I have devoted three blog posts in this series to my father's line, so it is time to talk a little about my mother's.
My mom, Martha Shideler Reed, was born in Detroit, Wayne County, Michigan. She and I had something in common: we each did not like our middle names much. Family history has reconciled me to mine. The fact that hers came from the surname of a young social activist in Logansport, Indiana at the turn of the 20th century apparently had no effect on Mom.
Her family was not as peripatetic as my father's. I have not gone back far enough to discover the family's origin. The name Reed could be either English, Scots, or Irish. From some things I know about the Reeds and their attitudes and behavior, I have a sneaking suspicion that they were "lace curtain" Irish. But as yet, I have no evidence. I find the family in the United States in the early 1800s, in a slow westward movement that ended up in Ohio and then in Indiana. In Indiana, towns associated with my Reed line are Monticello, in White County, and Logansport, in Cass County.
There were railroad men in the Reed family. My great-grandfather Francis Harvey ("Frank") Reed was a conductor. My grandfather Benjamin Franklin (also called "Frank") was a switchman in a railroad marshaling yard. My adoptive grandfather, Benjamin Franklin Reed's oldest brother Perry Wilmer Reed, was a freight agent.
Francis Harvey Reed married Florence Elizabeth McKee 10 September 1884 in Monticello, White County, Indiana. Francis H. had been raised in Monticello when his family lived there. His work for the railroad had stationed him in Logansport, and that is where the new bride and groom set up their house. That was the end of their migrations. Their children, however, ended up scattered to the four winds, ending up in such places as Washington state, California, and Florida.
Benjamin Franklin Reed married Ruth Ella Nave, who was from South Bend, Indiana. She worked to support her widowed mother, a situation frowned upon by many whose notion was that "nice" girls did not work, no matter the circumstances. But eating is preferable to starving, so Ruth became a telephone operator. Married in November of 1913, the couple had three children by December of 1916. They got an early start, according to some in the family. In October of 1917, Benjamin Franklin Reed was killed in a railroad accident in Detroit, where he worked in a railroad yard.
According to my aunt, my mother's sister, the Reed family was not fond of Ruth Nave, possibly both because she worked for a living, and because the growth of her and their son's family had been, shall we say, rapid beyond the customary. My aunt said that the Reeds "ganged up" on Ruth Nave, and took her daughters, Margaret, the second child, and Martha, my mother, the youngest. The oldest, a son named Donald, was 16 by the time all the family rearrangement had taken place in the early 1920s, and he stayed with his mother. These three siblings were not reuinted until the 1950s, when all had ended up in Florida, scattered among the Tampa Bay area (Uncle Don), Orlando (Aunt Margaret) and Jacksonville (Mom).
My mother was placed with the oldest Reed brother, Perry, and his wife Mary LeSourd, of Sleeth, Carroll County, Indiana. There is not much left of Sleeth; it's practically a ghost town, so I've been told. The town was named for Mary Reed's mother's family. Perry Reed and his family are found in the 1910 census in Chicago, where their daughter, their second child Elizabeth, was born in 1910. They are missing from the 1920 census. I have looked in Chicago, in various locations in Indiana, and in Pensacola, Florida, where Perry was a railroad freight agent. My theory is this: in April of 1920, there is a very small notice in the Logansport Pharos-Reporter to the effect that Mr. Perry W. Reed, of Pensacola, Florida, was visiting relatives in the area. The visit was to take custody, I'm fairly certain, of four-year-old Martha. I would imagine Perry's wife Mary was with him, to care for the child on the journey home to Pensacola. They were on the move from one location to the other, and that is the way they got missed in the census. The final adoption decree was issued later in 1920 in Pensacola. My mom's journey to Pensacola was but the first in many migrations, as she married a young Navy officer, Arden Packard, in Pensacola, 16 July 1937. Their story is told in the first in this series of posts, On the Move: A is for Arden.
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