Charles A. Warner

Charles A. Warner, fifth of the five children of John Warner and Marancy Alexander, was born on the Fourth of July, 1853 in Winslow, Stephenson County, IL. It is uncertain what his middle initial stood for. Logic would suggest it was Aaron after his grandfather. But even having only the “A” appear in records is genealogically intriguing, because it means he had some sort of middle name, and that in turn implies the rest of his family might have had middle names as well. Yet thus far no middle names have ever been noted in the case of Charles’s siblings and parents.

Charles was only four and a half years old when his father died. As the littlest of the children, his life both the most affected, and least affected, by this tragedy. Most, in the sense that he barely had the chance to know his father, and was half an orphan very early in his life, and least, because he had the least obligation to “step up” and fulfill a more mature role. That is in sharp contrast to his oldest brother, John, who went to work at the tender age of twelve to support the household or his sister Minta, who at thirteen was surely obliged to act at times as a surrogate mother for the youngest boys -- Fred, Clifford, and Charles -- while Marancy took advantage of whatever meager income-producing opportunities were available to widows.

When Charles was nine, his mother married Nicholas Balliet, a neighbor who had recently lost his first wife. But by then, Charles had spent half his lifetime without a father, and Nicholas would perish within a few years, so Charles must have come of age with the notion implanted that he would have to fend for himself as soon as he could manage it. And indeed, he was out of his mother’s house by no later than seventeen years old. He accompanied neighbor Charles McOmber (aka McComber, McCumber, Macomber) and his family as they made an attempt to establish themselves on a farm a little to the west of the Missouri River in Washington County, NE, between the towns of Blair and Fort Calhoun. He worked for the family as a hired hand.

In 1875, the McOmbers bought the original Warner homestead in Winslow. Apparently they had not liked Nebraska, and had decided to come home. Marancy had no more use for the property with all of her children gone. The arrangement may even have been some sort of trade -- the Winslow place for the McOmber farm in Washington County, which was then deeded to Charles, or perhaps jointly to Charles and his mother. Whatever the particulars, Charles had decided to remain a Nebraskan, and he continued to farm in Washington County. If he was unable to assume stewardship of the McOmber acreage, he must have found another spread somewhere in the same section of the county, because numerous sources attest to his presence in that vicinity over the next several years.

Charles probably made regular visits to Winslow throughout the 1870s. This is suggested by his choice of bride, a Winslow girl. Or it could be Washington County was lacking in eligible young ladies, and he had to send for a childhood sweetheart. The object of his affection was Mary Elizabeth Maurer, with whom he had grown up. Mary, born 24 March 1851 in Clinton, PA, had come to Winslow in the early 1850s with parents Daniel Maurer and Martha Brownlee and older siblings Anderson and Isabella. She and Charles were married 26 November 1878 in Fremont, Dodge County, NE -- despite being a bit beyond the boundaries of Washington County, this was one of the nearest major towns to the farm, a place where a justice of the peace could be found.

Charles had land. He had a spouse. It was time to found a family. Mary became pregnant at once, giving birth to first child Laura Isabelle Warner in the late summer of 1879, a short nine months after the wedding. The one element needed to make the couple’s sense of security complete was to have kinfolk around them. This was somewhat problematic. Mary’s parents and siblings were content to remain in northern Illinois. Charles’s older brothers were already situated. His brother John had married Nellie Martin, the daughter of a wealthy landowner, and settled a mile north of Winslow in Martintown, Green County, WI. Fred Warner was in Butler County, NE, having homesteaded there in 1872 with his parents-in-law, the Shreckengosts. Clifford Warner had either accompanied Fred or joined him within a year or two and was also to be found in Butler County, having married a Shreckengost bride in 1875. Charles had one sibling left. That was his sister Minta. Fortunately Minta and her husband John Ladd were amenable to the idea of coming to Nebraska. They brought with them their two children, John Warner Ladd and Kate Ladd, then just reaching school age. They acquired a parcel adjacent to that of Charles and Mary. Marancy Alexander Warner Balliet was also part of the arrangement. She lodged with Minta and John at first. Later she joined the household of Charles and Mary, probably in order to help care for the babies.

