with their Grandparents, Michael “ Mike” and Millisa “Lizzie” Lehman in Astoria, Illinois. They made the trip to Astoria by train and, according to Ethel, were terrified the whole trip. She said, “I think we just sat there on the hard train seat hugging each other and shivering all the way from North Dakota to Astoria.” Lizzie, was characterized as a fat little grandma with a very pug nose. (Aha! The Guild Nose!) Lizzie was well known for her beautiful quilts. Neighbors could keep track of her latest creations because she kept her quilting frame set up in her living room where it could be seen from the street through a doorway. Michael Lehman was known for his strict discipline, which Mother learned of during her stay. She recalled, “He was a tough one.” Ethel never questioned why her father’s brothers and sisters and his mother and father had a different name from him. She was told the “bigamy” story after Iris’ birth in 1930, by Ed’s sister, Mary, and Ethel didn’t tell her own children until they were adults. Agnes Tomitum Williams, died of consumption and complications from swine flu in 1921. Note that, in those days, any serious disease of the lungs was referred to as Consumption, but Agnes actually had tuberculosis. Ed, unable to keep up a big house, moved them all into a boarding house, where, with a little help from Mrs. Howe, the kindly woman who ran it, he managed to raise Ethel and his son, Lloyd by himself. Then, grieving his wife’s and son’s deaths, or bemoaning his past bad luck, he began to drink heavily leaving Ethel to more or less care for herself and Lloyd, and then, even for her father. Ethel was only eleven. It was 1922. Ed also managed a diner and a dance hall attached to the lumberyard for a while after Agnes’ death. Ethel tells of the night she got caught by her father smooching in the back seat of a car with a really terrific dance partner. She was banned from the dance hall after that. But Ethel dearly loved to dance, and though her father had become severely depressed by her mother’s death and was becoming harder to deal with because of his drinking, she managed to have fun in high school. She attended all the dances, and thanks to her many friends and their parents, who treated her very well, she was pretty happy. Her friends called her “Brownie” for her big brown eyes and another nickname she gave herself was “Ets.” Ethel and Lloyd attended Catholic school in North Dakota but were baptized and confirmed in the Lutheran church (Agnes’ Tomitum’s Norwegian religion, it is assumed) and graduated from the tenth grade—the final grade in those days. Ethel received a certificate stating she was qualified to attend any college in the state, which she desperately wanted to do, but Ed Williams said girls didn’t need an education, and that Ethel should instead get a job so she could help pay for her own clothes. She had become a clotheshorse and loved looking well dressed her entire life. She worked as a typist in a doctor’s office in Dunseth, North Dakota. Ethel said she was a good typist. Ethel moved to Moline with her father and brother Lloyd in 1925 when she was 14. She married Floyd in 1928 at the age of 17, although she thought she was 19 due to being misinformed of her birth date by her mother and father—we know not why. She was introduced to Floyd by her best friend, Mary Hill, who thought Floyd Guild was a very special guy she would like. Floyd was said to be an excellent dancer and took Ethel to all the dances at the Turner’s Hall where he belonged to the Glee Club as he had a good singing voice and loved singing. He became an advanced tumbler and competed with the Turner’s Tumbling team. Floyd was very proud of his muscular body and made a biceps muscle for his kids whenever they asked him to. Ethel said she thought he was a “dreamboat” when they met. Ed Williams lived on and off with Ethel and Floyd in his early years in Moline and permanently beginning in about 1934, when he suddenly stopped working, possibly because he was severely depressed. Before then, he held several jobs no one can recall. Ethel’s brother, Lloyd Williams, was married shortly soon after arriving in Moline. Then he divorced and never remarried. He never had children. At some point, he moved from Moline to Savannah, Illinois. The jobs he’s known to have held there were as a bartender before the war and as a chauffeur to a rich eye doctor, after. He joined the army early on in the war. He was a semaphore expert in the Army Signal Corps. Lloyd was honorably discharged just before the war ended. As a result of injuries he incurred in an amphibious landing in New Guinea, he later suffered a collapsed lung for which he had two surgeries. One of these surgeries was in 1965 preventing him from attending his father’s funeral which upset Ethel terribly. He eventually disappeared from Ethel and her family’s lives much to their sorrow. Ethel’s kids all liked him very much and got excited whenever he came to visit. His legacy to the family was teaching