I do not know for certain the identity of this handsome older gentleman. A note scribbled on the back of the photo in handwriting unknown to me says “Great Grandpa Hawkins”. A note in the same hand on the back of another photo refers to Angie (Angeline Hawkins) Wright as “Grandma Wright.” (Angie was also Dad’s grandmother, but this is definitely not his handwriting.) Because of this other notation in the same hand, one would naturally assume that this photo is of Angie’s father, James Thomas Hawkins. However, her father did not live to his 40th birthday, and this gentleman appears (to me, at least) to be significantly older than that. My best guess is that this is Angie’s grandfather, Thomas Grinstead Hawkins, who lived into his mid-70s (no mean feat in the middle of the 1800s).
A studio imprint on the back of this photo reads: “W. E. Lindop, Photographer, Elgin Gallery, St. Thomas, Ont.” I don’t know why Thomas was in Ontario, or when. To my knowledge, he lived at least the latter part of his life in Louisville, Kentucky.
Thomas Hawkins appears to have immigrated to the US from England in 1843 along with his second wife Mary Anne and two youngest children, Sarah and Richard. James (Angie’s father) was 20 by that time and did not immigrate with his father (though he did come to the US before 1847, when he married Angie’s mother, Mary Elizabeth Vannoy).
(I’ve mentioned before that except for Grandma Wright and her ancestors from Holland, our family tree back to the 1700s has very few immigrants in it. The Hawkins branch is the primary reason this is “very few” and not “none.”)
Here is a family tree that shows the relationships among the various people mentioned below. I know that even at full size, the tree is a bit of an eye chart, but I hope you can read it well enough that it will help you follow the relationships among the players mentioned in the following paragraphs. (Click the image to view a version you can zoom to full size. If your browser supports tabs, this will open in a separate tab. You may want to keep it in that tab to refer back to as you read on.)
Just for some orientation on the tree, Angeline Hawkins (our great-grandmother) is toward the lower left. Her two sisters (apparently twins) Ida and Ione did not survive long. But her sister Mary Hawkins did. She is the “Auntie Hawkins” mentioned below and in other posts.
Thomas Hawkins outlived his first wife (she died and he remarried before he immigrated) and he also outlived three of his sons. The youngest of these sons, Thomas Rowland Hawkins, was born shortly after Thomas immigrated to the US. Young Thomas apparently died at about age eight. The son who immigrated with Thomas, Richard Grinstead Hawkins (not to be confused with another Richard that I will mention below), passed away in his early 30s. Thomas’s eldest son, James Thomas Hawkins (Angie’s father) was just short of 40 when he died, as I mentioned above.
I related in another post the story passed down through the family about when James’ first wife, Mary Elizabeth Vannoy, passed away and James remarried, the new wife didn’t want Angie and her sister Mary and they ended up with their maternal grandparents, Sarah May and her husband John. This story casts the second wife as an evil stepmother. Although there may be some truth to it, it should be noted that James Hawkins passed away only five years after the girls’ mother. So apparently he wasn’t with that second wife long. And under those circumstances, one can understand how it might have made more sense for the girls to live with their maternal grandmother after their mother and then father passed away than to live with their father’s widow who they had known for just a few years at most. So it may not have been the simple “evil stepmother” case that family tradition portrays.
This brings up another mystery that may be related to the Hawkins/Grinstead family. Grandpa Wright’s sister Sarah May Wright Taft (“Auntie May”) was born in Bloomington Township, Muscatine County, Iowa in 1884. The siblings before and after her were born in Chicago. When I first noticed this, I assumed that Great-Grandpa William P. Wright moved the family from Chicago to Iowa for a short time, then moved them back, possibly in connection with his job with the Chicago, Milwaukee, and St. Paul Railroad. But while the CMSPRR did have rail lines in Bloomington Township (as they did almost everywhere in the Midwest) it seems unlikely that they would send someone from the Chicago headquarters to an outpost in Iowa for a short assignment. But maybe.
Just recently, I discovered quite by accident that a Richard Hawkins Grinsted lived in Bloomington Township, Iowa at that time. (I know, crazy, right? Don’t confuse him with the “Richard Grinstead Hawkins” above.) When I first saw that name, my immediate reaction was, “that cannot be a coincidence”–neither the name of this individual nor the fact that he lived in Bloomington. It turns out that this Richard Hawkins Grinsted’s father, John Grinstead, was a brother to our Thomas Grinstead Hawkins. (There is no consistency in how “Grinsted” is spelled, by the way.)
Whatever the case, this Richard H. Grinsted of Boomington, Iowa was Great-Grandma Angie Wright’s first cousin once removed. And though he was “removed” one generation earlier than she, she was actually a few years older than he. So they would have seemed more like first cousins, I imagine. Anyway, I wonder: was she visiting Richard and his family in May 1884 when Sarah May arrived unexpectedly?
But I have no evidence that Angie even knew she had a cousin there, much less visited him. So this is all utter speculation.
There is yet another twist in all this. Richard Hawkins Grinsted eventually moved with his wife and children to Oregon. He shows up in the Portland area in 1910, but in Roseburg in 1920. He died in Roseburg in 1927. One wonders whether he knew that three children of his cousin Angie (John, Lottie and Persis) lived close by at that time, and that another child Will and his other cousin Mary (Auntie Hawkins) lived not much farther away in Washington. But that question presupposes that he knew his cousin Angie, and I have no evidence that he did.
As a sort of conclusion to all of this, here is a photo of the Hawkins plot at Cave Hill Cemetery in Louisville, KY. (Beautiful and huge cemetery. Worth a visit if you’re ever in the area.) Most of the Hawkinses mentioned above and their wives are buried in the small triangular plot in the foreground of this photo. This includes Thomas, his wife Mary Anne, son Richard, his wife Mary, son James T., son Thomas R., possibly an infant child of Richard and Mary, and possibly Thomas’s father, Richard Grinsted. The tall, flat stones with the curved tops (one of which has fallen and is laying on the ground on the right) mark the graves of Thomas and Mary Anne. (By the way, have you noticed that every woman in this family is named “Mary”? Added to the ones listed above are James T.’s first and second wives, both named Mary. And of course the daughter, Angie Hawkins’ sister, “Auntie” Mary Hawkins. You’d think some other female name would appear somewhere, but other than some of James T.’s daughters, nope.)
Someone is bound to ask why Thomas’s name was “Thomas Grinstead Hawkins” when “Grinsted” was his father’s family name and “Hawkins” was his mother’s family name. Seems like it should have been “Thomas Hawkins Grinstead” or something. After all, his brother had Grinstead as a last name. I don’t have an answer. Apparently there is some evidence that Thomas’s father was not married to his mother when he was born. If so, that could explain his name. His parents evidently married at some point, though.
Side note: the name “Grinstead” is a pretty well-known family name around Louisville, Kentucky. A James F. Grinstead was mayor of the city and county commissioner in the early 1900s. A major street in the city is named after him. (And that street just happens to run along one side of Cave Hill Cemetery.) I don’t know of a connection with our Grinsteads and Hawkinses, but it wouldn’t be surprising if there were one.
OK, I really need to close this post. But just one more observation. I mentioned above (and it appears in the family tree) that Great-Grandma Angie Hawkins and “Auntie” Mary Hawkins had two sisters named Ione and Ida who did not survive. Much later, when Dad’s Uncle Richard and Aunt Edith were living in Seattle and Auntie Hawkins was living with them, Auntie must have had some influence on the naming of Richard and Edith’s daughters. The first was named Helen Ione and the second was named Ida, seemingly in honor of Auntie Hawkins’ lost sisters.