More Newspapers: GenealogyBank

I’m reading newspapers.com and Chronicling America, if by “reading” you understand that I am lying down poking at the iPhone.

I realize that there are still a lot of papers and time frames that aren’t online. But I’m confused. I’ve seen other folks post things from the Charleston newspaper on a Charleston history FB group. Why can’t I find the same things! It hit me. There must be another online database where I can throw some money.

Let’s ask our friend, Ms. Google. She knows everything.

GenealogyBank.

Friendly reader and historian Lynda  provided the first search terms for John Stoney who died on Hilton Head Island in 1821. His obit is on genealogybank in the Charleston Courier. Plus 5k more search returns.

Let’s try Agnes Mann. I have an obit for her already from the Beaufort paper from 1906.

From the State newspaper in Columbia, SC, July 17, 1906:

DEATH OF MRS. AGNES MANN.

 

Native of Germany Dies at Her Beaufort Home.

Special to The State.

Beaufort, July 16 — Mrs. Agnes Mann died on Saturday in her 78th year after an illness of three months.

The funeral services were held at St. Helena church on Sunday afternoon and were conducted by Rev. J. W. Campbell. The pallbearers were Messrs W. F. Mancher, W. R. Bristol, H. M. Stuart, Jr., W. J. Thomas, R. R. Legare and J. M. Lengnick.

Mrs. Mann, whose maiden name was Agnes Reese, was born in 1828 at Meintz, a German town situated on the banks of the Rhine. There she married Daniel Mann and with him came to Beaufort in 1848. Here she has lived ever since, taking an active part in charitable and church work. For 56 years she has been a member of St. Helena church. Until recently she took part in the beneficent work of the Ladies’ Charitable Aid society. Her cheerful, sweet, benignant personality and influence will be missed by a wide circle of friends.

Mrs. Mann is survived by two daughters, Mrs. L. C. Scheper and Miss Emily Mann, and by one son, Mr. Daniel Mann, and by 23 grandchildren and six great grandchildren. Mr. Daniel Mann, her husband, was a Confederate soldier and fought through the war in the B. V. A. He died March 17, 1872.

I knew that she was from Eltville, Germany, from the records at the Laurel Grove Cemetery. Now I have another place to search in Meintz where she married her husband Daniel.

I might have to call out of work.

The William Levin Building in Beaufort, SC

Sugar and I are out for a stroll in Beaufort when we see this sign.

  

Contributing to the building 

boom after The Great Fire of

1907, the Levin Building housed

the Levin law offices and that of

Sheriff J. E. McTeer, who 1924-

1963, used voodoo in keeping

the law in Beaufort County. 

Do you remember Agnes and Daniel Mann who owned and lived in the Saltus house before the Civil War? One of their sons was sheriff before McTeer. 

Here are a few more shots of the Mann/Saltus house. I love this house. I want to marry it. 

   
    
 
Of course, Sugar has a connection to McTeer. Sugar’s father knew him. 

Georgia on My Mind, Part Two

Julie in Brussels, a dedicated Bateson researcher, found a website for the state of Missouri and its digital heritage.

Did I mention that Julie is a persistent genius? On it she found Bateson surnames, and by a stroke of persistent genius, she found *Georgia Bateson Lengnick*, even though Georgia is listed as Georgia Lengnick with nary a Bateson as a clue.

LengnickGeorgiaDeathCert1956

If you’ll take a look at the certificate, you’ll see that she died January 19, 1956, at age 85 of a cerebral hemorrhage. The informant is J. W. Williams, who is her son-in-law, and he gets a few things wrong. He correctly states that her father is Thomas R. Bateson (and we’d love to know what the R. stands for. Remington, like his father and his son?), and he further states that her mother is Agnes Mann, which we know is not correct. Agnes is actually her grandmother. Georgia’s mother was Martha Mann Bateson, who died when Georgia was a very little girl.

The informant further states that Georgia’s husband was *Alfred* Carl Lengnick, but this could have been a transcription error, for the responses were typed onto the form. Her husband’s name is actually *Albert* Carl Lengnick, and his father’s name was Carl Alfred Lengnick.