everyone how to make bread and butter and peanut butter sandwiches on a piece of folded-over white bread, and then how to dunk them in cocoa for breakfast, a tradition that lasted all through their childhood. Grandpa Williams lived at home with Ethel and Floyd from 1934 until his death. He helped Ethel raise her kids, did housework, gardening and canning and did not take an outside job until quite late in life. When he did work, he gave his entire earnings (except the two dollars a week he spent on whiskey) and his entire savings to Ethel and Floyd, including the two thousand dollars, which he withdrew from his postal savings account, for the addition of the two bedrooms and the bath to the house on 39th Street. He told Ethel and Floyd the little house would never hold seven teenagers. He was seriously injured on the job at the Herman Nelson Corporation when he slipped off a catwalk into a vat of metal stripping acid and burned his leg from the ankle to the knee quite badly. He was treated successfully with Tryptar, an experimental drug that chemically removed the dead skin so the wounds could heal rapidly. His leg healed completely with the help of two skin grafts. Ed stopped working after the accident and started walking with a cane. Called “Grampa” by his seven grandchildren and “Gramps” by Floyd, he was really loved by everyone. His favorites were Delores and Bob but he was nice to all the kids. They all knew he was a great help to their Mom, who adored him. Ed Williams, who drank whiskey, would sometimes get drunk at Harvey’s Bar in Highland, and Floyd would have to go pick him up. Once, Floyd had to go looking for him when he showed up missing entirely and finally found him sleeping in a railroad boxcar. Ed Williams died of a heart attack on February 22, 1953 at age seventy-one and is buried in Riverside Cemetery, in Moline, Illinois. He has no headstone. After Ethel married Floyd and gave birth to a daughter, Iris, she worked sorting buttons in a button factory, where she was paid by the pound. Her next job was as a telephone operator. She also worked at the Moline candy factory where they made Nibs Licorice Bits for a while. Ethel Guild gave birth to seven children. The first child, Iris, a daughter in May, 1930, the second, a son, Bernie after the Great Depression ended in 1936, and the remaining five (one more son, Bob and four more daughters, Carol, Delores, Diana and Barbara were each born about eighteen months apart except Barb who came three years after Diana. Some reports say Ethel’s father, Ed, was more or less permanently on Floyd’s case for keeping her pregnant all the time. But Ethel loved having kids and would have had even more if she could have afforded them she told her children many times. She nearly died from a goiter in 1934 at age twenty-three. It was successfully operated on by a doctor who, oddly, himself later succumbed of the exact same malady. She wore her scar or “thyroid necklace” as she called it, the rest of her life. This hypothyroidism occurred before iodine was added to salt, and the Illinois soil provides none to things that grow there. Ethel took thyroid tablets from then on. Though, two years later, she was pregnant again with Bernie. Stories of the Floyd and Ethel Guild’s life together with their family are well, if not exhaustively, documented in the individual stories of their children in this book. After all the children had left and Floyd had died, Ethel was by herself but she led a full and satisfying life. She spent time with her handcrafts, became an artistic expert at making Christmas ornaments and played cards at her home or at her friend Florence Britz’s home almost every evening. She took in Carol and Chris after Carol’s divorce, and then Dee and Susy after Dee’s divorce. She loved helping to raise her grandchildren. Ethel loved babies above all. She spent three months of the year with her daughter, Diana, in Florida and often made short visits to her other children’s homes as well. Her lifelong dream was to go to Europe. Her son, Bernie, sent her to Germany, her father’s forbearers’s national origin country, to visit her daughter, Carol, Charlie and Chris when they were stationed there in Mainz with the Army in 1979. Bernie joined her there and they all traveled in a big government-issued Mercedes to Denmark. On her yearly visit to Diana’s home in Hollywood Florida on April 22, 1988, Ethel died, at age 77 from complications of an ovarian cyst surgery and congestive heart failure. She is buried in Riverside cemetery in Moline Illinois next to her husband Floyd with the wrong birth date on her pre- engraved head stone. It says, “Born 1909,” but should read 1911. But that never bothered her, because she was delighted to find she was two years younger than she thought when she researched her birth records to get a U.S. Passport. Ethel was a hard-working dedicated mother above all. She gave pure unqualified love to each and every one of her children. They each loved her with all their heart.