Searching Ancestry.com or: How I Learned to Stop Spelling Correctly and Love the Census

When Linda Bussey handed me the names of two former Hower House servants, I couldn't wait to go find them online. Aside from Valinda Hurley, the famous local cook who had worked for Blanche Hower, I didn't know the names of anyone who had worked at the house, and everything the museum staff could tell me about the servants was based on speculation rather than documentation. So when Linda asked if I wanted the names of two sisters who had worked as maids at the house, I could hardly believe it: of course I wanted them! I walked away with Hanne Ruthenberg and Tille Carre written on a pink sheet of paper.  I felt like my research was finally getting started, and it was exciting.

  

However, I didn't know where to start looking for Hanna and Tille. Of course I tried googling first, but that didn't turn up anything useful. Linda had suggested that I look through census records to find Hower employees, but I didn't see how a census record could be useful when I already had the sisters' names. (At the time, I didn't know that census records contained so much other information, and I didn't know how to search them anyway.)  

I thought of all the information Mark Price of the Akron Beacon Journal had been able to find on Valinda Hurley when he wrote about her. (You can read his article here.) I hadn't appreciated how detailed his research was until I could find nothing on Hanna and Tille. Mark had cited a lot of now-defunct newspapers in his article, so I decided to look through some old papers myself.  

The Akron-Summit County Public Library provides access to NewspaperARCHIVE, a database that includes over 100 Ohio papers from 1800-present. (You can search it here.) I thought a good place to start would be finding for myself some of the clippings that Mark quotes in his article and move outward from there. However, I couldn’t find any of them, not even the newspapers, let alone the specific articles. 

I figured that, as a journalist, Mark Price must have access to some obscure newspaper files that a regular person wouldn’t be able to find, perhaps in a secret room in the basement of the Akron Beacon Journal building. So I wrote to him and asked where he got his information, hoping he’d give me some tips or maybe even invite me to check out the secret room. Mark kindly answered me and said he'd done most of his research via census records, city directories, and Newspapers.com. He admitted that searching for Valinda had been difficult because she was known by so many variations of her name during her lifetime, and he'd had to search for them all. "There was just enough information for a story," he wrote. "I wish I could have found more." 

I was disappointed there wasn't a secret basement room at the ABJ, but at least I could sign up for Newspapers.com and get access to the same resources the professionals use. (Thank goodness for Mark's article, or I wouldn’t have realized there were local papers not included in NewspaperARCHIVE, including old issues of the Akron Beacon Journal that have turned out to be crucial for my research.)

Meanwhile, Linda Bussey emailed me the name of another woman who'd worked for the Howers, and this time she had pictures: Augusta Strickroth worked as a maid for John H. Hower in 1912 at the Buchtel Avenue house, which is the smaller place John took after transferring the Hower House to Otis and Blanche in 1901. Augusta thus wasn't actually a Hower House servant, Linda explained, but she thought I'd want to include her nevertheless.  I agreed and added Augusta's name to my list of people to find.

Photo courtesy of the Hower House Museum

Mark Price had said he'd searched census records to get information on Valinda Hurley, so I thought those records might help me as well.  In any case, I couldn't find proof that Hanna Ruthenberg and Tille Carre had even existed, so finding them in census records would be a start. I began by googling “how to search census records” and quickly discovered that it’s difficult to access census information for free: while the records themselves are publicly available, you have to pay for the convenience of being able to search digitized copies (or belong to a library that pays for that service). Ancestry.com offers a package subscription to both Ancestry and Newspapers.com, so I sucked it up and entered my credit card info. And then the floodgates of information opened!

Searching old census records is both exhilarating and frustrating as there is so much room for error on so many levels. To begin with, the original census records are handwritten in cursive. Ancestry.com has a pretty good search function that also captions the handwriting, making it easier to read, but the captions sometimes misinterpret what is written. Then there's the possibility of human error: sometimes the census enumerators misspelled people’s names, and sometimes people changed the spelling of their names (or did not know how to spell them), or maybe the writing is too faded or too sloppy to read. Then there's the inconsistency with how people, and especially married women, are listed: for instance, sometimes women are listed by their own married names, and sometimes they are listed as Mrs. Husband’s Name, and sometimes they are under their maiden name or another married name, if they remarried at some point. And finally, sometimes the census enumerators outright missed people because no one was home when they knocked, or perhaps the person answering the survey gave inaccurate information, so you end up looking for a record that simply doesn't exist. 

