In The Sad Story of the John Rogers Family: Part 1, I wrote about my great-great grandparents, John and Sidney Rogers – how they met, how they had a young, growing family, how they averted the death of one of their daughters, and how Sidney died before the age of 30. I had really hoped to solve some of the other mysteries surrounding what happened to John Rogers after that time, but I failed. The search aroused more questions than answers. Despite that, I know most of the story, so I can continue to tell it. It’s kind of a rambling, complicated tale, but if it weren’t, it would be boring and not worth writing about. So, here we go with part 2.
The Rogers Family Torn Apart
Part 1 of this story ended with Sidney dying of tuberculosis in 1884, at just 28 years old. From what my family tells me, Sidney’s death devastated John. It must have weighed on him heavily, having his wife die of the same fatal disease that his mother died from, and at an even younger age.
Broken down and now a single parent, John determined that he could not care for his young children by himself, so, as his father did, John adopted his children out to other families. John’s aunt Dorothy Chapman adopted baby Violet, the same aunt who cared for Sidney during her illness.
A family named Sonnenstein adopted John’s son William, my great-grandfather. While they treated him well, William always felt like his adopted father wanted a hired hand more than a son and he resented this. When he reached adulthood, he took the surname Rogers back, although he changed the spelling to Roghers. (Why did he change the spelling? That’s a funny story in itself.)
The DeCote family adopted John’s daughter Rose. She moved to Canada with them while she was still a child. And a family named Bracht adopted daughter Maude. She lived in Marathon County with them until she got married.
John’s oldest, daughter Myrtle, was adopted by her aunt, Sidney’s sister Emeline Coleman Taft and her husband, Absolom Taft. This is significant because, even though John didn’t keep Myrtle with him and didn’t move in with the Taft family, he did move back to southwestern Wisconsin and lived near the Tafts. I’m not sure why John moved away from his own relatives. Possibly because he couldn’t stand seeing his own children living with his neighbors. Or maybe they couldn’t stand to see him, but that’s just speculation. What I do know is that he lived in southwestern Wisconsin for several years after Sidney’s death. I also know he married again. His second wife, in fact, was Absalom and Emeline’s oldest daughter, Olive W. Taft.
The Mysterious Story of Olive Taft
This is another one of those instances where I remember hearing stories that turned out to be partially true. I remember hearing that Olive married three times and may not have been divorced from her first husband. She and John liked to go out drinking together. After John died, she disappeared. Now, here’s the real story of Olive and John Rogers, or at least as much as I’ve been able to confirm.
Olive, born in 1869, had been married once before, to a man named James Adams. They had one daughter, Mary, born in 1887. When I asked my mom about Olive’s marriages, she told me that Olive was a widow when she married John. Not true, as I found out while digging through records on Ancestry.com. I was able to locate a U.S. census record from 1900 and a Wisconsin state census record from 1905 that both show Olive’s first husband James Adams living with his mother Jane and his daughter Mary in the same township as the Taft family. So Olive was clearly divorced, not widowed. Also, her daughter was living with her ex-husband, not her.
John and Olive wed on July 18, 1890 in Boscobel, Wisconsin. Here’s where the facts get murky. I can see why there were stories about John and Olive, because some of the facts just don’t make much sense unless you add some of the family “folklore” to it. The original date of death that my mother had for John Rogers was January 16, 1889. Obviously this was wrong, since John and Olive were married in 1890.
John Rogers’ Sad End
However, another family story I remember hearing was that every year on the anniversary of Sidney’s birthday (which just happened to also be Christmas Day), John would go out and get ripping drunk. I don’t know what his relationship with alcohol actually was, but I wouldn’t put it past him to drown his sorrows in a bottle after what happened to his family.
Anyway, the story goes that after one of these Christmas Day binges, John was walking home, got disoriented, and fell in the river. He didn’t drown, but he did catch pneumonia. He was taken in and cared for by a Mrs. Barnum, who owned a local boarding house, while he was sick. He died about 3 weeks later. They buried him in an unmarked grave in the Haney Ridge Cemetery in Crawford County, Wisconsin. Olive took off with another man and disappeared.
Using this family story as a basis, I would guess that John probably did die on January 16, but it was probably 1891 or 1892. I really don’t know the actual year. I would also like to know where his wife was while he was dying of pneumonia?
What Ever Happened to Olive?
Why wasn’t Olive taking care of her dying husband, instead of a woman who owned a boarding house? Did he live in the boarding house? Oh why did that 1890 census have to burn?!
Regardless of where she was or what she was doing when John died, Olive did get married again. In 1898 she married David Valendeham Coleman in Soldiers Grove, Wisconsin. Olive was his third wife. David, who was about 30 years older than Olive, was her mother’s (and Sidney’s) first cousin. One year later, a marriage record for David Coleman to a woman named Rose Chapin appears in the records from Butler County, Kansas. So Olive really did disappear! My hypothesis is that Olive moved to Kansas with her new husband and died there within a year after their marriage. No tombstone that I know of exists.
John Rogers was buried in the Haney Cemetery, in a grave plot owned by the Tafts. When his Taft relatives decided they wanted to be buried in the same grave plot, somebody decided to put up a stone so that no one would be buried on top of him. All the stone says is “John, father of Mrs. Ruey Taft”. An obscure end to a sad life, for sure. Fortunately, his children did not become strangers, but stayed in contact with each other as adults. In fact, my mother remembers that “Aunt Myrtle” sent her a birthday card every year. Nice to know that families can overcome adversity and rumors to survive and thrive for the next generation. Also nice to know that family stories can be sorted out with historical records!
Image Credit
Header image of Crawford County, Wisconsin from Picryl.
Both other photos from the records of Gerald and Ruth Dilley.
