Tag: Burgess

52W Mark IV – Week 27: Card B1 Milton Leo Burgess and Hazel Nelson

Milton Leo Burgess (1891-1964)
Hazel Nelson (1899-1967)

We’re halfway through the 2025 edition of my take on Amy Johnson Crow’s 52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks Challenge. With it I start the maternal side of my family and a new suit involving my mother’s paternal line. It’s also my Mormon lineage. In fact, my  Gx4 Grandfather, William Burgess (1794-1880), joined the church in 1832, two years after it had been founded. Moreover, all eight of my maternal grandfather’s great grandparents joined the church in the 1830s and 1840s.

However, after five generations, that came to an end with my grandfather, Leo Burgess, as none of his four children were members of the church or raised Mormon. In fact, my grandfather was pretty much a lapsed Mormon, if there is such a term, by his late teens. He only returned to the church after my grandmother, Helen Lerner, passed away.

Leo’s parents, and the subject of the first card of this suit, were Milton Leo Burgess and Hazel Nelson.

Milton was born in Vernal, Utah, on September 9, 1891, the eighth of nine children born to Horace Conrad Liggett Burgess and Sarah Florilla Cook. Florilla passed away in January 1894, a few weeks after her last child, also named Sarah Florilla (“Rilla”), was born. Milton was only two years old at the time. Horace remarried shortly afterwards, to Julia Josephine Lundquist, with whom he had at least another eight or nine children. The family moved Canada when Milton was 14. They settled in Vulcan County, Alberta.

After completing a two-year mission to Australia in 1915, Milton settled in Glenwood, Alberta, which is about 22 kilometers from Cardston as the crow flies. There he worked as a farm labourer. Sometime afterwards, he met Hazel Nelson, who he married in Cardston on April 13, 1919.

Calling card of Milton Leo Burgess from his time as a Mormon missionary in Adelaide, Australia

Milton’s calling card from his time as a Mormon missionary in Adelaide, Australia

Hazel’s family was amongst the earliest settlers of  Cardston, Alberta, which Mormon immigrants from the United States founded in 1887. Her parents, John Alexander Nelson and Ella Elizabeth Thomas settled there in 1890. Six of their 12 children were born in Utah; the other six were born in Canada. Hazel and her sister Irene were born on December 15, 1899. They were the first twins born in Cardston. Sadly, Irene passed away five weeks later, but Hazel lived to be 67.

Because Hazel is listed first, I take it to mean that she was born first.

The year after they married, Milton and Hazel had the first of their nine children, my grandfather Leo. Shortly afterwards, the family moved to Nampa, Idaho, where Milton worked at an orchard with his in-laws. In Nampa they had three more children before permanently returning to Canada in 1924.

By 1927, the family had settled in Magrath, where Milton and Hazel spent the rest of their lives. While he continued to do farm work over the decades, Milton had a wide variety of jobs. In the early 1940s he worked as a plumber. Milton later worked in a woolen mill, where he lost a finger of his left hand in a work injury. Milton also worked for a short time as a grave digger around 1950. By 1958, when he was 67, Milton retired.

My mother has told me many stories about him over the years. One story that she has recounted many times is that her grandfather would often talk about how, according to the bible, no man was meant to live more than 72 years. Milton died on September 10, 1964, the day after he turned 73.

I also have a small cache of letters Milton wrote to my grandfather in the 1940s. Most of them were gentle admonishments, such as disapproving of my grandfather working in establishments that served alcohol, coffee, and tea, or telling him that it was time to stop seeing the Catholic girl he had been dating and to find a nice Mormon girl to settle down with. Fortunately for me, my grandfather did not follow that advice, as that Catholic girl became his wife and my grandmother!

Screenshot of the entry for Hazel at Find a Grave, showing the headstone she shares with Milton.

Hazel was 64 when Milton passed away. Around that time she moved to a seniors’ home in Cardston, which she derisively called “the old fools’ home”. There she met a widower, Albert Beaves, who she married in July 1967. Eight weeks later, Hazel passed away. My mother literally went from the funeral to the hospital, where I was born.

The newlyweds, Hazel Nelson and Albert Beaves, about July 5, 1967.

“The Old Fool’s Home” – Chinook Lodge in Cardston, Alberta

52W Mark III – Week 48: Very Funny

This week’s 52 Ancestors Challenge prompt is not just funny, but apparently very funny!

Margaretha (“Margaret”) Heck
(1 April 1868-21 October 1946)

My mother shares a birthday – April Fools’ Day! – with her mother’s maternal grandmother, Margaretha (“Margaret”) Heck. In fact, my grandmother gave my mother Margaret as a middle name in honour of her grandmother.

My grandfather always called my mother “Maggie”, which of course is a derivative of her middle name. When I asked my mother why he preferred to do so, she said that her mother had wanted to give her Margaret as her first name, since my mother shared a birthday with her great grandmother. However, her father objected because people would call her Maggie, so my grandmother agreed to give my mother Margaret as her middle name.

My mother’s parents, Leo Burgess and Helen Lerner. Margaret Heck was Helen’s maternal grandmother.

Milton Burgess: “There’s Maggie!”

When my mother’s parents brought her home, her paternal grandfather was there and said, “there’s Maggie!” Since that time, Lorraine’s father and grandfather called her Maggie. Later, the immediate family and some of her cousins came to call her Maggie.

