The Captain, part 2

The Bridges moved to Saginaw, Michigan initially to begin their married life.  Work in the lumber industry would have been plentiful for an enterprising 27 year old with relevant experience and connections from out east.  Within a few years, they moved a few miles up the Saginaw River to Bay City which was rapidly becoming a major center of shipping for the Great Lakes.

Bay City, Michigan 1872

It was at this time that Bill became involved in the shipping business, and in the 1870s, 1880s and 1890s started and grew his own shipping business that ran lumber and later coal from the western tip of Lake Superior at Duluth, Minnesota to the eastern tip of Lake Erie at Buffalo, New York.

Bill and Nettie had their first child, Elizabeth Louise (Lizzie) in 1870.  Their next 2 children, a daughter and a son, both died within a few days of birth in 1874 and 1880, and it wasn't until 1884 that Willard Allen (Bill) was born.

Bill Bridges, Bay City, 1888

Lizzie Bridges, Bay City, 1873

Bill Bridges' business letterhead with his family history

During this time, Bill would have been away from home for many weeks at a time on his boats picking up lumber at towns along the Great Lakes and delivering them to mills and cities in the east.

Sault Ste. Marie August 28, 1902 The Barge Alleghany. This was WHB's last boat on the Great Lakes. He was master of this barge, then retired. He is standing atop the lumber at left.

By the end of the century, Cleveland, Ohio on Lake Erie was becoming the center of the Great Lakes shipping business and the Captain and his family moved there in 1904.  By his mid-60s, Bill had achieved a modest success in his shipping business and had become a pillar of Cleveland society.  He was an active Republican and senior member of the Kinghts Templar masonic society.

WHB at South Bay, NY July 1923

In 1910, he finally retired from his business and when Nettie died in 1914, Bill moved to Syracuse, New York to live with Lizzie, who ran a small hotel there.  He lived in Syracuse until his own death in 1923 at the age of 82.  He is buried with Nettie in Lake View Cemetery in Cleveland, Ohio.

The Captain

W.H. Bridges

It looks like Marion Bridges was the great family genealogist as the Franks, Webb and Woodruff side (hers) of the family are better recorded than the Bridges and Worcester side (WAB Sr.'s side).  However, she knew her father-in-law, "the Captain" Bill Bridges, and as such had a personal connection and reason to keep his photos and letters.  He also was something of a character and man about town in Bay City, Michigan and later in Syracuse, NY.

Willard Harrison Bridges was born in Glenburn, Maine on 11 May, 1840.  Glenburn was a newly incorporated town 8 miles north along the Kenduskeag River from Bangor, which at that time was a relatively large town of 8,600 people.  The Bridges family was one of the more prosperous land-owning farmers in the area.

Willard was a common first name at the time, and he probably received his middle name from William Henry Harrison, a war hero who was actively campaigning for (and subsequently won) the presidency in early 1840.  He was known as Bill to his family and friends, and he grew up in a house with his mother, father, grandmother and uncle, and was the oldest of 4 brothers and 2 sisters.  The family was able to send Bill and his siblings to school, though no doubt he also worked on the family farm as well.

In the mid-1800s Bangor styled itself the "lumber capital of the world" and at one time there were up to 400 mills in the area processing lumber floated down the Kenduskeag and Penobscot rivers.  By the age of 20, Bill was working in one of these mills and probably earning a decent wage given the insatiable demand for processed lumber in the gold mines and railways out west and in the Caribbean.

Bill Bridges and Annette Worcester
Bangor, Maine, 1867

This was a time of rapid development of the interior of the United States, and many mill owners and lumber men from Maine moved to Illinois and Michigan to set up mills.  Bay City, Michigan (and it's neighbor, Bangor, named for the town in Maine where many mill owners and workers originated), was a center of the lumber industry in the mid-west and was on the edge of the sheltered Saginaw Bay in Lake Huron.  Bay City was the transit and processing point for lumber coming in from the mid-west and Canada before being transferred by boat through the Erie Canal to New York and Montreal.

