Clifford Warner

Clifford Warner, fourth of the five children of John Warner and Marancy Alexander, was born 14 April 1851 in Winslow, Stephenson County, IL. His older siblings were Araminta, John, and Frederick. The birth of his brother Charles would follow two years after his. Clifford is not to be confused with his brother John’s son Cullen Clifford Warner, who was born in 1882 and partly named for his uncle.

When Clifford was very small, Stephenson County could not yet truly claim it was a settled part of the United States. The region had still been controlled by Indians twenty years earlier. Wisconsin, whose southern boundary was located a mere one mile north of Winslow, had only just achieved statehood in 1848. Winslow itself had only been platted and founded as a formal town in 1844, and then only because developer Cyrus Woodman wanted to increase the value of the large amount of acreage he had bought there on behalf of himself and his group of Boston-based land speculators. The first frame houses built with milled lumber had only recently started to rise, and it is possible that the Warner home was still a log cabin when Clifford was an infant. From boyhood, Clifford was imbued with the sense that his environment was being actively shaped, that this sort of transformation of surroundings and customs and relationships was “what people did” as a common, everyday thing. As an adult he would not be afraid to place himself in similar circumstances.

For all Winslow’s lingering pioneer aspects, Clifford spent his early childhood safe within a bevy of hearth and kin. The 1850 census shows that the household consisted not only of his parents and siblings but both of his grandmothers. Living nearby were many uncles and aunts, including his father’s half-siblings Cynthia Mack and George White, and his mother’s siblings Mary Ann Francis and Almeda Boynton, and their various spouses and offspring. Clifford’s parents had been on their homestead for ten years when he made his appearance in the world, and his father was gainfully employed as a farmer and miller. Clifford was unquestionably in a “good place to grow up.”

Unfortunately, when Clifford was not yet seven years old, his father died. Such a loss at a formative age surely had its effect on Clifford, given the modest means of the Warners and the insecurity of losing the breadwinner. On the brighter side, he was somewhat sheltered from the ramifications of the tragedy due to being one of the younger children. For instance, unlike his older brother John, he did not have to quit school and go to work to support the household.

Marancy did not remarry until over four years after John’s death. The change came after after neighbor Nicholas Balliet became a widower. He proposed to Marancy, who accepted. The Warner and Balliet households were combined in 1862, and in the process Clifford gained step-siblings. The arrangement proved to be somewhat temporary, however, in part because most of the Balliet kids were older than Clifford and soon came of age and left to make their ways in the world, and in part because Nicholas Balliet passed away before the end of the 1860s. During the latter 1860s Clifford’s full siblings also spread their wings, even his younger brother Charles, who despite being only a teenager went with neighbor Charles McOmber (aka McComber, Macomber, McCumber) and family to Washington County, NE to work as a hired hand on the farm the McOmbers were attempting to establish there. By the time the federal census was taken in the summer of 1870, the only members of the Warner household left at the old place in Winslow were Clifford and his mother.

It could be that Clifford remained because by 1870 he was the eldest unmarried son, and was the one made responsible for maintaining the heritage farm. However, this was a stop-gap arrangement. Other opportunities beckoned. In particular, there was the call of Nebraska, where homesteading opportunities were plentiful now that the Civil War had ended and the army had been able to turn its attention to “pacifying” the Sioux. Clifford’s brother Frederick heeded this call in 1872, becoming a homesteader in Butler County. In 1869 Fred had married Penina Jane Shreckengost, the eldest daughter of a family who had come to Winslow in the early 1850s from Pennsylvania. Fred’s parents-in-law Henry Shreckengost and the former Mary Ann Miller, along with their younger children, came west at the same time and acquired adjacent land. The locality they chose would eventually be known as Rising City after the large number of local pioneers who had the surname Rising.