All this means that even if you have a definite name and permanent address for someone, you still might have trouble finding their census records (if the records exist). The difficulties only compound when you're starting out with little more than scraps of information. When she gave me the pink piece of paper with Hanna Ruthenberg and Tille Carre written on it, Linda Bussey noted that she didn't know if both sisters had married or if one or both had worked for the Howers under a different name, but she did know they'd been born in Holmes County, which could be helpful for finding them in the census records.  

I decided to start my census search with the Hower House because I knew the full names of all the family members who’d lived there as well as the exact address of the house (60 Fir), and from there I could see who the live-in servants were. I was hoping I'd find Tille, Hanna, Valinda Hurley, and also the names I'd read in the travel letters at the very beginning of my research: Flossie, Tisch, Mrs. Logston, Mrs. Lugostine, and maybe even that catty Georgette. 

Therefore, I was nearly tearing out my hair when I couldn’t find all the census records for the Howers. Specifically, I was missing the 1920 census record for Blanche Hower, who was considered the head of the house after Otis’s death in 1916. I knew she hadn’t moved, so why did she disappear in 1920? Where was the Hower House?

It turns out that women, along with their work, can easily disappear in census records. In Serving Women: Household Service in Nineteenth-Century America, Faye E. Dudden discusses how women’s work was often left unrecorded in census records from the nineteenth century through much of the twentieth. In those early census surveys, the enumerators would ask about each person’s occupation and then categorize them in the census accordingly. Dudden points out that women were often listed as having no occupation for a variety of reasons. First, women, and particularly married women, were not expected to be breadwinners, so they may not have been asked about their occupations at all (74). If they were asked, many women engaged in part-time work, such as taking in sewing or giving music lessons, but they did not consider this work to be their occupation, so they would not list it for the census. Moreover, women whose paid work took place in their own homes, such as those who took in lodgers or ran boarding houses, were often listed as having no occupation (75). 

Even Blanche Hower, who was not only president of the Akron Selle Company but also served on Akron’s school board and in the Ohio State Legislature, is listed as having no occupation in the census records.

Accordingly, there was a bit of a learning curve for me when it came to searching and reading census records, especially when looking for women. Searches have to be broad enough to include alternate spellings and misspellings of names (as well as incorrect birth or death dates, places of birth, and so on), yet they have to be specific enough to narrow down the search results to mostly pertinent records. Then you have to search from different angles, such as looking for the person's house address instead of their name, or perhaps looking for their spouse as a roundabout way of finding them. Eventually, I figured out that Blanche was listed not as Blanche Hower but as Mrs. Otis Hower in the missing 1920 record.

I looked through each year of the census to see if any servants were listed as residing at the Hower House, and I did find a few, but not nearly as many as I’d been anticipating. There was one servant listed as living there in 1900 (while John H. Hower was still in residence) named Ella B. Quigly, then two servants living there in 1910 with Otis and Blanche named William Hurley and Elsa Egler.  There were no servants listed as living at the house in 1920, 1930, or 1940.  Where were Hanna Ruthenberg, Tille Carr, Augusta Strickroth, and even Valinda Hurley? Where were Flossie and Tisch? And was this William Hurley somehow related to Valinda? 

I knew there had to be more Hower servants hiding in these records, but I just wasn't finding them yet. My luck didn't change until I stopped pulling out my hair, embraced the craziness of historical documents, and got more creative with my searches.  I'll talk about what I found in my next post.


Works Referenced

Dudden, Faye E. Serving Women: Household Service in Nineteenth-Century America. Wesleyan UP: Hanover NH, 1983.

Price, Mark. Email to Christi Blythin. 06 Feb 2022.

---. "Local History: Her Story Can Be Told." Akron Beacon Journal. Online. 16 Feb 2020. https://www.beaconjournal.com/story/news/2020/02/16/local-history-her-story-can/1695457007/

United States of America, Bureau of the Census. Thirteenth Census of the United States, 1910. Akron, Ohio, USA. Via Ancestry.com.

---. Fifteenth Census of the United States, 1930. Akron, Ohio, USA. Via Ancestry.com.

A backstairs look at the Hower House

NOTE: All photos in this post were taken and posted with the permission of the Hower House Museum.  Please contact the museum if you are interested in using these photos for your own purposes.

