Agnes Vanderwalker Call Congleton Wilson Part 3 – Agnes Rejoins Healdsburg Society

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Agnes circa 1899By the time Agnes Vanderwalker Call Congleton was 26 years old, she had already experienced a lifetime of tribulation. She had lost her mother at birth, been given away to the neighbors by her father, been relocated 2,000 miles from home by her adoptive parents, endured a “shotgun marriage” to a handsome ne’er-do-well, given birth to three children, lost a son to illness, and managed to obtain a divorce under the repressive laws of the 1880s.

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Agnes Vanderwalker Call Congleton Wilson Part 5 – A Sister Found and Lost

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In February 1861, in a drafty frontier cabin on a farm in the newly-minted state of Minnesota, Clarinda Stokes Vanderwalker died giving birth to her daughter Agnes. Clarinda and husband Isaac Vanderwalker already had five children, four of them girls. They were fourteen year old Elizabeth, twelve year old Helen, ten year old George, six year old Mary, and five year old Clara who was afflicted with dwarfism. The two older girls may have wanted to take care of their new baby sister Agnes, but in the dead of winter in rural Minnesota it could not have been easy. As Agnes’ daughter Helen Wilson Peterson describes in the audio clip below, the best option available to widower Isaac Vanderwalker was to give the baby away to the neighbors who had access to a milk cow.

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Agnes Vanderwalker Call Congleton Wilson Part 6 – Energy is Directed Toward Community, Family, and Friends

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The saga of my Great Grandmother Agnes’ life spanned a number of major world events, and that never rang more true than in the early twentieth century. To learn about the interesting first chapters of her life please check out The Early Years, Agnes Makes a Regrettable Choice, Agnes Rejoins Healdsburg Society, A New Family for a New Century, and A Sister Found and Lost.

THE GREAT WAR

Liberty Bonds LOC4In the years leading up to the United States entering the Great War in April of 1917, Agnes and Albert Wilson had become quite active in the progressive politics of the Pomona Grange of Healdsburg. However, once the country was directly involved in the global conflict, their focus shifted. They, along with so many other citizens of Healdsburg, jumped on the patriotic bandwagon and campaigns to sell Liberty Bonds were quickly organized.

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Louise Giorgi DalColletto Remembers

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In 1977, when the mini-series “Roots” took America by storm, thousands of people adopted a new hobby called genealogy. And Maria Buchignani Taeuffer was one of them. One of her first steps was to interview some of the oldest members of her family that she could find. This precious snippet of conversation with her aunt, Louise Giorgi DalColletto, was recorded sometime in the late 1970s and allows us to hear the voice of our beloved Aunt Louise/Nonna one more time…

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How I Found My Buchignani Connection

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My mother was born Maria Columbia Buchignani. Her parents were Vittorio Alberto Buchignani and Eva Veronica Giorgi.

Mom and Grand Parents

Growing up in Healdsburg, California I remember spending a lot of time visiting with my mother’s cousins on her Giorgi side. But there were also numerous families in town and the surrounding area named Buchignani, and we never socialized with any of them. My mother’s explanation was that “We’re not related to them.” By the 1990s there were 39 Buchignani families in Sonoma County. There were 160 in California. But, of course, we were not related to any of them.

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Claude F. Congleton – AKA “Buster Brown”

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In October 1903, Eugenia Selestine Hoar, daughter of Benjamin Franklin and Eugenia Chichester Hoar of Healdsburg married A. Claude Congleton, son of Agnes Call Congleton Wilson of Bailhache Avenue. The young couple set up housekeeping in Healdsburg and on February 13, 1905 their son Claude Franklin Congleton was born. Eugenia, better known as Jennie or Birdie, and baby Claude kept the home fires burning while Daddy Claude was away working as a brakeman for the Railroad.

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KEEP LOOKING: More on that elusive Congleton family…

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One very basic building block of family research is to catalog your family’s movements via census records. These reliable documents provide us not only with evidence of where our people lived across time but also indications of family relationships, countries of origin, occupations, etc., etc. However, every family historian soon learns that the information contain is not always 100% accurate nor is it always complete. I suspect we all have that branch of the tree consisting of people who, by all appearances, were intent on hiding from census takers.

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