Author: Ronald Guenther
Written: November 22nd, 2013
As I said, I will start now with mom’s side of the family. It is also interesting. But I do want to leave you with a couple of mysteries. First, the only ones that I know of who name a daughter, Berchion, is a Stead. Now, it turns out that there is a Berchion Stead Johns who is buried in Texas. I vaguely remember that there was another member of the Stead family that was a member of the Stead family of our grandmother Alice, but it was just a chance remark that I may have misunderstood from Aunt Berchion. If that were the case, it would have been the oldest son. The only members of the Stead family that I know are our Uncles, George and Arch, and our Grandmother Alice. Nevertheless, could they have had an older brother who had left the family early and struck out on his own. That is the first mystery. The second mystery deals with a William Stead who was a famous educator among other things from England. He went down with the Titanic. Grandma Alice claimed he was a brother of her which I doubt was true, but it could easily have been a distant relative. The father of Grandma Alice was named William and he married Matilda Duke, who went by the name Tilly. At any rate, those are the mysteries. Maybe somebody would know how to clear those mysteries up.
Thanksgiving is coming and so this part will be short. I will start with the family of our Grandmother Wilda. Her family was an odd family. They were essentially an English family who had come out to the Oregon Territory with the Hudson Bay Company. The were soon a mixture when a Dutch man married into the family and eventually also an Irish man. He was supposed to be a Scotch-Irish man and back when, when the English were trying to turn Ireland into an English outpost, they brought in people from the Lowlands of Scotland so were ethnically English, they were the Scotch Irish, but then he may have been an Irishman with a bit of Scottish in him. Who knows, at any rate, that was the ethnic background of the family. The first white girl born in the Oregon Territory was a member of our family. At that time, the whole Oregon Territory was comprised of Oregon, Washington, Idaho, British Columbia and just a bare shade of Montana and Wyoming. It was governed by the head of the Hudson Bay company. The last “governor” was a man named McLaughlin and his house is still there in Oregon City. The area was claimed by several countries, but in the end, the area South of the 49th parallel became part of the U.S. and north of it became part of Canada. Our family settled in the Hillsboro area. They were originally businessmen and part of the Hudson Bay company dealing in firs.
The family really finally comes into focus with the family who were our direct ancestors. They were the Landess family. The family that is relevant to us had six children, the oldest was a boy, Grant, and then came Hattie, Etta, Rena (Her name was really Irena but they just called her Rena), Gerthy and Mamie. Rena was our ancestor. The other daughters were collectively known as “The Aunts”. Mamie was a common nickname for Mary in those years and there were two Mamies in the family, the Mamie from Hillsboro and our own Aunt Mamie who lived in Englewood with Uncle Heini. At any rate, that was the Landess family. There were surprisingly few children who came out of the family and hardly anyone ever talked about our Uncle Grant. I guess in a family comprising five sisters and one brother that was not surprising.
To be continued.