As a graduate student, I read a lot of nineteenth-century novels, and much of my dissertation was about fancy houses and the wealthy people who lived in them.  One of the more frustrating aspects of the research was that I had to imagine the layout of each house and its grounds without having ever been to a comparable home: in short, I was writing about the experience of living in these houses and walking on the land, but I had no idea what that would actually be like.

One of the reasons I am now excited to write about the Hower House servants is that the house is still standing, and it’s local: I can actually walk through the servant spaces and see how it felt to move through them. I want to look at the house from a servant’s perspective as much as possible in order to gain insight about what it might have been like to work and live there.

In her excellent study of the representation of servants in nineteenth-century American paintings, Elizabeth L. O’Leary notes that houses for the wealthy were designed with separate servant spaces so as to keep the domestic employees out of sight and segregated from the family. She writes, “By the late decades [of the 1800s], house designs routinely included cross passages, pantries, and china closets as buffer zones between service and family spaces,” so “[...] servants were expected to stay in specific precincts within the home and make use of back entrances, halls, rooms, and stairs” (166).  O’Leary also points out that the servant work and living spaces were significantly less comfortable than the family areas: kitchens were often in the basement, meaning inadequate light and air circulation, and servant bedrooms were commonly located in attics that lacked heat, plumbing, and even windows (166).  

John Henry Hower built the Hower House in 1871, so I wanted to see how the floor plan of the home compares with the late-century design trends that O’Leary describes.  I contacted Linda Bussey, the director of the Hower House, and asked if she could take me through the servant spaces that aren’t usually included on tours: i.e., the rooms that now serve as storage, private offices for the museum staff, and dormitory quarters for the university students that are hired to live in the house and help with its upkeep.  Linda agreed to show as much of the house as possible to me and my working group (two classmates who are working on their own projects).    

Appropriately, when my group arrived for our private tour, we were instructed to enter the house through the back door, i.e. the service entrance.  

The first room we saw was the kitchen, which no longer looks the way it did when the Howers were in residence due to fire damage and the resulting restorations/renovations that changed the layout of the room.  All that’s really left of the original kitchen is the cast iron stove, and the room is now used as a lobby for the museum.

However, the basic architecture of the original kitchen remains. Unlike the dark and airless basement kitchens that O'Leary says were common in the period, the Hower kitchen is instead located on the main floor, with high ceilings and large windows. There is also a door to the outside, which would have allowed for easier delivery of goods to the kitchen as well as increased air circulation in hot weather. The space is smaller than one might expect for such a large home, but it wasn’t cramped. Branching off from the kitchen are doorways leading to the scullery and butler's pantry, the basement, and the entrance to the servants' staircase.  

Linda took us through the doorway leading to the servants' staircase to the second floor. The staircase is sealed off from the main area of the house by a heavy door, and Linda pointed out that all servant areas in the house are similarly divided from family spaces by doors. This design is in line with what O'Leary says about servant spaces: when writing about the various architectural barriers used to separate servant spaces from those of the family, she suggests that "all were devised to render the staff invisible and to protect the families and their guests from inconvenient or unwanted proximity to workers" (167).  However, the doors between servant and family spaces likely served more practical functions as well, such as muffling the sounds and containing the smells produced by the labor being performed by the domestic workers.  

We climbed the narrow servants' stairway to the second floor.  There is a stark difference between the main staircase, used by the family, and the servants' stairs.  The main staircase is winding, broad, carpeted, and ornate.  It is the first thing you see when you walk in the front door of the house (where the family's visitors would be received), and it's clearly meant to be visually pleasing.

The servants' stairs, on the other hand, are steep, narrow, and enclosed by walls.  They have no carpet nor ornamentation to make them pleasant to look at, and unlike the lavishly wallpapered rooms in the family spaces, the walls are painted with a plain shade of beige.  There is a small window in the wall facing the stairs, which Linda suggests may have been used to help bring some light to the stairway, especially in the days before the house was wired for electricity.

 

Although the Howers did not bother to decorate the servant spaces, it's clear that they were more invested in the comfort of their employees than many of their wealthy peers were. Rather than being located in an uninsulated attic, the servant bedrooms are on the second floor, which is the same floor as the family bedrooms, and thus were probably kept at a comfortable temperature year-round. The family bedrooms and bathroom are connected to the servants' quarters by a long hallway that includes a servant lavatory, the linen closet, a hidden utility sink (which would have helped lighten the workload of the servants by saving them the task of carrying buckets of cleaning water upstairs), and, at the end of the hallway, the servant bedrooms.  