Both families remained on the Washington County farms for five years. During this period, Charles and Mary made up for their somewhat late start as husband and wife. During these years they became parents of not only Laura Isabelle, but two more daughters, Alta Araminta and Edna. In 1884, the two couples and their kids headed farther west, repeating their earlier arrangement by settling on side-by-side parcels. These parcels were in Miller Township, Knox County, NE, in a previously undeveloped area about eight miles west of the newly founded hamlet of Creighton. (The 1885 state census describes this spot as part of Lincoln Precinct.) Why they moved is not completely certain. Perhaps it was because Knox County offered homesteading opportunities that would allow both households to substantially increase the amount of acreage they possessed. Whatever the reason, it seems clear that once they had arrived, Charles and Mary and Minta and John viewed this new spot as their generation’s Winslow, to be the place they finished raising their broods and probably the place where they would grow old together. Fate had other things in mind, but in 1884, it was a goal that seemed realistic and a plan to which they cleaved until the late 1890s.

Minta was reaching the end of a pregnancy at the time the Knox County farms were established, and gave birth in the summer of 1884 to son Ira E. Ladd. In 1886 Charles and Mary welcomed fourth daughter Sibyl Bertha Warner to the family. In 1888, another girl was born. Unfortunately, she did not thrive. Her name has been lost -- she may, in fact, have never been given a name, perhaps because it was clear she was too frail to survive her infancy. Her gravestone (shown at right) describes her only as Infant Warner. Her precise birthdate and death date went unrecorded in family notes and it is only due to this marker that her stats are known. She passed away 3 September 1888 at four months and twenty-five days of age. This works out to a birthdate on the preceding ninth of April. She was buried near the farm in a tiny graveyard established by Samuel and Jane Ausman, who had come to Knox County in 1880 and lost an infant the following year. Charles and Mary’s baby was the sixth person to be laid to rest at the site, which occupied a corner of the Ausman homestead. In the 1890s the Ausmans would move away, and wishing their child’s resting place to be maintained, they donated an acre for a larger and more formal cemetery and another acre for a church yard, knowing that a local preacher, D.T. Olcott, wanted to establish a place of worship in that part of the county. Reverend Olcott did indeed take advantage of the offer, erecting what would become known as Olcott Church. As a consequence, today the graveyard is known as Olcott Cemetery. Long neglected, the burial ground emerged from an overgrown patch of lilac bushes in 1985 with the help of local volunteers, and has since been kept in good condition. The site was probably used for no more than a few dozen burials, the last in 1920, and today only twenty-two headstones can be found there, including that of Infant Warner.

The Creighton years could be thought of as the prime of Charles’s life, as he worked his land, raised his daughters, helped -- as he would have viewed it -- carve a zone of civilization out of territory rescued from savages. For some of his neighbors, this pioneer era would represent the founding of a presence that would endure for generations. That was not to be the destiny of Charles and his clan. The last of the family would be gone from Knox County within forty years. But for a time, they were firmly ensconced. Minta and John continued to be neighbors. Marancy lingered on within Charles and Mary’s home, helping raise the girls. In fact, much of what is still known of Marancy comes from what her youngest granddaughter Sibyl remembered of her many decades later.

Charles passed away 2 April 1898 on the farm outside Creighton. He was only in his mid-forties. The cause is not known, but in an eerie coincidence, his demise came at almost precisely the same age that his father had been when he expired. Charles is known to have been buried next to his baby daughter. This would mean at Olcott Cemetery, but as Sibyl mentioned in correspondence in the early 1960s to her first cousin Albert Frederick Warner, the grave seems to have never been given a headstone -- as was also the case three years later when Marancy died and was buried there as well. Indeed, neither the name Charles Warner nor Marancy Balliet turn up on the list of graveyard names supplied on the Knox County GenWeb website, a list compiled via a modern-day inspection of the surviving markers. The family was struggling financially at the time and probably could not afford to hire a stonecutter, particularly once the breadwinner of the household was deceased.

Though deprived of Charles while only in her own forties, Mary did not become a wife again. She was a child of pioneers and had then in turn become a pioneer, and was not scared to fend for herself, and in fact seemed to prefer to be mistress of her own destiny. This remained true even as her home emptied of every other occupant. Not only did Marancy pass away not long after Charles, but over the course of the first decade of the Twentieth Century all the girls departed to make their own ways in the world. It was not until the following decade, when Mary was into her sixties, that she made the decision to retire to a less isolated place. She went to back to northern Illinois. (The photo at left dates from that point in her life. It was taken in early 1913 in Fresno County, CA, when Mary, accompanied by her daughter Sibyl, went to visit her brother-in-law John Warner and his family.) Mary’s siblings had remained in the family home near Winslow throughout the decades that Mary was in Nebraska. Parents Daniel and Martha had died early in the 20th Century (at very advanced ages). Anderson Maurer was still keeping the farm going, though by then was doing so at times as an absentee landlord, while renting or leasing the acreage to others. (For example, in a 1917 farmer’s directory the tenant working the land was Clarence Wales. This individual was a brother of Ethel Wales, who was the recent widow of Claude Earl Bucher. Claude Earl Bucher was a nephew of Mary’s sister-in-law Nellie Martin, wife of John Warner.) At the point when Mary arrived, Anderson, a childless widower, was sharing a home in Nora, Jo Daviess County with his spinster sister Isabella, better known as Belle. Belle had never experienced a time living apart from Anderson, and now Mary was there as well.