Clifford may have been part of the 1872 migration. If not, he joined Fred within a year or two. He did not found a homestead himself. His role was apparently to assist Fred. By 1875, Clifford married Penina’s sister Ella Andora Shreckengost, an event which took place in Butler County. Ella had been born 12 October 1857 in Winslow. She therefore had been only fourteen when the move to Nebraska occurred. For a courtship to have occurred in 1874 and 1875 that culminated in a wedding, Clifford must have been in Butler County within a couple of years of Fred and Penina’s arrival.

The wedding of Clifford and Ella and their choice to remain in Nebraska meant Marancy did not see it as viable to keep the Winslow farm going, so she sold the property in 1875 to Charles McOmber, who had apparently found Nebraska unworthy and had come back to more familiar surroundings. It is possible that his acquisition of the old Warner place was a trade for his farm in Washington County, where Charles Warner stayed. Thus, by 1875, Clifford had no home to go back to. And indeed, he never again resided in Illinois.

Clifford and Ella probably spent the rest of the 1870s in Butler County. This has yet to be positively confirmed, but they can be pinpointed there in the late autumn of 1879. At that point the couple’s first child, Olan Carson Warner, died of croup at only two years of age, and his death can be found in the county’s mortality tables. While it is possible little Olan and his parents were just visiting his Shreckengost grandparents, it seems more likely the Rising City area was still Clifford and Ella’s base of operations. It would not remain so for long. Though the other members of the Shreckengost clan remained in place, Ella was apparently ready to endorse a move elsewhere, and Clifford was ready to carve out a own destiny separate from Fred. By the spring of 1880 at the latest, Clifford and Ella moved to an entirely different part of Nebraska, settling on a farm near the juncture of Greeley, Nance, and Boone Counties.

The two decades of the 1880s and 1890s represent the prime period in the lives of Clifford and Ella. The early part of that span was spent farming in the Nance/Greeley/Boone area, the second part, in the 1890s, was spent farther north in Holt County, near the border with South Dakota, and just west of Knox County, where Clifford’s siblings Minta and Charles established new homesteads in 1884. It does not appear that Clifford and Ella stayed long in any one place. Chances are high they were “sodbusters.” The prairie was not a good region for farming. After the topsoil was exposed on each parcel, it may not have remained fertile more than two or three growing seasons. References survive in family notes that make it clear the Holt County residence was a “dugout,” i.e. a house dug into the ground and otherwise constructed mainly of sod blocks. One way or another, though, the family made do. They thrived well enough that children arrived at a steady, if somewhat leisurely, pace. About every three and a half years Ella gave birth to another young one, until the family numbered six children. This tally does not include poor little Olan, who never got to be part of the household during the lifetimes of his siblings -- his death occurred four months before the birth of Maude, the second of Clifford and Ella’s brood.

The “prime” phase described above ended abruptly. Descendants report that Clifford and Ella went through a bitter parting of the ways. They may never have divorced in the legal sense, but they definitely separated and did not maintain a spousal relationship during the last few decades of their lives. Precisely what triggered the bad blood between them is not known. Once the rift occurred, it was severe. One reason why there is no photograph of Clifford on this webpage is that Ella must have destroyed any she owned, and none were passed down to her descendants.

The split seems to have taken place in 1898. The couple were apparently getting along well in the late 1897, because their last child, Martha Mary Ann Warner, was conceived that autumn. Martha was born 6 April 1898. The event occurred in Wolbach, Greeley County. This may have been where Ella sought out a midwife, because “home” was apparently still the Holt County dugout, where Ella and most of her kids are known to have stayed for at least a few months after the break-up. Soon Ella was in Butler County, having sought the haven of her brother and sisters in the Rising City area, as shown in the 1 June 1900 census. She would remain local to that general part of Nebraska for the remainder of her life -- another forty years.

