In my previous posting, I discussed two mystery photos of WWI soldiers I find in a “gathering” that I now realize belonged to my great-aunt Frances Tucker, who married my grandmother’s brother John R. Batchelor in Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1921. John’s trunk was in the attic of the house of my grandmother Hattie Batchelor Simpson in Little Rock all through my growing-up years, and in 2001, when my mother’s youngest sister and I ended up owning half shares of that house and its contents, as we divided the house’s contents, I took all the old photos from that trunk and put them into a box and stored them — along with other boxes and envelopes of old photos I found elsewhere in the house — to sort through later.
I recognize the cache of photos I’ve recently been sorting through as Frances’s because some of them have inscriptions in her handwriting on the back of them, and quite a few of them are photos in which she or her husband John and/or son George appear, with others featuring members of the Tucker family, and others clearly taken during her time at University of Arkansas in Fayetteville in the early 1920s and then at Agnes Memorial sanatorium for tuberculosis patients in Denver in 1922-3. The whole batch is also curled in the same way from having long been stored together in an envelope, so that I can now place photos that had been separated from them main group back with the others because they have that matching curl.
Yesterday’s posting mentions that Frances’s husband John’s old trunk previously contained a diary she began keeping when she was studying at the University of Arkansas, and in which she kept writing until not long before her death. It also notes that I have donated that diary to the Butler Center for Arkansas Studies. The diary opens on 1 January 1921 when she was finishing her final semester as an M.A. student in classics at Fayetteville. On 13 January, the diary states that Frances and John were engaged to be married and notes that her father had told cousins visiting from Canton, Massachusetts, of the engagement.
Many of the early entries in the diary are about the classes she was taking, her thesis on Juvenal being written under the direction of Dr. Jones, her search for a position to teach Latin and her hope that she would find one in Pine Bluff, 40 miles south of Little Rock along the Arkansas River, near where John and his family members lived in Jefferson County, Arkansas. But on 18 July 1921, after Frances married John and they were living in Pine Bluff and she still had not found a teaching position, the diary speaks of obstacles she was encountering after an experience she had when she had previously taught Latin at nearby Altheimer: someone there accused her of atheism and she was fired. (The diary contains abundant references to her churchgoing, by the way, and nothing in it suggests that she was an unbeliever.)
By 4 March 1921, it’s clear Frances has begun to have health issues: the entry of that day speaks of a second x-ray of her lungs a doctor had taken. By 3 July 1922, Frances notes that Dr. Judd of Little Rock had found one of her lungs “suspicious,” and then on the 7th, she reports that her sister Mary, who had a master’s degree in public health from Bellevue Hospital Training School in New York City, had told John that Dr. Judd had confirmed that Frances had tuberculosis. At the time she was diagnosed, Frances was very much pregnant with her son George William Tucker Batchelor, who would be born on 6 August 1922.
After John and Frances had married at her parents’ home in Little Rock on 17 June 1921 with Reverend Van Lear, pastor of First Presbyterian Church, officiating at their wedding, the couple then settled in Pine Bluff following their honeymoon, where Frances states in her diary on 5th and 9th July that they had gotten a house (the diary doesn’t make clear whether they bought or rented it) from Angus F. McNeill, the first mayor of Redfield, a town in Jefferson County in which John’s sisters Hattie and husband William Z. Simpson and Alice and husband Thomas M. Murdock lived. The 1920 federal census shows John living in Redfield in that year and working as a clerk in a store there at the time he and Frances met.[1] John was not long back from his WWI service in Co. L of the 53rd Pioneer Infantry, where he and his brother William Edward Batchelor, who was in Co. A of the 81st Engineers of the 137th Infantry, had taken part in the Argonne offensive in France in September 1918.
I’m providing this background information from Frances’s diary because it’s necessary contextual information for the discussion of a photo in Frances’s “gathering” of photos that I’ll begin discussing in a moment. Pine Bluff plays a large role in that discussion.
After George was born on 6 August 1922, Frances began to have serious health complications due to her tuberculosis. Her diary reports that she had an abscess on 14 August, and Dr. Judd opened it two days later, leaving her without “strength or will.” On 22 August, she writes, “Arrangements made for Mary, John, George, and me to go away as soon as possible.”
