Case Closed in anticlimatic

I have at last, with one final visit to the deeds department, pieced together a rough enough idea of when this old house was built and by whom. I hereby consider the matter closed, so that I may move on to other obsessions.

Per my last email, I was trying to figure out why the descendants of a native chief named Teddy Moonbawdum- sisters Angeline and Rosaline Moonbawdum- had given over a substantial portion of their land to one of the first white settlers to the area, Hazen Ingalls, in 1878 for free. I had a quit claim deed in ridiculous cursive (that took me an eternity to translate) that spelled it out very clearly once I rendered it legible.

However, I couldn’t find a single record of Hazen then selling the property off to anyone. The closest record I did have to 1878 was a bill of sale in 1891 from one Lucy Bump, to one Henry Huff for 150 dollars. In this sale, the size of the property is reduced from the massive land giveaway in 1878 to a much smaller lot.

Fun fact about Lucy Bump that I learned- her grand daughter, Margorie (who also went by Lucy), had an affair with Earnest Hemmingway- who named her in a book discussing it- and was forever shamed by the ordeal.

I could find no record of anyone selling the property to Lucy Bump, and so the gap between the two dates- which likely told the complete story of how the house came to be- was absent.

The way deed ledgers are set up, at least in my county, is you can browse by decade- sellers and buyers- by first letter of last name, though not necessarily in alphabetical order other than that. That means, if you want to find when a house was last sold (in the 1800s), you dig out the volume labeled by the specific decade you’re after- like the 1890s, or 1880s- flip to the first letter of the last name of the person you’re looking for, and scan each line one by one by one by one until you’ve exhausted however many property sales there were in that decade for anyone whose name began with that letter.

And everything is written in barely legible cursive, so even names that should be obvious to read can blur and slip by if you’re not vigilant in your research.

This is what happened to me, and how I missed the Lucy Bump connection.

After finding the sale from Lucy to Henry in 1891, I immediately jumped into the 1880s book and began scanning. Once finished, I went over it again. Then I moved back into the 1870s. Once finished, I went over it again. Nothing. That’s where I had given up last.

However…had I not abandoned the 1890s book immediately after finding the sale, I would discover that ALSO in 1891, her husband George Bump would gift her that property with a gift deed, after buying it from a young builder, inventor, and developer named Thomas Kirby also in 1891, also for about 150 bucks, also the size of a single lot.

Kirby, it turned out, had bought the land- a massive chunk almost the same size as the block of land the native sisters gave up, in 1885 from some firm or something called Peters and Willis for a paltry amount- like 50 dollars. Clearly undeveloped, this meant that Mr Kirby likely built the house between 1885 and 1890, and sold it as an investment. The entire town was growing at that time, and many pioneer developers were following the same track.

....

I did wonder a bit how the lands went from Hazen to Peters & Willis, but not enough to go back to the ledgers to trace down the exact time of sale. Undeveloped land passing hands doesn’t mean too much to me, but I made an accidental discovery while looking up Mr Kirby in the news archives regarding Peters & Willis that truly did put the matter to bed for me.

On the deed it just says “Peters & Willis,” but in the newspaper announcement that mentions the sale their full names are included: Angeline Peters and Rosaline Willis.

The sisters had gotten married.

The quit claim deed was Hazen giving up his claim to the land to the sisters after the US government gave it to the local tribe families in the homestead act of the 1850s (Hazen had kind of moved himself in and set up a trading post prior to that).

I’m not on stolen or swindled land after all.

Last updated April 26, 2024