A DIFFICULT BEGINNING
Agnes Call and George Washington Congleton had been married just three years when on December 4, 1881 their third child, A. Claude Congleton, was born. He would join older siblings two-and-a-half-year-old Lulu Mae and 18-month-old John Esley to complete the burgeoning family. The young couple had been living with George’s twice widowed mother, Almira Almy Congleton Burgess, in her home on Sherman Street in Healdsburg, California. But that household also included George’s nephew Harry Brown as well as his spinster aunt Cynthia Almy, and the house was getting awfully crowded.
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My great great grandparents, John E. Congleton and Almira Almy had a large family. But like most families in the 19th century, not all of their eleven children would make it to adulthood. Learning where each of them had been born allowed me to trace the meandering migration path they took across America which finally lead them to settle in California.
My father’s family has been in the United States for several generations and in some cases since before there was a United States. Both sides of his family arrived in Sonoma County, California fairly early on in the local history. His mother’s side of his line arrived in the 1850s, while his father’s side arrived in the 1870s.
By 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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