I will do my best to report the facts I find, without speculation or interpretation or judgement. I know that I can't know the minute details of these people's lives - if they loved each other, if they loved their children, if they were happy or unhappy or too exhausted by a life of labor to even pose the question to themselves.
But I may break out into supplemental posts, such as this one, in which I allow myself the luxury of wondering out loud, just because wondering is integral to my personality (and is the reason I'm doing the research in the first place).
When I stumbled across the Door County Library Newspaper Archives, I found a source of information that filled in a few details of Joseph, Anna, Mayme, and that expanded their lives for me beyond the information found in census records and city directories. And yet these details brought up more questions. Why did Joseph go to Los Angeles? Why, apparently independently, did Anna? Why, when Joseph and Anna applied for their marriage license, did Anna used the name Vogel instead of Sullivan?1 (Even in cases of divorce, it was common for women to keep their married names.)
Several items2 about Joseph mention the "Door County colony"3 in Seattle, which opens up an intriguing avenue of research and helps explain, at least in part, the impulse to move West.
But my greatest curiosity is reserved for Mayme, who appears to have lived (except vacations) in Milwaukee with her deceased father's family, or with Anna's relatives. Maybe this was a common arrangement for the children of first marriages when the mother remarried. I don't know.
Too, I think about her balancing the needs of a dying mother, a tubercular husband, and a new baby; and I imagine she dealt with it the way most of us do in times of great stress and grief - from one moment to the next.
1 Los Angeles Herald, July 10, 1898↩
2 The Advocate, Sturgeon Bay, WI, December 17, 1908↩
3 The Advocate, September 14, 1911↩
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