Stories That Live In Us

Mess in His Wake | Episode 43

• Crista Cowan | The Barefoot Genealogist • Season 1 • Episode 43

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When family relationships shatter, the ripples can span generations. In this deeply personal episode, I uncover the story of my great-great-grandfather Park Cowan, whose choices left a wake of heartbreak, bigamy charges, and newspaper headlines across the Midwest in 1901. Through historical records and family lore, I piece together how his abandonment impacted three generations - from my resilient great-great-grandmother Carrie to my own grandfather's commitment to break the pattern. You'll discover how family stories, even the messy ones, can lead to healing and redemption. Join me in exploring how confronting our family's past challenges can transform our present relationships and shape a different future for those who come after us.

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Crista Cowan:

Stories that Live In Us is a podcast that inspires you to form deep connections with your family past, present and future. I'm Crista Cowan, known online as The Barefoot Genealogist. I've spent my whole life discovering the power of family history and I know that sharing the stories that live in you can change everything. When you first get into family history, one of the things that you learn is that families are messy. All families are messy. Families have always been messy. Sometimes that mess feels really close in. You feel like oh, like I don't know if I want to dig into my family history because I come from a broken home or I had a horrible childhood or there was abuse or other things that we kind of step into and confronting that can feel really vulnerable. But one of the things that I have learned about family history is that it can also be really really healing to confront that, to face that and then to move back further into the family tree and to start to come to understand some of the patterns, some of the experiences that led people to make the choices that they made. I don't think it excuses behavior, but I think for us, as the family story keeper, as the one going on this journey. I think it can help us make sense of some things. That is certainly the case in my own family, and so I'm going to share with you a little story about someone you've heard about before from me. Now, if you haven't yet listened to episode one, I'm going to ask you to go back and do that.

Crista Cowan:

I tell you all about my dad's paternal great-grandmother. Her name was Carrie Inman. Carrie was married to a man named Park Cowan, and Park was, in our family, often referred to as a scoundrel we can say that a little jokingly now but he left a lot of heartache and a lot of mess in his wake. Park Werder Cowan was born in 1863 in Brownsville, ohio. His father was a saddle maker during the Civil War and that's how he contributed to the Union War effort. And that's how he contributed to the Union War effort. His mother was a woman whose name was Mary Euphemia Stewart and she went by the nickname Fame, which I just adore. I have pictures of Robert and pictures of Fame and they just look like a delightful couple and from all the stories I've heard, they were good, hardworking people living at a time in this country when there was a lot of turmoil with the Civil War and just a lot of things happening at the time. Park was born into a family where he was one of two brothers and then he had three sisters. One of those sisters was injured in an accident as a child and so she had some disabilities and again all the stories we have heard. Her family, her parents, her siblings took really good care of her, again at a time in our country when a lot of children would have been abandoned or institutionalized due to some of those limitations. So I'm not sure what led Park to make some of the decisions that he made in his life and I've looked for those answers. But the choices he made caused a lot of damage, and here's kind of the story of how that goes.

Crista Cowan:

He married Carrie in 1884. He was 20 years old at the time. She was a little bit older, she was 22, which in 1884 was a little bit older. In addition to that, carrie was six feet tall. Park was not intimidated by that, even though he was younger than her and much shorter than her. He was in printing. That was his occupation. He printed flyers for the railroad. So he worked for the railroad for a period of time. He worked for different printing companies and then eventually opened up his own printing company, and so he was traveling quite a bit.

Crista Cowan:

Through the early years of their marriage. They lived in four or five different cities before their oldest son was 10 years old, mostly in and around Ohio and Indiana. And then, in 1901, it comes almost out of nowhere he just abandons his family. In 1901, he was 38 years old, so Carrie was 40. Their oldest son was 16. And my great grandfather, frederick, was 14. So now Carrie is a single woman. And if you'vegrandfather Frederick was 14. So now Carrie is a single woman. And if you've listened to episode one, you know about the tenacity of this woman and her ability to take care of her family. She had a skill that she employed as a seamstress, and she seems to have thrived a seamstress, and she seems to have thrived.

Crista Cowan:

What I didn't know in hearing these stories passed down was the extent of the choices that Park made and the ways in which he continued to harm his family through the ensuing years after his abandonment. You hear about a father abandoning a family and mentally I think, you construct this story about him just leaving and being gone. But he wasn't just gone. The choices that he continued to make had repercussions that reached Carrie and her children and continued to cause them embarrassment and I suspect in that time and place, and continued to cause them embarrassment and, I suspect, in that time and place, shame that created some real problems for them.