On 29 August, the Arkansas Gazette would note that “Mr. and Mrs. John R. Batchelor and baby of Pine Bluff, with Miss Mary W. Tucker of Little Rock, will leave Friday for Denver, Colo., for a stay of several months.”[2] Frances’s diary notes that the group left for Denver on 1 September and arrived there on 3 September, and on 10 October, they were notified that there was a place for her at Agnes Memorial sanitorium. In early November, after John and Mary convinced Frances against her objections that it was not good for her infant son George to remain with her at the sanitorium, Mary and George returned to Little Rock, and Frances remained with John at Agnes Memorial until 22 October 1923, returning to Arkansas two days later and seeing her son George again for the first time since November 1922.
On 13 March 1924, Frances notes in her diary that her father Francis W. Tucker had died at the Tucker’s house at 2320 Louisiana in Little Rock with her mother, Frances, and husband John present at his death.[3] Two days later Francis Tucker was buried. Frances’s diary then moves to its conclusion, noting on 6 April that George had been christened; on 13 April she and John had gone to Redfield to visit his sisters Hattie and Alice, and his brother Pat, who farmed between Redfield and Pine Bluff, had joined them; on 16 April she had met Governor McRae at the statehouse; and then on 21, 22, 23 April she had a high temperature and her mother was sick at the same time and her mother’s sister Julia had telegraphed from Massachusetts that she was coming to help care for them.
The entry of 23 April 1924 is the last entry in the diary. Frances died on 18 May at her mother’s house. Her mother lived to 4 June 1932, and she and her unmarried daughters Mary and Ruth raised John and Frances’s son George.
So all of that is by way of background information to provide context for my discussion of another mystery photo I’ve found in Frances’s photo collection, about which I’ve found interesting information. In the “gathering” of photos that I can now confidently say belonged to my great-aunt Frances Tucker Batchelor, there’s the mystery photo at the head of this posting on whose front someone has written — this is not Frances’s handwriting — that the baby in a nurse’s arms is named Euretta Mae and is a week old. On back is written in the same handwriting, “This practical nurse, ‘Angie Robinson,’ in P.B. is fine — Eura her 157th baby.”
I don’t have any idea who Euretta/Eura Mae was. My great-uncle Pat Batchelor and wife Nellie named their first child Eura Mae, and she was always called Doll because it was said she looked like a little doll when she was born. I have baby photos of Doll, and am sure the baby in this photo was not Doll. Doll was born in 1900 and I’ve concluded this photo dates from the 1920s.
But the inscription on the back of this photo contains an important clue: P.B. is Pine Bluff. As I’ve noted, after marrying in June 1921, John and Frances settled at Pine Bluff near John’s relatives in Redfield. They were living there in 1922 when their son George was born and Frances had a definitive diagnosis of tuberculosis (though Frances went to Little Rock for George’s birth). So there are a number of reasons why Frances might have had a photo of a baby and a nurse from Pine Bluff which appears to date from the early 1920s
Though, as I say, I have no clue who baby Euretta Mae was, I have been able to track down “Angie Robinson” (the name is in quotation marks on the back of the photo). Reasoning that if John and Frances married in 1921 and then lived in Pine Bluff for a year or so before she was diagnosed with TB, which took her life in 1924, Angie Robinson might be somewhere on the 1920 federal census in Pine Bluff, I searched it for her.
And, voilà, on that census, I find living at 450 State St. in Pine Bluff an Adaline Robinson, a black female aged 45, whose occupation is given as a manager in a hospital, earning a wage.[4] Living in the household with her are 5 young women, all black women, two of whom are listed as trained nurses and three of whom were student nurses.
Adaline/Angie was evidently not merely a highly competent nurse, as the inscription on the photo says, but someone training nurses for a hospital in Pine Bluff and earning a salary to do so. On the federal census in 1900, I find her living in Hot Springs, Arkansas, and working as a schoolteacher, with her mother and a sister in the household.[5] The mother, also named Adaline Robinson, was a nurse. The sister, whose name I cannot read (Zinka?) was an attendant in a bathhouse in Hot Springs, a quasi-nursing occupation. This census suggests to me that Adaline/Angie may have been trained as a nurse in Hot Springs at some point after 1900, and that she then moved to Pine Bluff to work as a nurse there.
I’ve found a death certificate for Adaline stating that she was born in Helena, Arkansas, 3 November 1876, and died in Pine Bluff on 28 November 1937, single, occupation nurse.[6] Her parents were Henderson and Adaline Robinson, Ohio natives.
