My Grandfather's (Sort Of) Secret Past - Part 2

No skeletons found in the closets I've searched so far but you never know...one could pop up anytime, anywhere, anyhow. That doesn't mean I expect to discover anything astonishing.  And expectations can be a hindrance to good research so I try to keep intriguing speculation in the far resources of my brain and just gather as much evidence data as I can. Once I think I've accumulated as much info as I can, then that will be the time to put on my private investigator hat.

So that's pretty much what I've been doing.  Gathering facts.  Avoiding making conclusions. And hoping that all the information I can find will turn "sort of secret past" into one of those mundane and ho-hum revelations that show my father did not hold back secrets from me about his father and, moreover, my grandfather had no secrets to hide. Not big ugly ones anyway. I don't care if he skipped a church service now and then or smoked a cigar behind the outhouse. On the other hand, if my research discovers he was an ax murderer or something, I would be shocked and disappointed but I sure want to know about it.

My search has gone forwards and backwards since I posted Part 1. By that I mean I searched through some records my sister gave me that included many of my father's sermons and some half-letter sized 3-ring binders with notes and essays from his days at Yale Divinity. To be honest I haven't dug through the sermons much other than just a few. With all due respect, I still find them boring. I loved my father but when I listened to the sermons he preached from the pulpit, they just about put me to sleep. In the few that I've gone through recently I was hoping to catch a glimpse of some of his personal thoughts that might shed some light on his personal history. No such luck. Other than to solidify my opinion that he was an intellectual giant despite a short physical stature. The binders from Yale support that description as well. Here's one page of his notes that would have been written around 1930.

Sometimes I look at his notes like this and I wonder if he thought in outline order. The man was an organized and diligent student. There are probably thousands of pages in these notebooks, all noted on both sides and out of all of them I think I saw maybe one or two doodles! And not extravagant doodles, either. I don't think his mind wandered one second away from whatever subject matter he was studying. I thought a couple of times I caught some real doodle examples that would prove he was human but, nope, they were diagrams of logical progressions that his instructors must have designed to clarify their teachings.  So while I'm looking at all this data, the question in my mind is where the heck did a 25 year old kid from East Podunk Florida come up with, one, the incentive to study religion, and, two, the ability to analyze and organize himself with so much scholastic discipline?  Did he get any of this from his father? 

Anyway, I found little data of a personal nature inside any of the notebooks. Not that he didn't have a life. There was a postcard from his mother that told him she enjoyed his visit home, apparently with a friend and around New Years 1930. And there was a 1929 class schedule card inside one of the notebooks. But not much else to shed light on anything personal that I could see.  But it's way too early to draw any conclusions about anything other than the data gathered to this point suggests he was a serious divinity student at Yale.

From Yale I backtracked to his undergraduate history at Florida Southern College. I had a photograph that had been noted on the back (I believe by one of his sisters), "Charles King, the graduate 1928" which I combined with a listing of 1928 graduates of the college. So I know he attended college there and graduated but when I asked the school if I could request a copy of his transcripts I was told they would not release school records to anyone other than the student. Catch 22 if the student is no longer alive! I hope they don't have a genealogy department at the school. Or if they do I wonder if the department head could explain to the registrar's office that genealogical research, or at least good genealogical research depends on documentation. What do they think I'm going to do, steal the identity of a graduate who by now would be 107 years old if he was alive?

But for the research I'm concentrating on here the transcripts probably wouldn't shed much light. Possible but not likely. I'm actually more interested in my father's high school records because it's closer to the time period I'm looking at. The secret past angle to all this is why did our family have the impression that our father's father passed away when he was about 12 years old, when in reality we have discovered our father was 18 years old?  And why did our father attend high school in Lakeland, Florida 80 miles south of where his father resided in Yalaha?  Could be some very simple answers to all this but hopefully the research will provide some insight on the matter. And to that end I requested copies of transcripts and "any available records pertaining to my father's attendance at Lakeland High School" to the Polk County school board student record department. I called first and was told they would locate whatever they could find for a small fee and proof that I was the son of Charles King. I sent them a copy of my birth certificate and a check for the fee. I have subsequently heard from them that they also need a copy of my father's death certificate as (this sounds familiar) "they can only release to the student."  Unlike Florida Southern they at least indicated they could release the files to me if I provided them with a copy of my father's death certificate. So I have sent a request to the Florida State Office of Vital Statistics requesting a death certificate for my father. While I did that I sent another request for a death certificate for my grandfather as well. There is always the possibility that there is no certificate on file for my grandfather since the state acknowledges some records date back to the late 1800's but not all files were registered. We'll see.

My interest in the high school transcripts is not to discern his academic performance (although I'd be surprised if he was anything less than an "A" student).  I'm interested in finding information on when he attended Lakeland High School and, hopefully, what school he attended previous to Lakeland. I already know from Lakeland High School yearbooks that my father attended the school during the school year 1921-1922 and that he was in the graduating class of 1924.  One of my Florida cousins was kind enough to pass the yearbooks onto me for safekeeping. My father is the handsome guy pictured top right of this page of class of 1924 senior photographs.