Anderson died in February, 1917. By then Belle was not in good shape either. She lasted less than four years more, passing away on Christmas Eve, 1920. Mary was left on her own again, and once again she seemed at peace with it -- so much at peace with it that she is known to have refused a proposal of marriage. The overture came from David M. Balliet, the step-brother of Charles. David’s wife of sixty years, the former Nancy Reber, died in the mid-1920s. David came calling at Mary’s door, apparently wanting to follow through on an interest that had stirred back in the 1860s, when he and Mary had both been teenagers and neighbors in Winslow. Mary’s girls took a dim view of such a prospective union -- David was turning or just had turned eighty by then, and Mary was no spring chicken. Mary does not seem to have hesitated to reject the offer. David returned to his home in Waterloo, IA, found a lady who did want to be his missus, and finished his life there. If the concern of the girls was that they did not wish their mother to be widowed again, the refusal contained an irony, because David would live to age ninety-two -- Mary was four-and-a-half years in her grave by the time he passed away.

The 1930 census confirms Mary was still in Nora, and still at that juncture was the sole occupant of her home, though by then her daughter Edna lived somewhat nearby in Rockford. Alta was about the same distance away in Davenport, IA. Mary was probably “looked in on” on a regular basis, and Alta is known to have spent summers in Nora on at least an occasional basis. Mary finally passed away 25 April 1933 in Nora, having survived Charles by thirty-five years. Her grave can be found at Rock Lily Cemetery in Winslow amid those of her parents and siblings. She had come full circle, becoming part of the very earth on which she had skipped and played during childhood, despite the many years she had lived in other places.

Below, in brief, are accounts of the lives of the children of Charles A. Warner and Mary Elizabeth Maurer:

Laura Isabelle Warner, born 21 August 1879, was named for her mother’s sister Isabella Maurer and like her aunt was called Belle in daily life. She became a school teacher. In this, she was imitated by sisters Alta and Sibyl. The self-reliant streak was firmly lodged in the Warner/Maurer girls, perhaps because it was in their genes, and/or perhaps because having to witness multiple crop failures and endure the shock of losing their father made it apparent that having a personal means of earning income was essential to their sense of security.

Belle does not seem to have been at all intimidated by the prospect of an independent life. In 1908, she established her own homestead near Midland, Haakon County, SD. The following year she finally married. Her husband was James D. Dibble, a Illinois native ten years her senior. The ceremony took place 1 September 1909 in Pennington County, SD. For the first seven years of the marriage the couple lived on a farm in Stanley County, SD, but in about 1916 they came back to Haakon County to the Midland homestead. James raised livestock on the parcel, while Belle continued -- with occasional hiatuses -- to be a teacher. The pair did not produce offspring. This appears to have been a deliberate choice. Belle certainly had reasons aplenty -- she and James were a little old to begin the process, the local enonomy was not robust, and she was probably worried that she might die before the kids were grown, forcing them to go through the same anguish she had. The latter concern -- about her own mortality -- was certainly justified. She was asthmatic, and she well knew that a bad episode could progress into bronchitis and then into pneumonia. She had been fortunate enough to have dealt with each crisis as it had arisen, but she knew she might not be so lucky in the future. In that pre-antibiotic age, pneumonia was often fatal.

As it turned out, it was James Dibble who would expire prematurely. He passed away in 1920, leaving Belle a widow at only forty. She resumed her state of personal independence, using hired men to work her land, and continuing to teach. She served on the local board of education as well. She remained a widow for fifteen years.

Her solitude ended with her marriage to Clarence Newt Davis 12 December 1935. C.N., as he was usually known, had been born 6 June 1890 in Holt County, NE, where he had stayed well into adulthood. The marriage to Belle was his first. They of course had no children given Belle’s age as a bride. The couple spent the first eight or so years of their union living on a ranch a mile north of the town of Hartley. Shortly after becoming Mrs. Davis, Belle became the postmistress of Hartley, a position she kept for seven years. In early March, 1944, she and C.N. moved to Iowa, where Belle could be closer to her sister Alta in Davenport. However, the greater humidity aggravated her asthma, so in 1948 the couple decided to return to Haakon County. They purchased Hartley’s general store and post office. Belle had reached her late sixties and was no doubt thinking in terms of a livelihood that would allow her to be an owner and supervisor rather than a shift worker. She did not get any real opportunity to settle into her role, however, because she caught a case of measles that, given her lung problems, proceeded into a case of pneumonia that she could not withstand. She perished of the infection 21 April 1948 at the nearest hospital to her home, which was in the town of Philip. Her remains were buried in the cemetery in Philip.

