Genealogy Jottings

Laura Riddle’s name seems appropriate for a person who led a puzzling personal life with the men who fathered her children. After she reached adulthood, her family knew and referred to her as Laura Edmonds and a couple of her sons carried the Edmonds name, but she never used that name herself. Instead, she always conducted business and signed documents with her maiden name, Laura Riddle.

She began life ordinarily enough on October 9, 1853 as the fifth of eight children born to John Davis Riddle and Olive Dunbar. On their farm in Mendon Township, St. Joseph County, Michigan, she learned to keep house, raise crops, and care for livestock. She used these skills the rest of her life.

At about age 20, she reportedly married George Edmonds. Although women of her era usually married either in their home church or at their father’s house, no record of this marriage has been found in any county in Michigan. All her sisters and two brothers had marriages recorded in St. Joseph County, but Laura did not.

Laura and George did have three sons. Francis (Frank) was born in 1876 in adjacent Berrien County. Both Lewis and Joseph, in 1877 and 1880 respectively, were born in St. Joseph County. That year, George and Laura lived near Laura’s family while he worked as a laborer on a farm and she kept house.

After 1880, George Edmonds disappeared from Laura’s life. No divorce or death record for him has been found, but a man named George Edmonds did marry another woman in St. Joseph County in the early 1880’s. Laura seems to have been left alone to support three little boys, two of whom were always described as “slow”.

Like many other single women, she headed west to find opportunities for making a living. Her older sister Theodocia had already moved to Nebraska with her husband John Evert and their children. Laura joined them in McCook.

In January 1885, she settled north of McCook on a 160-acre tract adjacent to land owned by her brother-in-law in Red Willow County. On June 24, 1885, she went to the McCook Land Office and filed a pre-emption claim on the land. By then she had erected a 14×16 house with a door and 2 windows and had broken 18-20 acres. She reported herself to be a single woman, but oddly claimed to have just 2 children. Perhaps one son had actually stayed behind in Michigan for a while or was living with John and Theodocia Evert. Unfortunately, no record for Laura and her boys has been found on the 1885 Nebraska census, so we do not know who resided in her household that year.

That August the Land Office approved her claim. She paid the $200 cash entry fee, a rate of $1.25 per acre, for her land.

Laura remained in Red Willow County for several years. It must have been hard for her when John and Theodocia Evert decided in 1888 to relocate to the Sandhill region of northwestern Nebraska, near Hyannis. Laura stayed behind in the McCook area. Perhaps she had a boyfriend.

By 1892, Laura also decided to move on from the McCook area. She filed a claim on a 160-acre homestead north of Palisade, Nebraska in Hayes County, claiming she supported 3 children. There she and the boys built a 14×18 frame house and a sod stable, a cave cistern, a hog corral, and a chicken house. They cultivated 45 acres. In 1896, Laura’s daughter Grace was born there, father unknown. Laura received the final certificate for this homestead in January 1899.

Sometime during this period, her son Frank left the family home. He moved on to Wyoming and Montana, working as a sheepherder. He registered for the WWI draft in Big Horn County, Wyoming. In 1944 he died from a broken neck when he was thrown from a horse in Montana’s Lewis and Clark National Forest. He is buried in Great Falls, Montana.

At the beginning of the 20^th century, Laura’s household in Hayes County consisted of herself (“Laura Riddle”) and three children (Lewis, Joseph, and Grace “Edman”). According to Grace’s sister-in-law, Bertha Reed Evert, “They were very hard up (or poor). Grandma [Theodocia] Evert went to visit Laura. Grandma Evert told me Laura was a widow then and was having a hard time making a living as the boys wasn’t (sic) big enough to get work all the time. So Grandma Evert brot (sic) Grace home with her.”

Bertha Evert thought Grace was about 2 years old when she went to live with the Everts, but the 1900 U.S. census for Hayes County lists 4-year-old Grace in her mother’s household. By 1910, however, 14-year-old Grace was enumerated with Theodocia Evert in Grant County. Interestingly, another member of the Evert household that year was a laborer named Samuel H. Reed, who later became Grace’s father-in-law.

Theodocia raised Grace as her own child and left Grace a share of her estate equal to that of her natural children when she died in 1929. How typical this was of the generous Theodocia whose son Warren’s wife, Blanche, described her as the “most kind and loving person I ever knew.”

Perhaps Grace’s move took place in 1904 when Laura and the boys decided to take new homesteads even further west in Dundy County, Nebraska. Congress had recently passed the Kincaid Act which allowed larger homesteads in western Nebraska. Several Palisade-area homesteaders sold their small farms and moved on. That year, Laura had inherited some money, $43.14, for her share of the proceeds from the sale of her mother’s farm in Michigan. Laura, Lewis, and Joseph sold their place in Hayes County for $350 and each filed claims on adjacent tracts near Haigler, Nebraska.

Again, poverty made life difficult. A neighbor’s affidavit described Laura as a poor widow who “has had to work where she could for a living while holding this [Dundy County] homestead. With her son they took nearby pieces of land without even a team to start with, buying a horse at a time”. She worked for a neighbor in Palisade in return for a wagon and harness. Eventually she improved the homestead to include a 20×26 house of stock boards with a board roof covered with tarred paper and sod, a well and pump, a corn crib, a stable and chicken house, 2 miles of wire fencing, 20 cottonwood trees, and 60 broken acres. She rented pasture space to neighbors.

Acquiring the final certificate for this homestead proved difficult. The case file is marked “Confidential” because neighbors contested her claim, alleging that she had not spent the requisite time actually living on the homestead. The Field Division in Cheyenne, Wyoming referred her case to the U.S. Land Office in Lincoln, Nebraska for investigation.

Her 480-acre Dundy County land finally proceeded to Patent in 1912. The investigator found “Inasmuch as the claimant was very poor when she took this land and has had to work for her living, and is well along in years, and seems to have complied with the law as to residence and as to improvements in a substantial manner, and apparently good faith, commensurate with her means and ability, I recommend that final certificate issue and the case pass to patent.” He suspected that at least one of the neighbors had given self-serving testimony in hopes of acquiring her land for himself.

Lewis and Joseph faced similar difficulties and allegations. Joseph’s land finally proceeded to patent, but Lewis surrendered his claim.

Lewis and Joseph continued to live with Laura and remained with her through most of their adult lives. About 1926, Laura and Joseph sold their homesteads and moved with Lewis back to Palisade, Nebraska. Joseph purchased a house in town, and the mother and sons lived there together. Their neighbor, Kenneth Ungles, recalled that Laura was a big, strong woman. He remembered Lewis and Joseph doing odd jobs like raking leaves.

Laura passed away from a stroke on September 2, 1933. She left an estate of personal property worth $900; Joseph received all of it as compensation for taking care of his mother from 1929-1933. Lewis died a couple of years later on November 23, 1935. When Joseph became too infirm to care for himself in 1949, Clyde Coles, the same man who had rented pasture land from Laura 40 years earlier, became his guardian. Joseph died on January 3, 1956. The mother and her two sons are buried next to each other with a single headstone in the Palisade Cemetery.

Regardless of the mysteries surrounding the men in her life, some things about Laura Riddle are very clear. She led a hard life. She struggled as a single mother to support disabled children, and she had to give one child away. She endured spitefulness and condescension from some of her neighbors. Yet she also made life-long friends and had the support of a loving sister. Despite every hardship, she always made her own way and never gave up.