Now I need your help. I want to create a memorial on findagrave.com, for there isn’t one for Georgia.

I decide to use the cemetery listed on the death certificate, which is Memorial Park Cemetery in St. Louis County, Missouri. I find two cemeteries by this name in St. Louis County, and I’m guessing it’s the cemetery with over 16,000 memorials on findagrave and over 54,000 burials, not the one with 2.

Here’s the stumper: on the bottom left-hand corner of the certificate, there’s a box marked 24a. “Burial, Cremation, Removal (Specify)” And it’s typed “Removal”.

What does this mean, and where is Georgia? (blowing hair out of face and staring off into space…)

Daniel & Agnes Mann’s House on Bay, Part Two

Do you remember how we went all around Daniel & Agnes Mann’s house in Beaufort, and even into the art gallery on the first floor? The person working in the art gallery said there was an artist who rented the second floor, and if we ever saw the side outside door open, then we could just go on up the staircase and ask for a tour.

Just go on up the staircase? (said in a hushed tone)

We’re the people that don’t want to bother anyone. We don’t want to make anyone go out of their way for us. This might even include flagging down a waiter and asking for a refill of sweet tea, even though that’s their job. We don’t want to get in the way.

We’ve been by the house several times, looking wistfully at the side door as if we could make it open by magical powers.

Today, it’s open.  We peep around the corner and see the staircase leading to the magical second floor.

 

Are we really going to just walk up a stairway just because a clerk in an art gallery told us we could?

Ohyesweare.

We took a few steps, Sugar called out Hello?, we heard voices, we took a few more steps, and as if by magic, found ourselves at the top of the stairs.

There was a man and a woman, he the artist, and she perhaps a client discussing a commission.  We asked permission to look around.  He didn’t even hesitate to say it was fine.

The artist in residence told us that we could walk through the space, but we couldn’t go up the elliptical stairs because the stairs are unstable. Doesn’t seem like too much to ask, since we don’t really feel like going to the hospital today.

The staircase is famous because it is elliptical, not circular. I managed several shots by holding the camera out as far as I could into the stairwell. Here’s the first shot of several.  See what you think.

The upstairs space is basically two large rooms with the elliptical stairway in between. So we entered into one large room, then into the stairwell, then through into the next large room.  The windows front northerly onto Bay Street, and also on the east side (which you have seen from the outside in previous posts).

 

Here’s a fun shot.  It’s the Verdier house directly across the street. We went on the tour recently, and the tour guide allowed me to take a shot of Agnes’s house from the upstairs window directly to the right of the porch. The shutters over there are closed now.

It occurred to me that you can’t tell how wide these boards are without a frame of reference. Here’s a ladies size 7 frame of reference.

See?  Really an artist’s gallery.  There’s one of Agne’s fireplaces, redone.

The house I grew up in had this same type of window hardware for lifting the window. It’s a pretty fair guess that my 1950’s house was not using hardware from the late 1700’s. Regardless, these walls are thick.

Another thick wall, this one an interior, separates a room on the left from the stairwell.

 

 

Y’all, that’s Agnes’s fireplace. The stairway leads to an upstairs 3rd floor that we will most likely never see.

But dream?  Oh, we can dream.

Yet Another View of Agnes Mann’s House

Sugar had a plan.

He wanted to go back to Beaufort and take a tour of the John Mark Verdier House, get some lunch, and run some errands.  

It was also a bittersweet time of celebration and panic, for Sugar had just had a birthday, and also.  He. Retired.

Not quit.  Retired.

He practiced saying, “But I’m on a fixed income.”  To which I counter, “Oh, not me, I’m loaded.”  Yes, yes, retired people, you are not the only people whose income is stagnated.

Back to Beaufort.

We went back to the Post Office turned Restaurant, the Lowcountry Produce place on Carteret.

Sugar got a fried shrimp Po Boy, ’cause he is feeling Po-ish.