Crista Cowan:

Carrie filed for divorce on the 27th of July 1901. I didn't know that until I found a little snippet of an article in a newspaper on newspaperscom, and I learned all about the divorce filing. He had abandoned her months earlier and she filed that divorce. In January of 1902, an article hit a St Louis newspaper that made its way back to Dayton, ohio, where Kerry was living at the time For three days. Headlines kind of worked their way across newspapers of the Midwest and what those newspapers stated was that Park had married a woman named Emma Louise Kingsbury and Emma was a young woman in her 20s and they had eloped. She and Park had eloped and her parents were so embarrassed by this that they tried to legitimize this marriage by playing it up in the newspapers as this happy occasion. What they didn't realize, what I think none of them realized, was that Carrie and Park's divorce was not finalized. Carrie's lawyer saw that headline marching its way across Midwest newspapers that week in January and within three days he had added bigamy charges to the divorce suit in the courts on Kerry's behalf. I don't know what ultimately happened to that. I've looked in newspapers for days. Headlines in Cincinnati, ohio and Mansfield, ohio and Dayton Ohio continued to claim bigamy charges. The divorce charges that had been filed months before had never been responded to and ultimately the next thing I find in a newspaper is that in March, so two and a half months later, divorce is finally granted to Carrie on the grounds of abandonment and the bigamy charge is noted in the divorce paperwork.

Crista Cowan:

Now, through those years, carrie then continues to raise her children. She sends one of them off into the Merchant Marines. Ultimately my great-grandfather joins the army. And again I thought, here's this woman, abandoned by her husband, raising these two teenage boys. But I found little snips of information in newspapers. They were like the Facebook of their day, where Park's sisters would come to visit her. It would say things like Miss Bertha Cowan or Miss Maude Cowan came to visit Mrs Carrie Cowan in Dayton Ohio and she returned after a week's visit. Just a little line or two that would tell me that Park's family was still connected to Carrie and her children in spite of this choice that their son and brother had made.

Crista Cowan:

The next time we see Park, he shows up in a 1907 newspaper in Little Rock, arkansas, where he has divorced Emma. Now here, the interesting thing in our family is that we didn't even know Emma existed until we found these newspaper stories. The story in our family had always been that Park abandoned Carrie and ran off to California, but the fact that he eloped to St Louis and then ended up in Little Rock, and that that was six years of his life that we didn't even know about Newspapers are what brought that information to light. So here's this little snippet of a newspaper in this 1907 Little Rock paper. And within three weeks there is another notice where he marries a woman named Miriam Hall, who had been married to a man with the last name of Blount, and what we uncovered there was that Miriam and Emma had been best friends. So now Park has not just done what he's done to his original family eloped with a young woman six years, five years later, he's divorced her, he's married her best friend and now he heads out to California.

Crista Cowan:

In 1909, again in the Little Rock newspaper, he closes down his printing business that makes the news and heads out to California where he has big dreams of opening a printing company to print scripts and playbills and become involved in the burgeoning movie industry. That is just starting to happen out in California. We always thought he first went, and so the fact that he immediately then shows up in census records in Los Angeles and Beverly Hills and Santa Monica, moving around that area repeatedly, that made sense to us. Here's where you would think that the story would end right. He ends up in California, separated from his family. His parents and siblings appear to have no further interaction with him, but unfortunately his sons do, and not in a really happy way. If you listened to episode one, then you're going to want to piece this together. After Carrie raised her sons and they got married and started having families of their own, her oldest son did the same thing to his family that Park did. Robert abandoned his wife and four daughters and left them and went out to California. Again, that was the story always told in the family. Research bears that out Turns out, yes, he went out to California, which tells me that he had maintained some kind of a relationship with his father, even though they had been separated at that point for nearly 20 years Out in California, robert marries again, has another child and works in various businesses, while Carrie takes her daughter-in-law and grandchildren home to her daughter-in-law's family in New Orleans and that's where Carrie stays and that's the story of Carrie there.

