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The Marcel Balthazor family in about 1886. L to R: Mary,
Marcel with Philip on his knee, Georgianna standing, Eli, Julia
holding daughter Rosie and Eli.
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The legend in our family was not a happy one. Scott’s great-great grandparents, Marcel and
Julia Balthazor were the parents of 14 children, with only 7 surviving to adult
hood. It has been one of the biggest
research tasks I’ve undertaken, finding those lost babies. According to family legend, Marcel and Julia
were the parents of a set of twins – one boy and one girl – and they were drug
to death by horses out at the family farm near Clifton, Kansas. I searched for YEARS and was able to come up
with the names and birth dates of most of the missing babies, but could not
find a set of twins. I went through old
newspapers, county death records, cemetery records and Catholic church records. I found nothing.
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| Photo of Mary Balthazor, taken in Marshall, MN |
I had
been working on the family genealogy for a good twenty years when I went to a Talbot family reunion in Greenleaf Kansas.
Julia Balthazor was born a Talbot.
One of the other family researchers had a table of unidentified
photos. I was going through them one by
one when I saw a familiar face. It was
Marcel and Julia’s daughter, Mary Balthazor.
The background didn’t look like the one at the studio in Clyde, Kansas
that the family usually used. I looked
down at the studio name and found that the photo had been taken in Marshall,
Minnesota. So, I thought, Mary must have
gone to Marshall to visit her older sister Georgianna Dandurand who was
married and living there.
More
years passed with no further information on the missing children. About five years ago, I got a subscription to
Newspapers.com. I was like a kid in a
candy store! I searched for all of the
obits I needed and looked for tidbits of juicy information that would have been
impossible to find the old fashioned way of scrolling through microfilm. One day it hit me, I should search for
Georgianna in Minnesota. What I found
took my breath away.
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| St. Paul Globe, Wed. 15 July 1896 |
The
newspaper was the St. Paul Globe, published on Wednesday, July 15th,
1896. The head line on page one was
DRAGGED TO DEATH. That sick feeling in
the pit of my stomach told me I had found the answer. As I read the article, my heart ached for all
of those involved.
Marcel
and Julia and their children moved to Marshall for a year or so to live closer
to their oldest daughter and her family. On
July 14, their two youngest daughters, Annie and Celia, their youngest son
Philip (my husband’s great grandfather) and Georgianna’s oldest daughter Rosana
were playing in the yard. Twelve
year-old Philip was herding cattle with a pony.
His sisters Annie, age 5, and Celia, age 4 and his little niece Rosanna
(four days from her fifth birthday) were playing in the yard with him. They played a game, where Philip tied the
little girls up with rope and tied the rope to the saddle of the pony. It was a game they played often. This time, something happened and the pony
got spooked. It took off at a run,
dragging the three little girls behind it.
It was a half a mile before the Dandurand’s neighbor, a Mr. Gaffney, was
able to stop the runaway pony. Celia was
already dead. Rosana died just after the
doctor’s arrival. Annie was injured, but
she survived. Celia and Rosana were
buried at Mt. Cavalry Cemetery in Marshall, Minnesota. Not long after this tragedy, the Balthazor
family moved back to their Kansas homestead.
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| Annie Balthazor as a teen |
Such a
tragic story. I knew when I started
looking that it would be sad. But the
true story made my heart hurt for poor Philip.
How did he live with that all of his life? Apparently he never talked of it, for the
I have been unable to contact
any of Annie’s descendants. I am curious
if she carried scars all of her life, mental or physical. Someday, the last pieces will fall into place
and I’ll have the whole story.
story that was passed down through the family was not much like what really
happened.