I think it's pretty safe to assume at this point that his Junior year at Lakeland High School took place in the school year 1922-1923.  And hopefully the transcripts will verify this. But the big question that lends itself directly to my research into school records is this: where did my father attend school for his Freshman year of high school, the school year 1920-1921? And two Federal Census Reports recorded in 1920 lend themselves to the confusion. My father is listed in two places. Moreover, in two places with two different names! Tell me that doesn't cause the eyebrows to raise up a bit, as in "Oh, REALLY?"

On the 1920 Yalaha census (enumerator, Geo J King, no less)! recorded in January 1920, my father is listed as "Geo C." listed as son of the head of the household, "Geo J. King" directly under his mother, "Agnes E," listed as wife. The general procedure for census recording was to list head of household including surname first, with other family members with same surname listed by given name only. George J King's wife, Agnes, was listed next, followed by his 14 year old son, George C. (that was my father).

On the Orlando census recorded in February 1920 there is a listing for my father again. But this time he's listed as Charles G. White! The head of the household listed was Stephen Claude White. Next listed in the standard fashion of census records (that is, without surname) was wife, Carol King and brother in law, Charles G. So based on enumerator recording procedures this was the White family with head, wife, and brother in law. The brother in law part was correct; Stephen Claude White married my father's oldest sister, Carol Elizabeth King who apparently preferred her maiden name to be listed as her middle name. And Carol's younger brother was correctly listed as brother in law of the head of household. But at this point I don't know if the enumerator recorded my father under the White surname in error, in omission, or was he told to list it that way. I would imagine he would have concluded that brothers in law did not normally share the same surname but you never know. Enumerator errors are pretty common and not really surprising when you consider that most, perhaps all, census records were transcribed from notes taken at the original census interview. That seems obvious to me when I look at records that may have varying types of penmanship but are almost always uniformly recorded within the columns with few or no scratch outs or corrections. That's a lot of work for an enumerator to fill out 50 horizontal lines per page and 25 + vertical columns...no wonder they took advantage of listing the surname only once per family.  Must have prevented a lot of cramping fingers.

It's a little early to draw any conclusions from the two census records. I know enumerators were given instructions on how to account for residents they didn't actually see but recorded by testimony from whoever they interviewed. Sea captains, for instance, were generally listed as residents even though physically they might be sailing on the other side of the world. As long as they weren't known to be dead, they were listed as residents. I'm not suggesting there were too many sea captains in Yalaha and Orlando in 1920. My point is that an interpretation of "resident" might be different. Since my grandfather was the enumerator for Yalaha it may have been his interpretation that his son should be listed even if he was physically in Orlando. On the other hand, maybe his son belonged on the Yalaha census record and was just visiting Orlando.  In which case, the Orlando enumerator might have screwed up by listing a visitor as a resident.

Our family lore has it that my father and his mother both moved to Orlando to live with my father's oldest sister. Our impression was that this relocation was after George Johnson King's death. But the Orlando 1920 census hints that possibly our father moved in with his sister while his mother stayed home with her husband. Records after George J's death do show his widow living with the oldest daughter but I haven't found anything yet that would suggest mother and son relocated to Orlando together.  We also were aware that our father changed his given name from George Charles King to Charles George King because "he didn't like his given name."  So far I've been unable to secure documentation of a legal name change so I'm not sure how and when that came about. But the 1920 Orlando record seems to imply that the name change was already in the works.  An additional legend (maybe too strong a word?) we attached to our father was that his oldest sister was very domineering when it came to her young brother (she was 14 years older) perhaps in a loving way but much more suffocating than he wanted. And that was supposedly the reason why he moved to his other sisters home in Lakeland.  A few years younger than the overbearing Carol, our father's other sister, Nellie, offered him haven in more comfortable surroundings. And he could "help earn his keep" by babysitting for Nellie's young children. Carol King White never had children of her own but allegedly didn't hesitate to make sure her young brother, Charles, washed his hands before meals and went to the bathroom before travelling, even when her brother reached middle age and was raising his own family.

Another angle I'm looking at is to try to piece together George Johnson King's life from the time he arrived in Florida.  Nellie King had constructed some family research back in 1980 that indicated her father, born in Kentucky in 1864 had inherited monies from his father's estate (his father died before he was born)  when he turned 21 and came to Florida to start his adult life. So somewhere around 1885 might be when he arrived. I have found his 1890 marriage certificate from Lake County and I've found a few land deeds for land he purchased in Yalaha. I'm also gathering records for land purchases for his wife and his father in law, William Sweet. So far all I have is data that is too soon to start drawing any conclusions on. I plan to travel up to Lake County before too long and see what else I can find in the county records and newspapers (I hope) to reconstruct the history of George Johnson King's life in Yalaha. And to that end, my search goes on.  

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