{"id":6493,"date":"2017-09-04T10:07:50","date_gmt":"2017-09-04T14:07:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/genealogygals.com\/blog\/?p=6493"},"modified":"2017-09-04T10:07:50","modified_gmt":"2017-09-04T14:07:50","slug":"william-clark-salt-1842-1939","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/genealogygals.com\/blog\/william-clark-salt-1842-1939\/","title":{"rendered":"William Clark Salt (1842-1939)"},"content":{"rendered":"

I\u2019ve been more or less aware that William C. Salt had spent some amount of time in Washington, D.C. and that one or more of his children were born there.\u00a0 This is in opposition to his having been born and raised in southwestern Ohio, and having lived a lot of his adult life there.\u00a0 Every time I ran up against this discrepancy I\u2019d wonder what the story was but never pursued looking into it.<\/p>\n

Until I spent a week in Washington, D.C. last fall with Judy.\u00a0 Most of our time was spent in the National Archives and I looked at a lot of Civil War pension files.\u00a0 One of the files I got to, on the last day of our trip, was William\u2019s application.\u00a0 It was too late to make use of the Innovation Hub<\/a> and scan the file, and I didn\u2019t have the time or patience for photocopying any of it.\u00a0 I did take some notes on what was in the file and information I might follow up on.<\/p>\n

Said to have been born in 1842 in Bethel, Ohio, he enlisted in 10\/13\/1861 to serve in the Civil War.\u00a0 He served in the 59th Ohio Volunteer Infantry<\/a> and was discharged on 11\/1\/1864.\u00a0\u00a0 He had lived on the family farm before enlisting and returned to farming in Ohio when he was discharged.\u00a0 He was there for 4-5 years and then, for reasons not clear to me, went to Washington, D.C.\u00a0 According to his brother\u2019s affidavit in the pension file he was there for around ten years, until about 1879.<\/p>\n

One of the first places I looked to find his whereabouts was the 1870 U.S. federal census.\u00a0 I already had an image of the census sheet he was on and when I looked at it with a fresh eye I found that he was in Washington, D.C. on the 20th of July 1870.\u00a0 \"Ross,<\/a>He was boarding in the household of Orlando Ross, his wife and young daughter, along with several others.\u00a0 It turns out that Orlando Ross was William\u2019s first cousin (Orlando\u2019s father and William\u2019s mother were brother and sister).\u00a0 In addition, Phoebe Hawkins (another boarder) was the sister of Orlando\u2019s wife.\u00a0 And Orlando, William, Phoebe Hawkins, and Leontine Laking were all enumerated as clerks in the treasury department.\u00a0 Huh.\u00a0 What was that about and how did they get those jobs (especially the three who had been in Ohio just prior to this)?<\/p>\n

A very little bit of digging tells me that the Department of the Treasury<\/a> was a very busy place just after the Civil War in part because of the decision to begin printing paper money.\u00a0 Originally the sheets of printed bills had to be cut apart by hand using\u00a0 scissors, which led to the Department hiring women for this job.\u00a0 Men were hired to do other tasks \u2013 and not surprisingly were paid twice what the women were paid.\u00a0 \u2018Nuff said.<\/p>\n

This need for more workers is the likely explanation for the migration of my subjects of interest from Ohio to Washington.\u00a0 I wonder if there were flyers or ads in local newspapers that alerted Orlando and William to the opportunity, or perhaps letters from a friend or relative already in Washington.<\/p>\n

So far I know nothing else about what William did in the Department of the Treasury and why he stayed for the length of time he did, or why he decided to move back to Ohio.\u00a0 City directories I have found so far show me that he was listed in Washington, always as a clerk, through 1878.\u00a0 I also know that he was back in Ohio, farming, by the federal census of 1880.<\/p>\n

In between, he married Phoebe Hawkins, they had a son, and both Phoebe and the baby died, within a year of the marriage.\u00a0 This marriage and her death were documented in his Civil War pension file.\u00a0 They were also reported in the Genealogy of the Salt Family that William wrote at some point (likely late in his life).\u00a0 Interestingly he did not note that it happened in Washington.\u00a0 He also reported his second marriage to Minnie Hunter and the birth of their children, again without any statement about Washington (where they met and were married and where several of their children were born).\u00a0 A later \u201crearranging\u201d and adding to by Ruth Baker, William\u2019s granddaughter, in 1946 added the location of Phoebe\u2019s and the baby\u2019s burial in Washington.\u00a0 William and Minnie had lived with Ruth and her parents in the last few years of their lives.<\/p>\n

There were several newspaper articles about William that also provide some information about his life.\u00a0 In 1923 William and Minnie celebrated their Golden Anniversary which was reported.\u00a0 In 1930 William reluctantly retired from his career as an editor of a trade journal in Cincinnati and the newspaper detailed his work life.\u00a0 He started on his father\u2019s farm at about age 7 and worked continuously at one thing and another until he was persuaded to retire by his children at just shy of 88 years old.\u00a0 He had farmed after returning from Washington, D.C. until he was about 60 and then came to Cincinnati to make a new career.\u00a0 He found work in a printing company and from about age 60-87 he worked there, enjoying the tasks and contacts and staying in touch with what was going on in the world.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The article about his retirement (which I assume he was interviewed for) noted that he still had his wife and 7 children around him and that he had only mourned the loss of one grandchild in his years.\u00a0 No mention of his first wife and son, although I wonder if it was the loss of his son rather than a grandchild that he referred to.<\/p>\n

Likewise, his obituary upon his death 10 years later at age 97 did not mention Phoebe or the baby.\u00a0 I can only guess that his children had not heard much (or anything) about Phoebe.\u00a0 Certainly he and Minnie were married for a significant amount of time, something more than 60 years.\u00a0 She survived his death by only a few months.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I\u2019ve been more or less aware that William C. Salt had spent some amount of time in Washington, D.C. and that one or more of his children were born there.\u00a0 This is in opposition to his having been born and …<\/p>\n

William Clark Salt (1842-1939)<\/span> Read More »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[32,104,373],"class_list":["post-6493","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-misc","tag-civil-war","tag-salt-family","tag-washington-d-c"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/genealogygals.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6493","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/genealogygals.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/genealogygals.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/genealogygals.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/genealogygals.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6493"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/genealogygals.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6493\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6500,"href":"https:\/\/genealogygals.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6493\/revisions\/6500"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/genealogygals.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6493"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/genealogygals.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6493"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/genealogygals.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6493"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}