On 16 September 1867 in Bangor, Bill married Clara Annette Worster (Annette or Nettie), who was the daughter of an old and well known Maine family.  They likely met at Annette's older brother, George, who was a neighbour of the Bridges in Kenduskeag.  Shortly after their wedding, Bill and Annette headed west to Michigan to find greener pastures in the lumber and later the shipping business.
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Stay tuned for part 2.

Organizing - Part 2

We just arrived in Mexico for the girls' March Break, so sadly (or perhaps gladly) I won't have access to all the letters and photos.  The documents cover our dining room table and I still have 3 large bags half full of additional letters and photos.

I did however manage to scan quite a few photos and documents over the past week (you can see these in the Picasa and Google Docs links already provided) and have enough to do a story on Dad's grandfather.

I have enlisted Shirley and the girls to help sort through and organize the letters and photos into boxes focused around individuals.  The 3 biggest collections are around Marion, Ann and Dad.  Marion was the original family genealogy collector.  She carefully curated all the letters from her Franks (and Bridges) forebears and passed on the bug to Ann.  I feel that by chance, I have picked up the baton and continue the tradition through the Franks line.

It is such a pleasure randomly leafing through these things and piecing together names, faces and glimpses of lives.  But I can't help feeling sad going through the letters, photos and memories of Dad, knowing that he is not able to shed light or add his perspective on stories.  There is also the intrinsic sadness of Dad's broken relationship with Ann and Margaret's death, but also lots of happier things there as well.

Organizing

With such an amazing trove of photos and documents, I have given a lot of thought as to how best to share and archive the information.  I have settled on a 3 pronged approach: scan and upload photos to Picasa; scan and upload letters and documents in searchable PDF files to Google Docs; and blog about interesting finds in Blogger.  In addition to this, I am continuing to update and enhance the family tree on Ancestry.com.

Here are the links to all the resources:

BFG photo archive on Picasa

BFG searchable document archive on Google Docs

BFG blog on Blogger

Bridges family tree on Ancestry.com - Unfortunately I can only share with specific emails.  I have sent it out to all the immediate family, but email me with anyone else who wants to see.

The nice thing is that these are free resources (except the research component on Ancestry.com) and ones that I'm quite familiar with.  If you have any other good ideas, please let me know.  Also please pass this blog link on to any kids (Touches, Campbells, Smiths) who might be interested.  I would love to have your comments and input, and any questions you might have to guide my research or postings.

To whet your apetite

We're off to Mexico on Friday for a couple of weeks, and as I won't be carting the BFG with me, I wanted to get a few samples of the wonderful things to come.

The first item is a little letter from Dad, aged 6 to his dad, Bill.  The envelope says "from buddy, for dear daddy", and it contains a sort of treasure map with little bits of brown paper pasted on top which say "stop" and "the end stop".  I assume this is a combination treasure map and telegram.  The envelope has Dad's mom, Marion's note on when it was "received".  She was a scrupulous recorder and saver of letters, for which I am grateful.

The second item is self explanatory.

And finally, a nice photo of Dad, Ann, Bill and Marion taken in 1929.  I think it might be visiting Marion's sister, Florence in California.

Stay tuned for more.

Bridges Family Genealogy (BFG)

Hello my lovely family.

After an intense and crazy couple of days digging through Ann's apartment last week, I have come away with a wonderful stash of family letters, photos and wonderful memorabilia - 2 large suitcases full.  I was a little unnerved when Air Canada lost the bags on the return flight, but a couple of days later they were delivered to our door unharmed (except for a little note inside one case that said it had been inspected by Homeland Security - I wonder what they made of the contents).

I am so excited to read through all the letters and journals and share them with you all, but the reality is that it will be months before I can get through it all.  I want to share with you all the information as I go through it, and I am think that the best way is to share my findings on this blog, and make the documents and photos available to you through Google's Picasa (photo sharing) and Google Docs (document sharing).  You can add comments to the postings for everyone to see.