Photo taken in Rush Co., Kansas
Written on the back:
"This picture is valued very much by Miss Myrtle J. Ogden (of) Wagoner, Ind. R.R."
In 1879 our tree's outstanding blacksheep, James Harrison Ogden, took his pregnant young wife, Alice Ann Wynn, and their two infant daughters from Union Co., Ohio, to homestead in Rush Co., Kansas, where their third daughter was born. Pioneering was not new to Alice. She had been born in Iowa, where her parents had apparently lived for a brief period during the late 1850's before returning to Ohio.
James's parents, Albert and Doracy Ogden, homesteaded with them, accompanied by their two daughters, older son and his family. Doracy's long-widowed mother, Anna B. (Jones) Graham, came, too, with an unmarried son. They farmed together until 1887, when restless James tired of frontier life and took Alice and their daughters, now numbering six, back east. Anna and her son also left at that time. Rather than return to Ohio, they all went to Fulton Co., Indiana, where Graham relatives were living.
The group's departure was occasioned by tearful farewells within the extended family and the provision of a large basket of food for the little girls, dressed alike, to eat on the train - a basket that is treasured by a descendent. Doracy is said to have died three years later of a broken heart, fearful for their future and convinced that she would never see any of them again.
Her foreboding proved justified. Anna died the next year, in 1888. James and Alice finally had a son in 1891, whom they named Albert, but he died before his second birthday. Alice then became afflicted with consumption (tuberculosis) and realized that she did not have long to live. She was painfully aware that James intended, upon her death, to go to Alabama, where he had his eye on a new wife and had already purchased land. He clearly did not wish to be accompanied or otherwise burdened by his six young female dependents.
Unable physically, financially and perhaps for other reasons to take the girls to her parents' home in Union Co., Ohio, and reluctant to place them with her brother's new family living nearby, she struggled to find suitable foster homes for them among neighbors. By the time Alice died in the spring of 1895, at the age of thirty-six, she was graced with success. The eldest had married at the age of sixteen and the others all had willing families awaiting them. Our grandmother, the youngest, was just nine years old. James, as expected, moved away to re-marry that same year - rendering his daughters orphans, as his own father had been orphaned.
James had been an uncaring, cruel father who obliged his girls to work long and hard in the fields in his stead, while enforcing harsh discipline upon them. So, their new lives with foster families, in all but one case, may actually have been easier. By his second wife, also named Alice, James raised two sons and a daughter, treating them much the same way. He remained an unsettled man and took his second family to the Kansas homestead during the final years of his father's life.
In 1912, a decade later, while visiting his four married daughters who lived in Indiana, his first and only re-appearance since abandoning them, he complained of marital troubles and pleaded to remain there with any one of their families. There were no takers. He returned to his second family in Shelby County, Alabama, where he finally died in 1929.
The six Ogden sisters, together in Indiana on June 23, 1946, on the occasion of Maggie's 69th birthday. Left to right (in birth order):
Acknowledgments: This account is based primarily upon letters written in 1979 by Irene (Fultz) Culp, Mary's daughter, supplemented by census data. The photos of Alice and her daughters, kept by our grandmother, were provided by Barbara (Hoover) Vogel. The group photo was provided by Freida (Graham) Heaman. The gravesite photo was taken by Wendy Bower, after re-setting Alice's fallen stone upright at Salem Cemetery near Fulton, Indiana.
Postscript: Autosomal DNA test comparisons have proved that Alice Ann (Wynn) Ogden (1858-1895) was the biological daughter of Andrew Jackson Wynn & Rebecca Ann Chew and was also the biological mother of Myrtle Jane (Ogden) Hoover. While there have been no family allegations that Alice might have been adopted, formally or otherwise, by her parents, there were two indications of it. The first was that, in all of the 19th-century census records, Alice was consistently listed as born in Iowa, while her nine younger and older siblings were always listed as born in Ohio. Yet, there is nothing else in the family's oral history or records suggesting that the family ever lived in Iowa. The second indication was that Alice didn't obtain the help of either her parents and siblings living in western Ohio or her brother's family living nearby in Indiana when she sought foster homes for her six daughters prior to her expected death. That curious circumstance hinted that she may not have been considered an integral member of the family. So, DNA testing has not only proved Alice's natural birth within her family; it supports speculation that the family lived in Iowa for a short time between April 1855 and February 1861 - a period bracketed by the births of her two closest siblings in Pike Co., Ohio.
Copyright © 2001-
by Charles Acree. All rights reserved.