The Tale of Three Stewarts

Looking back on the last few generations of my family I discovered that there were three boys name Stewart, three generations in a row, each with decidedly different fates. 

The first Stewart was the 9th child to be born to John C. Feero (1821-1911) and Emeline (Way) Feero (1831-1881) in York, New Brunswick. John and Emeline would eventually end up having 11 children in total but poor Stewart died only 10 and a half months after being born in 1870. John and Emeline also lost another son at an early age when Miles died when he was 2 and a half in 1874. 

The second Stewart was born in Maine in 1885. He was the son of John E. Feero (who was the son of John C.) and Emma (Babcock) Feero. He was one of the older brothers of my great grandmother, Edith Feero. Unfortunately, Stewart also met with a tragic ending at a young age when he died at the age of 10. 

Stewart (in front right, smiling) with his siblings.

Here is how my great grandmother Edith described what happened to her brother when reflecting on her early childhood in Tacoma before moving to Skagway, Alaska for the gold rush. 

"Mother and Father got a chance to take over a farm for half of everything they could raise. Which might have been fine except the owner had been in an asylum twice and we found out he was ready to go again. We had real bad luck on that place. We lost my brother Stewart there. He was out with the men falling trees to make fence rails. One tree fell against another and a branch of the other tree broke off and hit Stewart in the forehead. He died the next morning at 3 am."

I was beginning to think that the name Stewart was cursed but perhaps the third time was indeed the charm. When Edith grew up, married Karl Larson, and started a family of her own she named her first child Stewart. Perhaps she was honoring her lost brother with her choice of a name. Thankfully, this Stewart avoided the tragedy of his preceding namesakes. Born in Skagway in 1908, Stewart would live to see the 21st century, passing away in 2002 in Washington state. He certainly made up his predecessors, living a full life which found him marrying three times (Virginia Van Dyk, Velma Fish and Helene Stoops) and having three children (Leila, Jim, Carolee). (Jim was adopted by Stewart when he was 14 years old.)

(Probably) Stewart operating a mini-steam locomotive at a fair.

I was never able to meet my great uncle Stewart but I was able to get some details about him from his son Jim's wife Jo-Ann (both now residing in Calgary). According to her, Stewart loved to play cribbage and lived to dance (he went dancing just 3 weeks after getting a new hip!). Like many in the family, he was a railroad man, having worked for Northern Pacific Railroad. He was also a bellhop at the Golden North Inn in Skagway. He was fun-loving with a sweet tooth for ice cream and an appreciation for poetry (Robert Service and Wadsworth were favorites). Later in life, he volunteered to drive cancer patients. His third wife Helene, unfortunately, died from brain cancer. 

"He lived thru the century change in 2000. But did not want to live to be 100 because he missed having a girlfriend/wife to snuggle with." 

It's nice to know that the third Stewart on the family tree had a happy ending. 

Great-Grandmother Edith Feero Larson in Her Own Words: Part One of an Audio Interview From Over 40 Years Ago

When I started this blog to cover my family history there was one person I especially wanted to write about, my great-grandmother Edith Feero Larson. A natural storyteller, Edith, loved to talk about here days during the Gold Rush in Skagway, Alaska. Because of her place in history and her great memory, I have been able to read a lot about her in books about that period like Klondike Women by Melanie Mayer. Even better, recently my Aunt was able to covert three audiotapes of an interview with great-grandma conducted around 1980 into digital form. With the files on the cloud, I was finally actually able to hear her in her own voice describe her life. It enabled me to get to know a great-grandmother that I had only met once as a baby and even allowed me to introduce her, in a way, to my children, her great-great-grandchildren. Now, over the next few months, I will be uploading parts of this interview in text and audio form. By the way, who exactly conducted the interview is a bit of a mystery right now. It may be a grandson or just someone who was really interested in the history of Skagway and the White Pass and Yukon Railroad. I'd love to meet him and thank him. He's provided me something to treasure for generations to come. Today's clip is a bit short but I think it's a good place to start. I hope you enjoy it. Below the YouTube clip is the transcript of part one. 

Starting in Tacoma

1887, my folks lived in Auburn, Maine. They had two boys, 4 and 2 years old when my twin sister and I was born to raise the family to double the family to two boys and two girls. And they lived in Auburn, Maine and my father was a teamster. He ran the transfer business with his brother. After a while they didn’t get along too good so when grandmother came back from the state of Washington and told about the wonder west, then he decided to sell out to his brother and move west. We were 18 months old then. Grandmother was working in the Kushman school here in Tacoma. And moved west and he went into the transfer business in Tacoma. (He) was doing really well, he had his place of business on J street, just about a block from the Fannie Paddock Hospital which is now the general hospital. 

When the big bust came in the early nineties everybody lost everything. He lost everything but his family you might say. And from there on we went from one place to another because you had to get the cheapest you could do and we moved from one place to another, where we could get rent and get enough to eat. On Thanksgiving day of that year mother had two cookie ornaments sitting on the organ (?) that she had put there because, well, when you got plenty you don’t give a damn. You put dipsy (?). And she had them for ornaments. There was nothing to eat in the house and four children. Well, there was five by then. And she broke them there two cookie ornaments up and give it to us children for something to eat. Dad was downtown in Tacoma hunting for, see if he could get enough money off of that that was owed to him to buy groceries. He got home at 10 o’clock that night. Mother hadn’t had a thing. We had those two cookie ornaments. And he brought home some groceries. Mother got us all up at 10 o’clock at night and cooked us a dinner. I don’t know what I could tell you about them except they were gingerbread men, like you see today. Oh, there were about this high. 

(Well, about a foot then) No, not a foot high. I’d say about 8-9 inches high. And that’s what we had for our dinner. But we had plenty to eat after that.