In the early 20th century, servants were still not guaranteed access to an indoor bathroom: many were denied the use of the family bathrooms and had to go to an outhouse when they needed the toilet. When they wanted to bathe, servants without access to a bathroom had to carry water to their rooms, often up several flights of stairs, and wash when they thought they'd have a few moments to themselves. (Free time was never a given for live-in domestic employees who, on average, received a half-day off per week at the discretion of their employer.)

An anonymous female servant, working in 1904, wrote about what it was like to work as a housemaid: 

"The hot, sweaty kitchen work made me long for a daily bath, but, of course, the bathroom was denied me; and after carrying water up two flights of stairs to my room and preparing for a bath the door bell was sure to ring. Then I would scramble into my clothes and carry the water down again. [...] I soon ceased to bathe with any regularity," ("A Washerwoman" 1074).  

The Howers' separate servant bathroom, which included a bathtub for bathing, must have contributed towards making the house an attractive place to work for its employees.    

The servant bedrooms were also fairly spacious and comfortable, with large windows and even closets comparable in size to what one would find in modern homes. A current student resident was kind enough to allow us to see her room, which was one of the two smaller servant rooms back in the Howers' day.  I did not take any photos out of respect for her privacy, but the room was sunny and bright.  The second bedroom was closed, and the third, slightly larger servant bedroom is now an office stuffed with desks and various museum materials.  Again, I refrained from taking pictures in order to respect the privacy of the staff members who work there.

Yet, despite being given comfortable living quarters on the same floor as their employers, the servants never would have mistaken themselves as the social equals of the Howers, and the design of the house, right down to the architecture, serves to both illustrate and enforce the boundaries that kept the classes separate. Decorative touches and vibrant colors were reserved for the eyes of the family and their guests while servant areas were strictly functional in design, which suggests that the servants were seen as either not needing beauty in their surroundings or not meriting the effort and expense it would take to add visual interest to their spaces. Similarly, the servant linens, while kept in the same closet as those of the family, were coarser and smaller than what the family used. They were also labeled with a tag reading "Maid's Room" to ensure that live-in employees wouldn't get the good sheets.

These differences in décor and materials clearly demarcate the servant spaces from those of the family while also reiterating the lower socioeconomic status of the servants: there could be no mistaking who had the wealth and who was in the house merely as an employee, and seeing the contrast between the family rooms and their own spaces would have repeatedly communicated this message to the servants. Other small architectural details, such as the step-downs that place the servant bedrooms on a slightly lower level than the bedrooms of the family, would have also served to remind the employees that they were not the equals of their employers. 

The third floor of the house contains the ballroom, which was used for large dinner parties, and the warming kitchen, where food was finished and kept warm until it was to be served at the dinners.  Like the servant bedrooms, the warming kitchen is one step lower than the ballroom, which seems like an unnecessary obstacle for people who were carrying trays of food through the door; however, that design element must have been deemed more important than a more practical floorplan that would have kept the rooms level. 

In the middle of the warming kitchen is the dumbwaiter, which was used to send food and other things to different floors in the house. Blanche and Otis motorized the dumbwaiter during their time in the house, which undoubtedly saved the servants a lot of heavy work, and the dumbwaiter itself was a labor-saving device in that someone didn't have to go up or down the stairs each time something was needed on a different floor of the house. The warming kitchen seems like it would have been a pleasant workspace, though the third-floor location, along with the heat generated by the cast iron stove and the giant dumbwaiter motor, probably would have made it sweltering in the summer.

Our group made our way back to the first floor in order to check out the butler's pantry and the other food-related rooms off the kitchen, which now largely serve as museum storage.  These rooms are typically closed to the public, but Linda let us have a peek.  The kitchen leads to what might have been a scullery, which was basically a place for washing dishes or doing other messy work. It now contains a commercial dishwasher, which Linda explained was necessary to keep the house up to code for the purposes of serving food at catered events. 

To the left is a room that was likely used as a storage panty, and to the right is the butler's pantry, which is a very narrow nook of cabinets where dishes were kept.  ("Butler's pantry" is just a room name and does not indicate that the house actually employed a butler, which I will discuss in more depth in a future post.)