Clifford, meanwhile, would soon head the opposite direction. The 1900 census shows him sharing rented quarters with son Claude in the village of Brayton in Greeley County. He was by then a railroad worker. This occupation could have something to do with the marital difficulties. Perhaps his job had forced him to travel a lot and kept him away too much from his wife, and that had led to a fraying of the bond. (A possibility exists that the fraying may have still been on-going when Ella moved to Butler County, and that the connection was not actually revoked until after 1900. The 1900 census lists both Clifford and Ella as Married. By 1910, Ella was listing herself as Widowed, a designation that was repeated in 1920, but which was not factual. Clifford was alive. Clifford described himself as Divorced in 1920.)

As the 20th Century wore on, Clifford became a farmer in Tripp County, SD. This was also true of his son Claude, the one child who maintained a close bond with him. Claude married in 1909 and settled with his bride in Millboro Township. This is a district of Tripp County lying just north of the boundary with Nebraska. Clifford’s acreage was located in Rames Township, which occupies an area more in the middle of the county, near the communities of Winner and Colome. He would have encountered one familiar face in the former community. His second cousin Charles O. Hilliard, a grandson of Cynthia White Mack and one of the clump of kinfolk among whom Clifford had been raised in Winslow, arrived in Winner by the early 1910s and became the proprietor of the town’s first tin shop (as in sheet metal fabrication). Charles’s spinster daughter Charlotte G. Hilliard was a local schoolteacher; her pupils may have included Clifford’s grandchildren.

As far as is known, Clifford finished out his life on the Tripp County farm. He passed away 13 January 1925. His death locale was recorded in family notes as Colome.

As for Ella, after taking refuge back in Butler County, she became a farmer, maintaining her own household (in the home shown at right) with the help of hired men to handle the crops and livestock. Economic times on the Great Plains farms of the turn of the century remained insecure and she probably seldom had difficulty finding available laborers. She kept to this lifestyle until she finished raising the last of her children. She and another widow are listed as owning and managing Butler County acreage in the 1918 publication Farmer’s Directory of Reading Precinct. In September of 1918 her youngest child Martha wed Alden Robert Moural, whereupon Ella became a “live-in mother-in-law” figure in the young couple’s home. This would be the arrangement for many years. Alden, a son of Czech (Bohemian) immigrants, had been born and raised on a farm near Schuyler, Colfax County, NE, and soon came to actively farm, and then own, his father John Moural’s land, so Ella’s final days were spent in that locale. This kept her only a matter of a few miles from the homes of her Butler County siblings. Ella passed away 20 March 1940 in Schuyler.

In brief, here is what happened to the seven children of Clifford Warner and Ella Andora Shreckengost:

Olan Carson Warner, as mentioned above, only survived two years. He was born 8 October 1877 and died of croup 20 November 1879 in Butler County, NE during the family’s final months in the area. (His first name is spelled Olen in at least one record, and too few other documents survive to be certain of the correct spelling.)

Maude Melville Warner also died young, though her life was considerably longer than that of Olan. Thanks to that comparative longevity, at least one image of her survives, namely the photograph of her taken in girlhood you can see reproduced at right. By the time of her birth on 15 March 1880, the family may still have been in Butler County. If not, she was born in Boone County, then was raised in the Boone/Greeley/Nance Counties area. Maude reached eighteen years of age and by the time of her death had become the wife of Milton Cleveland, about whom nothing is known except the name. Given the lack of documentation, even the name is not completely reliable. He may, for example, have been Milton Cleaveland with an extra “a” in the surname, or had some other name that family members recalled as being Cleveland. It is not known where the couple resided after the wedding, which family notes indicate took place when Maude was sixteen. Given the timing of Maude’s death, it seems likely she died in childbirth. She perished 7 August 1898.