Given that C.N. Davis had been eleven years younger than Belle, he was able to survive her by a quarter century. He passed away in April, 1975 in Sioux City, Woodbury County, IA.

Alta Araminta Warner, born 1 August 1881, also became a school teacher. At first, she did so in Knox County. Her job was so local, in fact, that she -- like Belle -- still appears as part of her mother’s household in the 1900 census. Where she went next has yet to be determined, but somewhere along the line she attended four years at university level and by 1920 she was teaching high school in Davenport, Scott County, IA. The 1920 census shows her, along with a handful of other young career women, lodging in a family residence. The 1925 state census and 1930 federal census also show her in boarding-house circumstances. Her permanent, i.e. summer, address at this time was Nora, Jo Daviess County, IL, which possibly means she spent those months with her mother, or at least used her mother’s residence as her “home port.”

Davenport was an auspicious place to be a female teacher. In 1872, Phebe Sudlow had been appointed the principal of Davenport High School. Sudlow was the first female to reach such a post in the history of the United States. Sudlow might well have been Alta’s personal role model. And even before Alta had been born, the site of Davenport had played a role in her destiny. It was there that Chief Keokuk and General Winfield Scott had signed the treaty ending the Black Hawk War of 1832. The resolution of the two Black Hawk Wars was critical to the opening of northwestern Illinois to white settlement. Without that development, Alta’s grandparents John and Marancy Warner would not have settled in Winslow in the late 1830s, nor would Daniel Maurer and Martha Brownlee have come in the 1850s, and Alta’s parents would never have met.

Alta was satisfied to be a career woman and she never married. A world traveller when on vacation, she remained based in Davenport at least through the end of the 1940s, but after her retirement she made Nora her home -- she had perhaps inherited her mother’s house. As Alta was closing in on her eightieth birthday, her health took a turn for the worse, requiring her to move into the Rockford Nursing Home in Nora. She passed away there after a year-and-a-half convalescence. The date of death was 29 July 1962. Her remains were interred at Rock Lily Cemetery in Winslow, which means her grave lies not far from the resting places of her mother, her grandfather John Warner, Sr., and her great-grandparents Joseph Alexander and Olive Littlefield.

Edna Warner, born 11 February 1883, was the one member of the family to follow the traditional path of women of her generation, i.e. marriage before the age of twenty. Her husband was Clark Ferdinand Bonge, whose family had settled in Knox County shortly before the Warners arrived. (To this day there are Bonge family members in the vicinity, perhaps some on the original homesteads.) The couple rapidly produced two children, Willard and Gladys. Clark and Edna farmed in the Creighton area at least through the harvest of 1918. (Their presence is confirmed by Clark’s World War I draft registration card.) Before the end of 1919 they moved to Norfolk, Madison County, NE. They had continued to pin their hopes on the rewards of Knox County crops, but like so many other family members, they had been disappointed by the results of their commitment. The 1920 census indicates that Clark was working as a travelling salesman selling motor oil and related products. It would take some time before he reestablished himself as a farmer.

Having to abandon the place where they had been raised was an upheaval, and the stress seems to have manifested in the form of friction between husband and wife. Clark and Edna divorced during the 1920s. Clark remained in Norfolk. He soon married a woman named Anna, who had earlier been married to a man named Young. Together Clark and Anna finished raising Gladys, as well as Anna’s two daughters Zella and Bernice Young. Eventually Clark and Anna moved to Los Angeles County, CA, where he passed away 4 May 1947.

Edna, clearly wanting to put some distance between herself and her ex-spouse, moved to northern Illinois. Willard came with her. Later Gladys would also move to the area. Edna probably took shelter temporarily with her mother, but as the 1930 census confirms, she set up her own household with Willard in Rockford, Winnebago County, IL. She supported herself working as a cook in a restaurant. At some point, probably in the latter part of the Great Depression and in the World War II years, Edna spent at least a short while working in Iowa, because her Social Security Number was issued there. This could mean she went to live with or be near Alta in Davenport. She is known to have been dwelling in Nora and running her own restaurant at the time of her sister Belle’s death in 1948. As mentioned above, eventually Alta came to Nora as well, and the by-then-elderly sisters probably shared a home until Alta had to go to the convalescent hospital. Edna finished her twilight years in Nora, and died there 25 March 1969. She was the last survivor of her birth family, having outlived Alta by seven years and Sibyl by one.

