The History of our House: 1917-1940 (The original owners!)

If you saw our last post, you know that something very exciting happened recently: 

We finally got down to the very first people that owned our house. If you've poked around the blog, you know that this has been an off and on project of ours for years. We did a little research here and there and were able to piece together a couple of things but never knew who the original owners were.

Until one month ago when I got an email from Meredith. It read:

...I've been researching your house and I stumbled upon your fixer upper blog yesterday. 

The reason I have been researching your house is because I've been researching the original owners - my ancestors. They purchased the house brand new in 1917 and lived there until 1940, when, as you know, the Muck family bought it. 

I have some newspaper clippings and some census and city directory records I'm sending you so you have this information. You have done amazing work fixing up this home and I'm sure the original owners would be proud. 

Bernard P. Cunningham

Mary Elizabeth (Sheahon) Cunningham (my 3rd great aunt)

Had 12 children

2 died in infancy

1 died of Spanish Flu at Fort Riley in 1918 (James)

WOW. Right?

Before we get into all of that, here's a quick refresher on what we already knew about the house's previous owners:

Present-2009

Us! (the home's sixth and current owners)

We purchased the house in April 2009. It had been vacant at that point for at least a couple of years. It had no heat, and several other issues.

Here's a little more about buying the house, an interior tour, and a nice roundup of projects through the years.

2000s-90s

(the home's fifth owners?)

A few years ago while painting the front porch with my mom, a woman came up with her son and said that she had lived in the house before us. I can't recall how long exactly she said but she gave some details of the house that confirmed she had lived in it.

1990s-1944

Larry (the home's third/fourth owners)

By complete accident and good fortune, we stumbled upon the next people to live in our house.


Conan worked for years and years at Moler's Camera digitizing slides and old photos.


One day in 2016 he was digitizing some pictures and saw something that looked familiar - our porch!

Larry in front of our (his) porch on a pony. 

He looked through more of the pictures and sure enough - it was our house!

Larry and other neighborhood children on our porch. 

He spoke to the man who was a little boy in the photos, Larry, who remembered his dad working on the house and making some additions here and there. The above photos were taken around 1946 and Larry said his family lived there until the 70s then he purchased the home from them and lived here until the 1990s.

See all of these incredible photos here.

1944-1940

The Muck Family (the home's second owners)

The Muck Family, l to r: Dan, Charles, Maude, Eva

Before Larry and his family, there were the Mucks.

The Muck family purchased the house in 1940 and lived there with their daughter Maude and son Charles.

Dan & Eva Muck on their wedding day, December 25, 1890

I was fortunate enough to get to speak with their granddaughter, Wilene who had done a lot of research on her own.

Dan Muck and his granddaughter Wilene

She recalled that her grandparents slept in the dining room of the house and she sometimes stayed up in the attic.

According to the census, they had 5 female boarders while living here.

1917-1940

The Cunningham Family (the home's original owners)

Here's where things get really interesting as we put the final puzzle piece of our home into place.


So, Meredith was researching her ancestors and came across our blog and decided to reach out with all of the amazing information she had found. With her permission, I'll share it with you here, paraphrasing her:

The home's original owners were Mary and Bernard Cunningham. They were married on April 21, 1884.

They were from Pottawatomie County, Kansas originally. They moved to Butler County around 1913, bought 160 farm acres near Augusta, Kansas (about 40 miles from here).

They discovered oil and gas on their land and became extremely wealthy as a result. Here's an interesting clipping renting that farm out years after they had moved to Wichita:

The home was built by L.H. Bump for a whopping $5,500 dollars. Here's an article about the building permit (he also built one other home in our neighborhood):

They moved to Wichita in 1917 and purchased our house brand new to live in with their children.



Then things took a turn

Sometime in 1919, Mary filed for divorce from Bernard on the grounds of extreme cruelty (see center column of clipping below:

Their son, Maurice testified that his father had choked his mother and then threatened to kill him with a butcher's knife.

Things got so bad that at one point, after the birth of another of their children, Mary fled the home and walked several miles to a neighbor's house for safety and sent the neighbor back to retrieve the baby.

And if that's not enough, Bernard had also held a loaded pistol to his daughter Grace's head at some point as well.

WOW.

Bernard's defense stated that he had moved into the garage to "obtain peace" but that when he returned to the house for meals someone was usually in his place at the table.

He claimed that it was Mary who had threatened to kill him due to the fact that he wanted to leave Wichita and return home to Augusta.

The divorce was finalized, with Mary receiving the house (now our house), half of their assets, royalties from the oil on their old farm, and custody of the children.