Claude Dee Warner, born 24 May 1884 in Reading Precinct, Greeley County, NE, fulfilled the role of “number one son” of the family and had a closer bond with Clifford than any of his siblings. As mentioned, he stayed with his father when his parents split up, even though he was only in his mid-teens when the incident occurred. As a young man Claude moved to Tripp County, SD, either because he was still part of his father’s household or independently. He perhaps might have preceded his father in relocating to that area, and it was his presence that prompted Clifford to move there. Claude married Bessie Elnora Hills in Tripp County in the town of Winner 31 January 1909. He and Bessie stayed on their Millboro Township farm for the better part of thirty years, during which time they became parents of eleven children. They lost one baby, Marion Floyd Warner, in the early 1920s. In the late 1930s they moved to Spokane, WA. By that point, their eldest children were adults and two, Elsie and Bertha, chose not to go west. Both of these daughters spent the majority of their lives in Iowa. Elsie lived to the impressive age of ninety-eight and a half, passing away in October, 2008. The main group of eight children came along to Spokane. The most junior of them literally journeyed with Claude and Bessie because they were still minors. The others made their way there on their own, but all arrived in their new stomping grounds no later than the end of the decade.

For the most part, ever since that mass migration, the whole Claude Dee Warner clan has been associated with the county and/or city of Spokane. And it is quite a clan, numbering in the many hundreds. Although none of Claude and Bessie’s offspring managed to have as many kids as they did, a few came close and as a group unquestionably did their part to heed the Biblical dictate of “going forth and multiplying.” As one of Claude’s granddaughters, the late Mary Belle Clason Brown, put it in 2005, “I’m related to half of Spokane!” Bessie passed away 10 May 1951 and Claude followed her 12 February 1956.

Above is Claude’s daughter Martha Mae Warner on Christmas Day, 1936. She is posing with her husband Jesse Neal “Slim” Clason, a brother-in-law and his wife, her father-in-law, three of her own children, and two of Slim’s nephews along with a baby niece. The scene is one of the South Dakota family farms. Martha, the woman in the center, gave birth to her fifth child the day after this photo was taken -- if she looks a bit under seige, now you know why. The baby in question was Mary Belle Clason, who supplied the copy of the photo.

Dessa Dollie Warner, born 23 August 1887, was not living with either parent by the time of the 1900 census. In that survey, she is probably the twelve-year-old Dessa Pierson who appears as part of the household of Swedish immigrants Neil and Marie Pierson in Lincoln, Lancaster County, NE. Who Neil and Marie might have been, and why she came to live with them, is a mystery. Perhaps she was a servant, though she is described in the census as a daughter and her occupation is listed as “at school.” Perhaps she had been adopted.

Regardless of whether she was ever a member of the Pierson household, Dessa Warner would go on to spend the bulk of her adult life in Lincoln. She was a resident of Lincoln when she married Alfred Picard Dawe in 1914, though the wedding itself took place in Beatrice, Gage County, NE, and Lincoln was the community where the couple chose to make their home. They dwelled in a boarding house or inn and probably operated it, or were otherwise employed there. (Alfred’s occupation in censuses is given as restaurant cook.) Dessa and Alfred did not have children. Her little sister Elsie settled very near Lincoln and did have offspring, so Dessa had the opportunity to be a regular figure in the lives of a group of her nephews and nieces when they were young. Dessa passed away at home 27 August 1930 at only forty-three years of age. (The photograph at right comes from her obituary in The Lincoln Star.)

Alfred was also known as Fred Dawe, and as A.P. Dawe. He had been adopted as a child by Joseph and Mary Picard of Houghton County, MI -- no doubt acquiring his middle name at that time -- but was biologically a member of the Dawes (with an “s”) family of Caplinger Mills, Cedar County, MO. Perhaps due to the adoption, the “real” spelling of his surname may have been forgotten -- certainly he went by Dawe from 1900 to 1930. He went back to using Dawes after Dessa died, apparently having reconnected with his birth kinfolk. Just how that reconnection played out is unknown, but it is clear he spent some time in Caplinger Mills in the 1930s, because that is where he found his second wife. She was Iva Mae Phipps, eldest child of Green Phipps and Mary Ellen Ralston. She became the new Mrs. Dawes having previously been married to Robert Otis Elliston, Sr., with whom she had produced three children -- meaning Alfred at long last had the chance to be a father, if only as a step-parent. Alfred and Iva made their home back in Lincoln. Alfred, born 4 March 1887, died 20 March 1967. Iva survived him by not quite five years. They are both buried in Caplinger Mills Cemetery under the Dawes spelling of the surname. (For that matter, Dessa’s headstone at Fairview Cemetery in Lincoln also says Dawes.)