That’s a Caesar salad with anchovies, which is the standard, and a slice of tomato pie, which is like a layered dish, like lasagna, except with tomatoes and cheeses, in a pie crust.  It is some kind of crazy goodness.

Then we put more money in the meter, even though we suspected that the parking might be free since it was Labor Day, and we headed over to the John Mark Verdier House.

The entry fee for the tour was $10 each, and lasted about 45 minutes.  It was a pleasant piece of history. We were not allowed to touch anything or take any photographs.

After the tour, I asked our guide if I could take a photo of the Saltus/Habersham/MANN house out the window, if I placed the camera against the glass.  She agreed that I could.

 

 

 

And that right there was worth ten dollars.

On the way home, I turned onto the road which leads to my road, and I saw a piece of tire rubber near the center of the road.  As I went past it, I realized that it was NOT a piece of tire rubber, but a snake.  I turned around, and took a photo.

You can guess that I am bravely holding the camera out the window.  From a very distant distance.

 

My scientist cousin Diane says this is a timber rattler, and not to piss it off.  That should be no problem at all for me.  

Hello, I am a timber rattler.

Do timber rattlesnakes eat cats?  I think not.

Because the Blog is My Scrapbook, Part Two: Beaufort District Collection

I had a great plan this morning.

I was going to do some cleaning.

The cleaning extravaganza stopped with the first stack of papers.  With that, I give you the brochure of the Beaufort County Public Library’s Beaufort District Collection.  The BDC people were the folks that have the obituaries for the Daniel and Agnes Mann family, and also the link for the Sanborn Fire Insurance maps, which helped me find Agnes Mann’s house on Craven Street.

 

 

 

Uh-oh.  Do you see the left-hand column above that lists the Beaufort County Historical Papers that discuss historic structures in the area?  Do you see Robertville?  Roe-BARE-ville?  Back to the Lawtons of Black Swamp…

A Stroll Around the Point, George Mosse Stoney’s Other House, and More Craven Street

So I’m jumping around a bit.

There was so much history coming at us so fast, and I really wanted to get the info about the Saltus/Habersham/MANN house onto the blog.  There’s usually some sort of secondary theme to our trips.  The primary reason lately has been finding out more about the family of Martha Mann, who married Sugar’s distant cousin Thomas Bateson of Lancashire, England, then New York, then Savannah, Georgia.  

A blog post is like a page or even a chapter in a book.  An entire blog is like a never-ending manuscript, unless, of course, the blog writer DIES.  So perhaps you are searching the internet for something specific, and you land on a blog post.  It’s like when you are trying to decide if you want to choose to read a particular book, and you open the book randomly and read what you see.  Do you like it?  Are you going to read the book?  Do you just want to read that page and then walk away?  I personally have never done this.  I have to read the entire book, start to finish, and I never skip over to the end to see if I like the ending.  Ruins it for me somehow, like there’s a book police monitoring my activity.  

Perhaps you have landed on this page.  You couldn’t possibly know that I’ve been writing about the Bateson/Mann family and their connections for months.  You wouldn’t guess that enough time has lapsed for Sugar to order a cemetery marker for the Bateson family, and for it to be installed.  You might have landed here because of your search for the Saltus people or the Habersham people or the Bateson people.  

I have to jump back in time now to the post about when we viewed the Arsenal in Beaufort.  It didn’t seem right to continue with the day after we’d started with Daniel Mann stuff.  

You know that our day continued with lunch, which was a block away from the Arsenal at Lowcountry Produce.  My BabyGirl and I had had a stroll around Beaufort less than a week before, and we stopped at the City News Coffee Shop, across Carteret from a place that looked named for a produce stand, yet no one was leaving with bags of vegetables.  That was my next choice for lunch, and Sugar was game. 

What was this wonderful building?  Why, it’s the old Post Office!  Sugar choked a little here, ’cause he’s a mail carrier.

He wanted to walk over to see the George Mosse Stoney house, the other one, not the one that became the Sea Island Inn, because that one is no more.

We’re only a block away from Bay, and look at all the traffic backed up.  If you are in Beaufort and you want to go to the barrier islands, you have to cross this bridge.  Sometimes, the bridge is open for passing boats.  Oopsy for those drivers today, but photo opportunity for me.