Willard Bonge had a number of jobs during his working life. Eventually he acquired a limestone quarry and sold lime for agricultural use. He was sixty-five when his mother died, and until that point it does not appear he had ever lived apart from her, save perhaps to stay put while she was gone to Iowa. He survived to the ripe old age of ninety-two, passing away in 1996 in Nora. He was not entirely alone during those final decades. In Edna’s fading years, after she had become less able to keep up with the cooking and housecleaning, she had hired a woman named Edith as a live-in housekeeper. Edith continued to serve in this capacity after Edna’s death. Though Willard did not marry her, she was the closest thing he had to a wife. She was very small in stature and was often called “Little Edith.”

Gladys seems to have settled in the Rockford house after her mother switched to the Nora place. She died in Rockford in 1976. Family notes indicate Gladys married a man named Charles Stitch. This was a brief marriage in the early 1930s that probably ended in divorce. “Charles Stitch” is probably the Charles Stich who can be traced in early 20th Century census records. That source material reveals him to have been born and raised in Jo Daviess County. A clipping preserved by Edna’s first cousin Emma Warner Hastings mentions Charles committed suicide by hanging himself in a barn in Nora at age fifty-five. This event occurred in the mid-1950s, long after the era of the marriage. Gladys did not marry a second time and so was single almost her entire life. She is listed as Bonge on her death record.

Sibyl Bertha Warner, was born 8 September 1886. Judging by the photos shown here at left and right, she was the beauty of the family. She was the third of Charles and Mary’s brood to become a public school teacher. Like Alta, she began locally. The 1910 census, taken in the spring, shows her still in Miller Township, quite close to the farm, though she was boarding with non-relatives rather than with her mother. However, within months of the effective date of that survey, she spread her wings. She entered pharmacy school in Fremont, NE. In those days, a year of coursework was sufficient to obtain a degree, which she succeeded in earning in 1911. Sibyl was top student and president of her class. Alas, in the early 20th Century, women were generally not allowed to actually pursue the profession of pharmacist. Despite her obvious talent and ability, getting a degree meant only that she could teach the materia medica to nursing students.

One of her classmates at the pharmacy college was William Matthias Lovett, a native of McPherson County, KS. After graduation Sibyl spent another couple of years as a single career woman, then she and William became man and wife. The wedding took place 5 June 1913 in Fremont -- just over a third of a century after Charles Warner and Mary Maurer had been united in matrimony in that very town. Sibyl and William settled in McPherson, McPherson County, KS, where William was, logically, a pharmacist, and operated a drugstore. Sibyl, despite her degree, is not known to have actively helped operate the business, except during a brief stretch in the midst of World War II when there was a shortage of labor. Once established, the household seems to have been stable, prosperous, and well-rooted. This was a good recipe for a large family, but in fact Sibyl and William were somewhat restrained in that regard. They were married for quite a number of years before they became parents, and then waited half a dozen years more to do it again. They stopped at two. The eldest was a daughter, Eunice, and the youngest a son, Roger. Sibyl was nearly forty before Roger came along.

In early 1944, Sibyl suffered a heart attack. This may have been a major reason why William sold the drugstore in the spring of that year. The couple continued to live in McPherson, however -- their tenure surpassed half a century. Despite the early heart attack, Sibyl made it into her eighties. A stroke in the 1960s slowed her down. She died in early January, 1968 and her remains were buried in McPherson City Cemetery on the eighth of that month. Her husband survived her by more than a decade, finally passing away in McPherson at ninety-one years of age. His grave is also at McPherson City Cemetery, the burial occurring 22 September 1978.

Eunice eventually settled in Junction City, KS, where for a brief stretch in the late 1980s she was the mayor of the town. She was married three times, producing three children with first husband Clayton Phillipi and spending her old age with third husband William M. Kelley. She passed away in the autumn of 2007. Roger Lovett is still alive. He has spent much of his life in Kansas. He is now a widower after the death of his third wife. Between Eunice and Roger, the line of Sibyl Warner is substantial and is steadily expanding. The younger generations of the clan are for the most part residents of the heartland of the nation. Together they make up the whole of the surviving descendants of Charles A. Warner.

The four surviving daughters of Charles A. Warner and Mary Elizabeth Maurer in the 1930s. By the time this was taken it was rare for all four to be in the same place at the same time. From left to right, Edna, Alta, Sibyl, and Belle.

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