Elsie Birdie Warner, born 10 April 1891, remained in her mother’s care after the separation, along with her two younger siblings. At eighteen, she married Charles Alvin Peck. He had been born 27 July 1886 in Nebraska. They settled at once in Lancaster County on a farm in Havelock Township, a locality which lay not far outside the city of Lincoln. In the 1920s Charles gave up farming and the household was reestablished inside Havelock City, a community which in modern times has become a suburb of Lincoln. The couple began having children at once and are known to have had at least six, as shown by the 1920 and 1930 censuses. By 1930 Elsie was thirty-nine years old and all records found thus far indicate she reached the end of her childbearing with sixth child Kenneth O. Peck, born in early 1930. Elsie died 2 February 1943. Elsie’s remains were interred in Section 24 of Fairview Cemetery -- this is the section that contains Dessa’s grave as well. Charles survived her by many years, passing away in March, 1971 in Lincoln.

Marion Henry Warner was born 23 October 1894 in Belgrade, Nance County, NE. During the 1910s it was surely Marion’s contribution that allowed his mother to be “self”-sufficient and avoid the apparently unwelcome prospect of a second marriage. His World War I draft registration card mentions that his mother and sisters were dependent upon him. In addition to helping with her farm in Reading Precinct, he also rented and managed a farm in Summit Precinct owned by Oliver E. Wade. He married Alma Lena Reitz (16 March 1897 - 17 March 1986). She was a daughter of Frederick and Mary Reitz, and had been born and raised in Butler County. The wedding took place in or near the village of Surprise 14 June 1916, when Marion was twenty-one. In the early 1920s he and Alma bought and moved to a farm in Lingle Precinct, Goshen County, WY, not far west of Nebraska. Their two children, Marion Clifford Warner and Mary Andora Warner, were born during their first few years on the Goshen County acreage. Some time during the Great Depression or very early in the World War II era, they moved on to Mead, Spokane County, WA, placing Marion somewhat near his brother Claude and his many Spokane County nephews and nieces. The final part of Marion and Alma’s lives were spent in or near Naches, Yakima County, WA, where they probably went so as to live near, or to be looked after by, their son. Marion passed away 8 June 1978 -- the first of his parents’ offspring to have surpassed eighty years of age, and the only one to do so aside from his younger sister Martha. Descendants still live in the Pacific Northwest.

Martha Mary Ann Warner, born 6 April 1898, was the tailender of the family, and as often happens with last babies, she was the one her mother clung to. Martha wed Alden Robert Moural 6 September 1918. As mentioned, the couple farmed in the Schuyler area, and were still there in 1940 when Ella Shreckengost Warner passed away, having lived with them ever since they had been newlyweds. Their union resulted in two children, Dalton and Correnne. Some time in the 1940s or early 1950s, having finished raising their kids, Martha and Alden relocated to Milton, Van Buren County, IA. Alden resumed farming in that area. In retirement, he was a well-known figure among enthusiasts of antique tractors and farm equipment. Martha passed away June 1981 near Milton. Though Alden was older than she, he survived several more years, passing away 17 August 1987. Both kids chose not to leave the Schuyler area, Dalton moving only twenty miles east to Fremont, Dodge County, NE, Correnne moving only ten miles west to Columbus, Platte County, NE. Dalton “Bud” Moural predeceased his father by a few years; in her widowhood his wife Lorna returned to Schuyler, where she passed away in the early summer of 2009. Bud and Lorna are not known to have had children. At this writing (mid-2009), Correnne survives. She is a recent widow and is the matriarch of a substantial cluster of descendants.

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