Of course, my mother was often teased by being called an April Fool because of her birthday. When we were kids, the tradition was that the time for pranking ends at 12 noon. My mother was adamant that she wasn’t an April Fool because she was born in the afternoon.

Once we were at my grandparents on April Fools’ Day and everyone was giving my mother grief about being an April Fool. My mother repeated her defense that she was born in the afternoon. My grandmother interjected and called out from the other room, “no you weren’t, you were born in the morning!”

Grandmothers: always siding with their grandchildren. Very funny!

52W Mark III – Week 47: Random Number

This week’s prompt for the 52 Ancestors Challenge is “Random Number”. At present, I now have 5,442 individuals in my primary RootsMagic database, which assigns each person a unique Record Number. That’s 148 more people than there were as of July 8, 2024, when the theme was “Random“. So, using the same method as last time, I generated a random number between 1 and 5,442. The result was 5,419.

There was a 0.018% chance of this coming up.

Shirley Elizabeth Baxter is #5419 in my database. Shirley is my first cousin twice removed. As with the result I obtained last time I did this, Shirley did not have a very long life. She was born October 31, 1933 in Goshen, Utah and died April 25, 1934 – not quite six months old. Thus, it bears repeating what I said in last year’s post:

One might think that this is an unfortunate result, in that there is not much to say about someone who lived such a short life. However, I was quite happy with the result. To me, it’s important to remember those who never really got to live their lives. Not only were their lives dismally short, they’re often forgotten as a result. They might not have been long in this world, but their time on Earth should be noted.

Shirley was born to John Grant Baxter and Sarah Florilla (“Rilla”) Burgess, who married on October 12, 1911 in Nephi, Utah. Rilla was my grandpa Leo Burgess‘s aunt. Shirley was the ninth of ten children and the only one not to survive infancy. Her eldest brother Evan was 22 years old when Shirley was born.

One of the main sources of information I have for Shirley comes from an item in the Salt Lake City Telegram published on April 26, 1934. In fact, the evening edition contained two separate items.

Horace Burgess, who is mentioned in both these items, is the most recent common ancestor that I share with Shirley. He was her grandfather and my great great grandfather.

The other place where I found information about Shirley was Find A Grave. Her entry includes a photo of her headstone.

Since starting this post, I thought I’d see what else I could find about Shirley. After all, one of the elements of the Genealogical Proof Standard is requires reasonably exhaustive research to have been conducted.

At FamilySearch, I found Shirley’s death certificate. Because there are contract restrictions, one cannot print or download the image. However, it corroborates what I already knew about Shirley, including her cause of death. I couldn’t read the physician’s handwriting (how stereotypical!), but I showed it to my sister who is a medical doctor. She confirmed that it says “gastroenteritis”.

Other than discovering her grave is also included at BillionGraves, I have not found anything else about her.

Everyone dies twice. Once when you take your final breath, and then again the last time someone says your name.

Attributed to everyone from the ancient Egyptians to Banksy

I say the name “Shirley Elizabeth Baxter” and she lives on.

52W Mark III – Week 45: Colourful

I’ve written a fair amount about my Aunt Diana (Helen Diana Burgess 1951 – 1999), but usually I’ve focused on her scientific side. However, I’ve always considered her a true Renaissance Woman, because the arts were just as important to her. It’s why her scientific pursuits lead her into the colourful world of art conservation.

According to the obituary published in the Canadian Conservation Institute Newsletter in November 1999,

Helen loved paper and textiles, flowers, beautiful ceramics and glass, and cats. She was often teased by her friends for picking flowers wherever she could find them, including, in one instance, the Faculty Club garden at Queen’s. Helen enjoyed painting flowers and donated several of her watercolours to the Lupus Society.

Diana took me to the first movie I ever saw in a cinema, Bedknobs and Broomsticks. Going to that movie was also the first time I rode a city bus. She also had some marvelous record albums, which included the original edition of Jesus Christ Superstar. I remember listening to it over and over again while reading all of my uncle’s comic books whenever we visited my grandparents.

This is the copy my Aunt Diana gave me, which my sons now have.

Books were often a welcome gift from her, often titles I had never heard of but came to love. Diana had a huge library of fiction and non-fiction books. In particular, she loved detective novels. The best book she gave me was from the Alfred Hitchcock and the Three Investigators series, Mystery of the Flaming Footprints. The books are about three boy detectives, which were everything boring old Hardy Boys books were not. I went on to buy many more from the series. I’ve passed them all on to my sons, who have read them all several times over.

When I was in undergrad, Diana introduced me to L.R. Wright and her first novel, The Suspect. That book quite blew my mind – a detective novel not only set in Canada rather than the US or UK. Moreover, it wasn’t someplace like Toronto, rather, it was set in the small town of Sechelt, only a short drive away from where live. It’s now been turned into a TV series, Murder in a Small Town.

Diana took me on tours of art galleries, including the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa and the Vancouver Art Gallery. It was wonderful having someone so knowledgeable about art as my guide. Diana loved to paint as well. When I was 10, she gave me my first set of oil paints, along with a small canvas, brushes, turpentine, and linseed oil. It didn’t take long for me to accidentally spill some on the gold shag carpet in our living room. Oops. At least it was purple, which pairs well with gold.

She mostly painted still life, often in vibrant or bright colours, although sometimes she used a more muted palate. My mother has a few of her works, one of which now hangs in her living room.