Finally, Linda took us to the basement to see the other working areas of the house.  The basement has mostly been converted into the museum gift shop, and not much is known about the original purposes of the various basement rooms (and there are a lot of them), but some of the original features remain that provide some clues. What is now the outside entrance to the museum once lead to the servant sitting room. Although the sitting room is in the basement, many wealthy homes provided no place for the servants to relax or entertain visitors in their free time, so the room was likely another attractive feature to Hower employees. We were touring the house in February, so the basement was cold, but the fireplace would have helped to make the space cozy during the winter months.

Some of the basement windows are slanted into chutes that likely allowed for delivery of large blocks of ice (necessary for food preservation before modern refrigerators) and coal or perhaps firewood.  Other rooms were used for storing jars of preserved fruits and veggies, and possibly fresh produce as well since the dark, cool environment of the basement would have delayed food spoilage.

The central room of the basement was used for laundry, which Linda says is evident by the original drying hooks that still line the walls and the fact that the room used to have a dirt floor, which would have absorbed dripping water. Washing, drying, and pressing laundry in the days before automatic washing machines and dryers was extraordinarily heavy, labor-intensive work, but the laundry chute that runs through every floor of the house (next to the dumbwaiter chute) would have made the work of gathering the soiled laundry slightly easier.  

Along with the dumbwaiter and laundry chutes, there were also chutes for swept-up dust and fireplace ash that dumped into the basement.  These chutes were likely intended as labor-saving home features as they consolidated the dirt that needed to be gathered and saved the maids from having to carry full dustpans and ash pails through the house.

The past purpose of other rooms in the basement remains a mystery.  Linda explained that we don't know whether servants were ever housed in the basement, though it's possible.  However, any bedrooms located down there would've been much less pleasant than the servant rooms on the second floor.

In sum, it appears that the Howers cared about their servants enough to invest in technology that would lighten their workloads, and they provided amenities that allowed the servants the dignity of attending to their basic human needs: i.e., a full indoor bathroom, a comfortable bedroom, and a sitting room for relaxation and socializing.  Many employers at the time did not provide these seemingly basic facilities as there were no workplace protections for domestic workers, not even to guarantee any pay for labor performed.  Everything was at the employer's discretion, which placed domestic workers in a very vulnerable position.  

The design of the house demonstrates that the Howers attempted to provide a pleasant workplace for their servants, and I hope that means they treated them well too.  Yet, regardless of how well they treated them, the Howers were not so liberal as to suggest that their domestic workers were their equals, as is evidenced by the austere décor in the servant quarters, the step-downs to servant spaces, and the labeling of the maids' sheets.  Some of these design choices were undoubtedly based on conventions of the time, but the Howers could have chosen to ignore those conventions if they'd wished to do so. 

As we were getting ready to leave the museum, Linda handed me a paper on which she had written the names of two former servants to the Howers: Hanne Ruthenberg and Tille Carre, who came from French Ridge, Ohio. Linda explained that she had no other information on the women, but I was excited to get some names to research.  However, I didn't know then just how difficult it was going to be to find information on specific domestic workers, and I'll discuss that in another post.

If you're interested in taking a virtual tour of the servant areas in the Hower House, you can go to their Facebook page and click on "videos."  There you will find the six part series Tine Hreno, the museum's literary historian, wrote on domestic workers in 2021 as part of U Akron's Rethinking Race series. (Or you can just scroll through the posts until you get to February of 2021, which is when the first video was posted.)

Special thanks to Linda Bussey, who has now taken me through the Hower House several times and keeps responding with thoughtful answers to my many emailed questions.  She's also dug up and shared all the photos and information that descendants of the Hower servants have sent to her, which have been so helpful.  She even shared an email that she'd written to some engineering students that described the structure of the house's basement, and that information was very useful as I was writing this post.  Thank you so much, Linda!

Works Referenced:

Hreno, Tine. Hower House Museum: A History of Domestic Service. Six part series. Streaming content. Available on the Hower House Facebook page: https://fb.watch/bzT-vos9v7/.

O'Leary, Elizabeth L.  At Beck and Call: The Representation of Domestic Servants in Nineteenth-Century American Paintings. Smithsonian Institution Press: Washington, 1996.

"A Washerwoman."  Independent LVII, 10 Nov. 1904, pp. 1073-1076.  Available online via HathiTrust Digital Library, digitalized by Google: https://hdl.handle.net/2027/uc1.b3075984.