The sea wall made of tabby.

And a few random shots thrown in at the end.

I have to say here that WordPress has changed their blogging template for new posts, and I’m a bit challenged.  I don’t want the photos stuck together in a run-on fashion, like a bad sentence gone amok.  When I add a caption, the photo re-inserted itself somewhere randomly in the post.  

Ten, or a hundred, years from now, no one will care.  But I care today, because I want these little stories preserved just so, and I’ll stamp away now and tear at my hair a bit…

Daniel & Agnes Mann’s House on Bay

We found the house!  

I have personally walked by this house more times than I could count.  When I read that the house was three stories and was downtown, I couldn’t even imagine which house it could be.  There surely was not a house that tall in downtown Beaufort.

It just goes to show that I’m not cognizant of my surroundings, and perhaps, because I’m walking along talking to Sugar, I’ve never looked up, and the street scene doesn’t allow for a long range view.  Yes, that’s it.  Exactly.

So we parked at the library on Scott Street, paid for parking, and headed over to Bay.  (Sadly, the yarn store was not open.)

We’re at the intersection of Scott and Bay on the northeast corner.

To the left is another building that seems important, but I don’t know why at this point.  It’s been remodeled into several shops.  Ah, more research.

 

The house is divided into two sections. The left side is an art gallery, and the right side an antiques shop. Yes, through the window.

 

 

 

The Verdier House is directly across the street.

The Saltus/Habersham/MANN house has some sort of high wall blocking the space between it and the Bay Street Traders.  There was a bookstore in the Bay Street Traders building (perhaps that was the name of the bookstore – Bay Street Traders – I’ll have to look it up), and we went in there many times.  Sugar and the owner determined that they were distant cousins.  It’s a children’s toy shop now.

 

This is the alleyway from Bay to the Riverfront Park. The Bay Street Traders’s building is to our left.

Across the street is the Verdier House, which is a museum now.  I never wanted to go to the Verdier House before, but now, it’s personal.

Agnes and Daniel’s house was purchased by the Belk Stores, and was remodeled, and the enormous, warehouse-like wing was added to the back of the house.  We walk along the alleyway by the Bay Street Traders which is to the right of the streetside of the Mann house.   Now we’re behind the Bay Street Traders and you can see the rooftop of the Mann house. Hiding in plain sight.

 

 

 

 

We went into the art gallery, and the lady there said that there is an artist living above the shop space, so of course, I had to take a photo of the outside.  Wow, do I want to see the upstairs and the elliptical staircase.

So I wondered if Agnes was a hotel keeper in her own house, but since she was a hotel keeper in 1880 and they didn’t get the house back from the tax collector after 1865, that’s pretty conclusive.  Still, she was a hotel keeper on Bay Street, and there was the Beaufort Hotel, and there are more little rabbit holes to explore…

Daniel Mann & the Beaufort Volunteer Artillery

You might remember that Daniel Mann was a member of the Beaufort Volunteer Artillery, and that Sugar and I went to see the Arsenal.

As it looks today.

 

I found a photo in a book, “Beaufort, A History” by Alexia Jones Helsley, in the Beaufort District Collection at the Beaufort Library.  It’s a marvelous book, rich is detail and research with numerous photos from historical repositories.

 

This photo would have been taken during the time that the Mann family lived in Beaufort. However, during the Civil War when Beaufort was occupied by Union forces, all white people evacuated.  I’m going to assume, until I get definitive proof, that the Mann family sojourned to Savannah, Georgia, which is how Martha Mann met Thomas Bateson, perhaps at Christ Church Episcopal, and so the Manns were known to the community.

The Mann family returned to Beaufort after the war, because they tried to reclaim the house from the tax collector, but were unsuccessful.  House?  What house?

Why, the Saltus/Habersham house.

Oh, people, just look at this resource.  Let me know if the link doesn’t work: http://lcweb2.loc.gov/pnp/habshaer/sc/sc0500/sc0502/data/sc0502data.pdf .