The death certificate states that Adaline Robinson is buried in Pine Bluff’s Bellwood cemetery, but I haven’t found a tombstone marker for her. Bellwood is “famous” as the burial site of the Watergate whistleblower, Martha Beall Mitchell.[7]
I also find listings for Adaline Robinson in the Pine Bluff city directory in the 1920s and 1930s giving her occupation as a nurse or nurse trainer. When one thinks about the fact that she was born not long after Emancipation, and achieved so much in her life against what have to have been great odds — well, she’s a real example.
None of the preceding explains, of course, why Frances Tucker Batchelor had this picture and held onto it, or who sent it to her. A plausible explanation does occur to me, though: Frances may have been sent that photo of an excellent and experienced practical nurse in Pine Bluff, where she lived at the time her son George was born, because she was looking for a nurse to assist her when her baby was born. Since she discovered she had tuberculosis right before George was born, she would surely have anticipated that she needed help in taking care of him.
I think it’s even possible that the person who sent the photo to Frances with a note about Angie was Frances’s sister Mary. As I noted previously, Mary graduated from Bellevue Hospital Training School in New York after going to Mount Holyoke College. At points in her career, she was a graduate public health supervisor, health nurse for Metropolitan Life of Little Rock, and city health nurse for North Little Rock. At the time of her death in 1941, she was the health recreational worker for the Pulaski County Tuberculosis Association.[8]
Mary definitely had her fingers in the nursing pie in Arkansas, and if Frances was seeking a good local practical nurse to help her care for George before it became apparent that she was too seriously ill to remain in Pine Bluff, her sister Mary could well have asked around about a good nurse in Pine Bluff and gotten recommendations of Angie Robinson. I do have a photo of George as a newborn, being held by a nurse, and that nurse is not Angie Robinson, so it seems unlikely that, if Frances was looking for a nurse as she expected George, she wanted a nurse to assist with the childbirth. As I’ve noted, Frances went to Little Rock for George’s birth and he was born at St. Vincent’s Infirmary there, according to her diary.[9] The photo of a nurse holding George was taken in Little Rock, and the nurse might, in fact, be Frances’s sister Mary.
Note several points that this story might serve to remind us of as we work with collections of old family photos that have mystery people in them:
1. Not all the mystery people we find in old family photos turn out to be family members.
2. Just as we ourselves do, our family members kept photos of people they knew, admired, had some connection to, who were not related to them.
3. One of the interesting challenges in dealing with old family photos is to see if we can identify those non-family mystery people and figure out why our family member kept a photo of them.
4. Collections of old family photos can range over wide geographic areas, even in the span of only a few years: Frances’s photos range from Fayetteville to Pine Bluff, Redfield, and Little Rock, Arkansas, and then to Denver, Colorado, in the span of only three years.
5. And because Frances went to Wellesley College in Massachusetts before doing master’s work at University of Arkansas, and had many relatives in Massachusetts, it’s possible some of the mystery people in her photos were from that part of her life.
From what I can discover, it appears that Adaline Robinson did not marry and have children. It would be wonderful to discover someone related to her and this family, however, to whom I could give this photo.
[1] 1920 federal census, Jefferson County, Arkansas, Barraque township, Redfield, p. 4A (dwelling 83/family 87; 8 January). John R. Bachelor (the spelling given here) was a salesman in a store belonging to James Grant Shoptaw, and was living with the Shoptaw family in Redfield.
[2] Arkansas Gazette (29 August 1922), p. 4, col. 1.
[3] See also “Capt. F.W. Tucker, Pioneer, Is Dead,” Arkansas Gazette (14 March 1924), p. 1; and William D. Lindsey, “Francis William (Frank) Tucker (1843-1924),” Encyclopedia of Arkansas.
[4] 1920 federal census, Jefferson County, Arkansas, Pine Bluff, ward 2, p. 18B (dwelling 450/family 462; ED 137; 15 January).
[5] 1900 federal census, Garland County, Arkansas, Hot Springs, p. 7A and B (7 Walnut St; dwelling 165/family 170; ED 29; 1 June).
[6] Arkansas Department of Vital Records, Death Certificates: 1937, volume 081-100, #546, Jefferson County, registration district 311; digitized at Ancestry.
[7] See Find a Grave memorial page of Martha Mitchell, Bellwood cemetery, Pine Bluff, Jefferson County, Arkansas, maintained by Find a Grave; and Brenda J. Hall, “Martha Mitchell (1918-1976),” Encyclopedia of Arkansas.
[8] See Mary W. Tucker’s obituary in the Arkansas Gazette (5 March 1941), p. 10, col. 4.
[9] George’s birth was announced in the Arkansas (7 August 1922), p. 10, col. 1.
BEGATS AND BEQUEATHALS 