Bernard moved just down the street to 245 N. Chautauqua where he lived until his death on April 5, 1922, just two years after their divorce was finalized. The executor of his estate, his brother, reported that his children entered the home within a few hours of his death and stole personal property valued at $1891.

Among the things they stole:

A Dodge sedan
Diamond pin
Watch
Overcoat
Silverware
Two bedspreads
and a razor

All of Bernard's children testified against him in the divorce case. He had about $40,000 of property when he died and he gave $4,000 each to his brother and sister and the rest was placed in a trust for his children.

Mary lived in the house until 1940 and then it was sold to the Muck family. Mary lived with her daughter Grace until her death in 1949.

So...yeah. That's A LOT.

When you think of researching your home or in our case, someone else researching their ancestry and finding you (!) - you never really think it will be anything as interesting as this.

Time after time, we've been handed these gems of history by people who have gone out and done the legwork and research.

In Wilene's case, she researched her family and put it out onto the internet for us to find through findagrave.com and in Meredith's case, she did an EXHAUSTIVE amount of research into her family's history and in doing so, found us!

We are so so so so grateful to them both for helping us piece together the history of our house which is now complete and we're doing our part by putting it here for someone to find someday hopefully!

Hopefully, someday Meredith will be able to connect with us in person and see the house. When she does, we have some trash we'd like to give her that belonged to her ancestors ; )

If you'll recall, when we were remodeling the upstairs bathroom we found some very old trash in the garbage chute under the stairs. Read all about it here

the tobacco tin up there is stamped with the date 1919 so it likely belonged to some member of her family. That was our first clue that our house was likely built before the year on the deed - 1920.

Just a neat little tidbit!

Thanks for reading and keep smiling!

SINCE YOU BEEN GONE

So um...It's been A WHILE.

So long in fact, that we were able to create an entirely new person, keep it alive over a year and live to tell about it ; ) 

Introducing, to the Keep Smiling family, Simon Yale Fugit:

Born January 1, 2019

10:39 AM

3 lbs. 15 oz, 16 in.

As you can maybe tell from the weight up there, lil' Simon wasn't supposed to show up on New Year's Day. His due date was actually February 12th but our doctors decided he needed to be a New Years baby so here we are.

He spent 21 days in the NICU but at last check up, he was over 20 lbs. and doing awesome. He's now walking, talking, and getting into everything (including dirt - see mouth in below pic ; ).

That sort of set the tone for the whole year - a whirlwind. Read on to see what else we did that was...surprising...or not depending on how well you know us ; ) 

Wait, Is That My House?

Some of you may remember me mentioning

"the biggest thing"

"the coolest thing"

a couple of weeks ago and promising to reveal it in due time. Welp, it's that time. Now, don't hate if this isn't your idea of "the biggest thing". It positively floored me when I saw it and I couldn't wait to share it.

Part I:

Okay, so a while back I used the 1940 census to find out a little about our home and the people who lived here in the late 30's early 40's, the Mucks. I even got the chance to speak to their granddaughter Wilene and hopefully, someday soon I will meet her. It was a thrilling time for us to learn a little about the history of the house and it couldn't have gone better thanks in large part to Wilene's very thorough research. Frankly, we figured that was the end of the road, though.

I knew that I could go and search through records and try to find more about the families who lived here but I also knew that with house projects, vacation approaching and just work, we would probably never have time to do that during the day.

Part II:

A few Saturdays ago while I was at work, I got the most cryptic facebook post ever from Conan.

"Yes, wonderful things."

That's all it said.

I called him and asked what was up. He told me that I had to wait until I got home but I was never going to believe it. When I finally got home and opened the door I wondered what would be in the living room. A new kitten perhaps? Some Craigslist chairs that Conan had been eyeing? He told me to sit down at the computer and then he flicked on the monitor to reveal this:

Wait, what?

Is that?

It couldn't be, could it?

It was! It was our house!

Now, that in and of itself would be amazing enough but it gets even better.

Part III:

I may have mentioned before that Conan works at a really old camera store here in Wichita (the oldest in fact) and a large part of his job involves taking people's old photos and slides, fixing them up, bringing them back to their original glory and then re-printing them or putting them on a CD or DVD. Turns out, a man had dropped these off at the store where Conan works when he wasn't in or wasn't up front and he had sat down to get started on them that weekend. The first one he saw was this one:

he told me that he chuckled at the picture and then something gave him pause; the columns.

Then he looked a little closer. Those windows sure do look like our windows, too.

He looked at a couple of more pictures and started to feel like everything was adding up but he still couldn't be sure.

