Week 7 – 2020: Favorite Discovery #52Ancestors

One favorite discovery has to do with my great-uncle, Everett Linwood Spencer. He was the first of my great-grandfather’s five children, born in 1867 to Charles Edward Spencer and his first wife, Sarah Jennie Farr. I’ve written about Charles before: he of three wives (two overlapping in time); a made-up Civil War story; and a made-up birth year (what kind of nut ageshimself by nine years?). Anyway, I want to focus on Everett today because of a little serendipity.

Born in Rhode Island in 1867, Everett was the first of Charles and Sarah’s two children. Charles had been in living in Boston with his mother, step-father and step-brothers in 1865, but married Sarah that year in Rhode Island. Evidently, they settled there because by 1870 they were living in Scituate, RI with two sons and Sarah’s father. Charles was a clerk in a store.  Then, disaster struck. Sarah died in 1872 and, although I cannot find the younger son’s death certificate, he certainly died before 1875. 

Less than two-years after Sarah’s death, Charles married again. This was also a second marriage for Celeste who had a seven-year old daughter. By mid-1880, Charles and family were living in Providence and Charles was a grocer. They were well-enough off to have a servant and Charles’ uncle, Edward Ingham (half-brother to his mother) is living with them.

Sadly, Charles and Celeste’s marriage did not last long. Well, on paper it did, but not in real life. By January of 1883, Charles was in New York living with a woman he identified as his wife who had just given birth to a son. Charles and his “new” wife, Mary Josephine McGann (my great-grandmother) had two more children and continued to live together as man and wife until after Celeste died in 1900. It wasn’t until I found the baptismal records for Charles and Mary’s children that I found their marriage record from 1902.

Fine, but what of Everett, the focus of this blog? His dad and Celeste separated by at least 1882 when he was fourteen-years-old. He didn’t go to New York with his father, so what happened to him? A biography of him says that he was “orphaned” at nine and made his living operating a little fruit stand and selling papers.[1] Presumably, Everett contributed this information to the biographer, but why would he invent such a fanciful story? I can only guess at the shame associated with having been abandoned by one’s father. I assume he needed to re-invent himself and fabricated the reasons for his “orphan” status. 

I’ve been able to find a little about Everett’s early life after his father left. In early 1885, he was living with his step-mother, Celeste. Later that year, he was living H. DeWitt Smith, a jewelry manufacturer in Providence. He was identified in the census that year as DeWitt’s step-son, but there is no reason to think there was a true family connection. Everett’s biography noted he was an apprentice at the jewelry firm of Waite, Smith & Co. and since DeWitt was also a jeweler in Providence, so I assume perhaps some kind of family connection.

After working for a number of jewelry manufacturers, Everett opened his own firm in 1891. He married his first wife, Nettie James Waite the year before and that same year they welcomed a daughter, Evelyn. Everett L. Spencer & Co. must have been quite successful. By 1915, Everett and his family had two homes in Rhode Island, one in Providence and another one near the ocean in Barrington.

Everett’s first wife died in in 1921 and he married Irene Hurley the next year. They had a daughter, Dorothy Betty, in 1923. Everett passed away three years later at age fifty-nine. His death was noted in many large newspapers in the region, including the Boston Herald who described him as a “Prominent Manufacturer.”[2]

Learning about Everett was one of my favorite discoveries because it turns out that his half-sister, my grandmother, also worked as a jeweler before she married in 1921. My sister inherited her engagement ring which, the story goes, was designed by my grandmother. To find that the half-brother she likely never knew was in the same business sent chills up my spine. Then I found a picture of Everett’s daughter Dorothy from her obituary in 2011 and that was a shocker. Maybe you won’t be able to see it, but when I saw Dorothy’s picture, I thought I was looking at my grandmother or at least a woman who could be my grandmother’s sister. Made me smile.[3]

[1] "Everett L. Spencer," History of the state of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations: Biographical (NY: The American Historical Society, Inc, 1920), 115-16.

[2] “Everett L. Spencer, Jewelry Man Dies," Boston Herald, 7 March 1926, p. 10, col. 5-6.

[3] Apologies for the lack of footnotes in this blog. Out of town and without sufficient resources. 

My grandmother, Catherine Josephine Spencer Maier

My first cousin, once removed, Dorothy Betty Spencer Fannon