And off we go to Beaufort.

In Which We Find Agnes Mann. Or Do We?

If you have been following along with us on the trail of Agnes Mann, you’ll know that we found her obituary, along with obituaries for most of her family, and other references to help us know where she lived in Beaufort.

There’s the Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps.  I found her exact location of her house next to the Tabernacle Baptist Church, because the 1900 census had her house number and street.  We decided to go find her house on a Monday, not a Sunday, since there would be church services next door, and we wanted to walk around Agnes’s house, which was right up against the property line.

We set out to Beaufort, first to the library and then in search of some lunch.

As we turned on to Scott Street, Sugar said to hold up!  And back up.  It’s a collection of cottages and accommodations that are part of the Beaufort Inn.  Why is this one named Scheper?

We park, and take a quick self-guided tour.

This is to the back of the Scheper Cottage and fronts on Craven Street. You can’t see it, but Agnes’s house is one block away on the right side of the street. Apparently, the Beaufort Inn takes up the block.

The back of the Scheper Cottage.

We circle around the cottage, and we’re back on Scott Street across from the library in front of the Beaufort Female Benevolent Society marker.

BEAUFORT FEMALE

BENEVOLENT

SOCIETY

The Society, founded in

1814 to educate and

provide relief for

destitute children, built

this house in 1895 and

leased it for many years,

using the income to help

the needy.  Tenants included

the Clover Club, which

operated a circulating

library here (1910-1917);

and an infirmary (1917-

1925).  Funds from the 1982

sale of the house continue

to provide relief

for people in need.

The Clover Club!  Mrs. Lengnick’s paper, “Beaufort Memoirs”, was read to the Clover Club.

 

 

Then onward to Plums for lunch and a cold drink.

We had beat the lunch crowd, but by the time we finished our meal, the restaurant was filling up.

It was time to go visit Agnes Mann’s house.  We crossed over Bay Street, and walked along until we saw her house on Craven.  We gazed across a  parking lot, still amazed that her house had the good fortune to be on the north side of the street, for many of the south side structures were gone.  It was also a good thing that her house was next to the Tabernacle Baptist Church.  The church owns a good portion of the block, including Agnes’s house, and as our luck would have it, there was a funeral taking place.  This meant that we would not be able to really get up close and personal with the house.

 

 

ROBERT SMALLS

Born a slave in Beaufort in

1839, Robert Smalls lived

to serve as a Congressman

of the United States.  In

1862 he commandeered and

delivered to Union forces

the Confederate gunboat

“Planter,” on which he was

a crewman.  His career as a

freedman included service

as delegate to the

1868 and 1895 State

Constitutional Conventions,

elections to the S. C. House

and Senate, and 9 years in

Congress.  He died in

1915 and is buried here.

Wow.  I had no idea that Robert Smalls was buried right here, even though I knew who he was.

 

I’m wondering what the holes are in the stonework are for.  Supports for a fence?  The holes are at regular intervals, so I can’t resist taking photos of every section.

 

While we don’t actually see anyone going in or out of Agnes’s house, there are folks going into a building behind the house.  Perhaps it is the gathering hall for the church people who are there after the funeral.

We head back to the van at the waterfront, and stop for ice cream.  A breeze springs up, blowing up from the southwest, and we hear and spot a small, bowl-shaped waterspout in the harbor.

 

We head over to the Saint Helena Episcopal Church’s graveyard, and notice that the parish house is open.  What great luck!  We stop in.

 

We meet a nice lady who, when asked if anyone can help us find a graveyard plot, pulls a booklet from a drawer.  And produces an index and a map for the cemetery which shows the plot for Daniel Mann and the Mann family.

They are in L1.

So off we go across the street, which, if you are looking at the map, is the entrance at the top, and we wind our way through.

 

Daniel Mann, Beaufort Volunteer Artillery, 11 South Carolina, Company A.

 

And of course, another mystery.  Who is Mary Louise Nutting, and why is she buried in the Mann plot?

 

So which one is Agnes Mann?  To the right or the left of Daniel Mann?