Then he saw this one, with our address number and it was official. These pictures that someone brought into where Conan works were from our house in the 1940s.

What. are. the. odds?

Seriously.

If you're good at math, go ahead and figure me up some odds because I would like to know.

Turns out, the man who brought in the pictures lived in our house with his parents right after Wilene's grandparents. Pretty incredible, huh? He said that they lived here until the 70s and then he bought the house from his parents and lived there until the 90s which, when you're talking about a nearly 100 year old house, is pretty recent. Conan asked if we could share these photos and he agreed so here are a few more from around the house in about 1946.

The backyard looks a little different now but basically the same. The garage still looks like that but unfortunately we have a lot less greenery back there and no clothesline.

This is pretty much the only one that was taken inside the house. I'm going to try and see if I can't get some more eventually. This would have been right where our living room shelves are now. How do we know? The little seam that's on the wood above their heads? Still there.

Here's the whole neighborhood gang hanging out underneath our carport. It also looks the same except for one thing. The column on the right and the little wall isn't there anymore. He told us that his dad took it out and replaced it with a metal pole when he bought a trailer that wouldn't fit down the driveway. That was one of my only problems with the outside of the house when we bought it and if we have the time and money, we would really like to put it back.

This is probably my favorite of the bunch and even though it's not of the house, it does have the intersecting street signs behind it which helped us definitively agree that this was our house. Aren't they so cute? Like real life little rascals!

Another one in the backyard and you can see our neighbor's garage/apartment. It's painted red now but it pretty much looks exactly the same.

The back of our house looks remarkably the same. There is one difference, though. They apparently had a well! There's still a pipe sticking up there. What I wouldn't give to be able to go out and pump water out of it!

There are a few more but they're not really of the house. If I ever get the chance to sit down and talk to Larry (that's the little boy on the pony) I might try to get a few more photos of the house if he has them. Pretty dang neat.

On a sidenote, apparently I wasn't supposed to tell y'all about the This Old House thing until it was officially printed or something like that so if you'll just stare at this pen here for a minute so I can "Men in Black" that right out of your minds that'd be great.
Ready?
*click*

Now then, whatever you do, don't go back and read the previous post and don't look at the paragraph above this one. Deal? Deal.

But for real, as soon as it's all over and done with *officially* I will tell you ALL about it. ALL about it.

Oh, and extra credit to anyone who can figure out Conan's super cryptic "Yes, wonderful things." reference. I know I sure couldn't. I'll send you a postcard all the way from Wichita, KS. It'll be great.



The History of Our House (1938-1944)

Okay, rather than update the bottom of that post below I'm going to dedicate an entire post to what happened in the days after I used the 1940 census to find out who was living in our house.

You might want to remove your socks now, otherwise they might be blown off.
Ed. note: thanks Jennifer for pointing out that at this point in the summer almost no one (save for people in Australia - Hell-o-o, Australian reader(s)!) would be wearing socks. Too.hot.for.socks y'all.

So, after I completed filling in the census form I figured one Google search couldn't hurt (probably wouldn't help either but, whatever). I searched for Daniel Muck and came up with a rootsweb page littered with his name. I poured over it quickly and saw that his middle name was Webster. I added that to the search and this time clicked Images. The first picture I saw was the one I posted earlier of Dan and Eva on their wedding day (which was December 25, 1890 - long before they lived here but still pretty amazing).

Dan and Eva Muck on their wedding day.

I went to the page where the picture came from, findagrave.com and there they were along with lots of interesting information about them and their daughter Maude including the fact that their final resting places were just a few minutes away here in Wichita.

Most of the Muck family. Dan, Eva, Charles and Maude.

A later photo of the Muck family. Maude wears a watch that was her grandmother's and now belongs to Wilene.

That evening we hopped in the car and went to find the family that had called our house home for at least a few years. We found their grave markers, took a couple of pictures and went on our way. The next day, on a whim I decided to email the woman, Wilene, who had compiled all of that information about Dan and Eva. I also included this picture of our house for her records and a little information about who else was living with them at the time.

She emailed me back and can you believe it? She was their only granddaughter! After a couple of emails back and forth, she called me yesterday afternoon and we spoke for over an hour about her grandparents, fond memories, name pronounciation (it's Eh-va with a soft e - pretty, huh?) and what she recalled from visiting her grandparents in the house. Turns out Dan and Eva slept in the dining room and Maude, their daughter slept in the attic. Wilene could remember looking out the attic window and down the street as a very young girl and she could remember her grandfather, Dan eating his favorite cereal at the kitchen table. The Muck family lived here from about 1938 until around 1944.