Crista Cowan:

My great-grandfather, frederick, was in the army, so he moved around a lot Texas. That's where he met his wife During World War I. He was shipped off to Europe when World War I ended. He ended up in Little Rock, interestingly, where his oldest child was born. Then he was stationed at the Presidio in San Francisco where my grandfather was born, and then the Army transferred him and his family to Los Angeles and he was put in charge of running the Army recruiting office there, and that was in the 1920s. So Park is there, he's established, robert is there and now Frederick is there.

Crista Cowan:

And the story in our family is that Carrie was heartbroken that both of her sons ended up in the same city with their father and apparently had a relationship now with him after everything he had done to her and to them. And again the story is told that she never came to visit and that's why my grandfather only met his grandmother twice in his life because she was in Louisiana, they were in California and she would not come to California, so they had to go to her, and they only did that a couple of times. There's another story told in our family that gives us some insight into the kind of man that Park was he by the time by 1930, he had married another woman. Her name was Eve Watson. By 1930, he had married another woman. Her name was Eve Watson. I think it may be one of the longer relationships that he had after Carrie.

Crista Cowan:

My grandfather knew her so as my grandfather was a child growing up, when they would visit his grandfather and step grandmother, my grandfather always called her the madam. They never called her Mrs Cowan or Eve, they always just called her the madam. And my grandfather, when he would tell that story, was always a little bit ironic about it, and so I've always wondered what it was about her character or personality that caused him to call her that. But one of the things that he relayed is that he would always go visit his grandmother with his father and that his mother would never go or his wife would never go. As I got older, he took her to meet his grandfather and they spent an afternoon together, and as they left my grandmother turned to him and said I never want to see that man again. And what she proceeded to relay is that Park had hit on her. What she proceeded to relay is that Park had hit on her. And here she was 19 years old and her boyfriend's grandfather had hit on her and she was so completely uncomfortable with that and so mortified by what had happened that she never wanted to see him again. And my grandfather promised her that he she wouldn't have to. So that was kind of the final straw in that relationship and my grandparents got married and I don't know if they ever took any of their children to meet him. He passed away.

Crista Cowan:

Finally in February of 1950 in Hollywood County, california, and again in a newspaper just a month later there was an article where it came out that Robert was contesting Park's will. By that point Park had been in California and in the printing business for enough years that he had built up a little bit of wealth. He owned a printing company in his name. He had invented perforation. If you've ever ripped a check out of a checkbook do people even do that anymore? The machine that originally created that concept of perforation was invented and patented by him and his printing company he had burned through several wives. He had a housekeeper at the time that he died, that in his will he had left all of his money to. So the business had gone to some partners and some investors, but all of his personal wealth had gone to the housekeeper, and within a month of his death his son was contesting that will.

Crista Cowan:

So, even though Robert appeared to have gone out to California to be with and near his father, the relationship was clearly not such that Park left his fortune to Robert or to Frederick or his family, and so you have to wonder what's the story behind that. Robert's contesting was overturned, the housekeeper got everything, and in our family we don't even know the name of that housekeeper. We have no idea who she is or what happened to her or why he left all his money to her. But we do know that he left an interesting legacy, and this is the legacy that my grandfather shared when he would share stories about Park, which was he was glad that he wasn't like that, that the mess of that family had given him an example of what not to do, and that his father, frederick even though Robert had also made other choices, even though Robert had also made other choices. Frederick had loved his wife and my grandfather loved his wife and was faithful to her and was romantic with her to the day he died.

Crista Cowan:

So even though I grew up with these stories of what a scoundrel Park was, I also grew up with such a good example of what it means when a man loves his wife and his children and when he's faithful to her.

Crista Cowan:

And I still remember my grandparents traveled together a lot and on one of their trips I remember because I love travel so much asking them about the trips they had taken and where they had been and what they had seen in the world. And my grandfather mentioned being in the European theater and the Pacific theater during World War II and he said that was enough time away from your grandmother for a lifetime. And since then we've never spent a night apart. And as a teenager and a young woman, hearing my grandfather share that about my grandmother impacted me in such a way that that story has become more important to me than the messy story of Park. What I learned from that story of Park is what an amazing woman Carrie was to have put up with it, to have dealt with it, to have come out on the other side of it, and what I learned from my grandfather is about the love that can exist in a family when people make choices to keep their commitments, to love their family, and I'm really grateful for that legacy that lives in me.

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Crista Cowan | The Barefoot Genealogist

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