Dan Muck and his granddaughter, Wilene.

I still can't really believe this. It must have been meant to be otherwise there's no way it would have been this easy. If you live in an old house, I URGE you to look into the 1940 census. It will take less than an hour and worst case scenario, you know a little more about your house's history. Best case scenario? Well, you just read about it, folks.

Wilene is searching for a photo of the whole family on our front staircase and when I have access to it I will add it and all of this information to the "About Our House" Section in the sidebar. Wilene, a whiz at research, also tipped me off to the county records department so hopefully someday soon I will be able to find out who preceded the Muck family.

1940 Census

The other day I came across a story online talking about how the 1940 census is now online and free to look through. My interest was piqued since, essentially, we know nothing about anyone who ever owned the house except for they had really cool trash.

So I headed over to 1940census.archives.gov to start searching.

You can search by something called an Enumeration District or you can search by Location. I chose location since I wasn't looking for a specific person (apparently that's what the Enumeration District is helpful for).

I entered our state, county, city and street.

Then, if possible, you can enter a cross street. Luckily, we live pretty much right at the intersection of two streets which narrowed things down a bit.

After opening the scanned document and scrolling through a few pages looking for our street name, we found it!

Now of course, you can zoom in on the page and change the brightness and contrast. I'm not going to lie though, it's still pretty difficult to read fancy schmancy census taker cursive (my cruddy 2012 handwriting has RUINED ME!).

One very helpful thing, you can go to the FAQ section on the site and download a copy of all of the questions that were asked along with different code meanings.

I printed that off and then took turns squinting at the computer screen, changing the contrast and filling in the chart.

So, here's the deets on our house in 1940:

Our home was owned by Daniel W. Muck, 72 (not sure of that spelling) and his wife Eva, 68

Their daughter Maude, 45 lived with them as well.

The value of the home was $5,500

It was a "lodging house"

with 5 female lodgers

Ruth Hasler, 18

Margaret Dawson, 21

Katherine Skidmore, 20

Mildred Kingsburry, 31

Another girl whose first name I couldn't figure out. Her last name was Wright and she was 18.

Almost all of the lodgers were stenographers except for Margaret Dawson who was a Labratory Assistant for a photographer.

This was so neat! Hopefully someday I can use these names to do a little more research at our local library or city office. If you live in a house that was around in 1940, it's definitely worth checking out. I had trouble finding information on where I was born (rural Tennessee) though, so be warned that in some areas there may not be information? I'm going to keep trying using the Enumeration District maps, though.

If you're interested, you can even help by indexing the information as a part of the 1940 U.S. Census Community Project.

Happy history hunting!

UPDATE:

Daniel and Eva on their wedding day.

I'll post more information as I can find it and confirm it.

Eeeks! Exciting!

One Man's Trash

You know how the saying goes, "One man's trash is another man's treasure." Well, when you live in a house that is nearly 100 years old that is literally the case. As mentioned previously, we are in the middle of the world's longest bathroom remodel (I kid, I kid) which if you've ever had the pleasure of enduring you know that around month three your patience is wearing pretty thin and the novelty of plaster and lathing has completely worn off. You just want the thing done. Well, yesterday we were given a little glimpse into the past life of our house that made all of this worth it. Conan was just passing through the bathroom, checking on the progress of the shower when something caught his eye sitting beneath the staircase to the attic (which, is now exposed because the bathroom wall is gone). He went to pick it up and lo and behold it was a little bottle of "Colgate's Brillantene"! He later told me that he thought about just showing me the bottle, having a laugh and then giving up but thankfully, something told him to grab a piece of the aforementioned lath and poke around under the stairs. And what followed was this:

A treausre trove of trash. Apparently, what we thought was a laundry shoot in the hallway was actually where they threw their trash. Makeup containers, gum wrappers, dry cleaning tickets, mentholatum lids, whatever, if they were done using it, it went in the wall. My favorites are of course the makeup containers, especially the Oriental Cream (which is recommended to be put on with a velvet sponge - ooh la la!) but the best part is definitely the can of tobacco. A worker found one of these once before while installing our heating ducts but this one is far better, and here's why: on the top of the can is a date March, 1919. If you've ever lived in an old house and been unable to positively identify when the house was actually built it is like stumbling on the Holy Grail. Something that helps to date your house! Well, needless to say I will definitely be displaying these treasures somewhere special. Probably our new, shiny, glorious bathroom when it is finished. I highly recommend looking at the larger size of that picture up there and reading the fine print on the bottles, it's a blast from the past.