RLP 254: Out of Place: Edward Raymond Kelsey and The Hobo Life

Nicole Elder Dyer (0s):
This is research like a Pro, episode 254 out of place, Edward, Raymond, Kelsey, and the Hobo Life. Welcome to Research Like a Pro, a genealogy podcast about taking your research to the next level. Hosted by Nicole Dyer and Diana Elder accredited genealogist professional. Diana and Nicole are the mother-daughter team@familylocket.com and the authors of research like a pro, a genealogist guide with Robin Woodland. They also co-authored the Companion Volume Research like a Pro with dna. Join Diana and Nicole as they discuss how to stay organized, make progress in their research, and solve difficult cases.

Nicole Elder Dyer (41s):
Let’s go. Today’s episode is sponsored by newspapers.com, break down genealogy brick walls with a subscription to the largest online newspaper archive. Hi everyone. Welcome to research like a Pro.

Diana Elder (54s):
Hi Nicole. How are you today?

Nicole Elder Dyer (56s):
Great. I’ve been reading a lot of research plans from our study group and they’re really interesting.

Diana Elder (60s):
Oh, I’ve been doing that too. It’s been fun to see the really wide breadth of research people are doing from all sorts of different locations and different time periods and different types of projects.

Nicole Elder Dyer (1m 12s):
Yeah. What have you been reading lately?

Diana Elder (1m 14s):
Well, I got my latest issue at the National Genealogical Society quarterly. This was for March, 2023 and opened it up and I saw there was an article by Rachel Mills Lemon and she is Elizabeth Shawn Mill’s daughter and has followed in her mother’s footstep of doing fabulous research in the South. So I’m always really anxious to read her work because she does so much teaching as she writes. And this is such a great article. It’s titled Southern Strategies Revisited, expanding Reasonably Exhaustive Research to Find Solomon Harper’s Roots in the Carolina Backcountry. So basically she is taking this gentleman, Solomon Harper, and there were three records that seem to be for him.

Diana Elder (2m 3s):
So she’s going through and explaining how you can really use context for the records and examining all the people within the records to try to determine if these are same people or different people. Anyway, it’s pretty fascinating and I love all the methodology in it.

Nicole Elder Dyer (2m 19s):
That’s great. I’ll have to read that. I saw that in the table of contents. I always open it up and look to see if there’s any new DNA articles.

Diana Elder (2m 27s):
I don’t think there have been any for a while.

Nicole Elder Dyer (2m 30s):
There haven’t, but I did see that Jill Morell’s article was published, which I want to read as well about her Swedish family. I heard her talking about her case study that she was working on in our certification discussion group that I took again recently so that I could review some more portfolios and judges comments and things.

Diana Elder (2m 50s):
Nice. And her article is Indirect Evidence helps build a 17th century Swedish family, so that is going way back 16 hundreds.

Nicole Elder Dyer (3m 1s):
That’s neat When there are church records and other records that can help you research back in that time period.

Diana Elder (3m 7s):
Right. Then I think the real challenge comes in, you know, same name people with the Patronymics in Scandinavia. Then you really have to dig in and figure out how to separate out these people by location and family members.

Nicole Elder Dyer (3m 20s):
Yeah, I like the Patronymics when they use the daughter at the end instead of Sin or Son. This one’s about Kirsten Pierce’s daughter, and I was telling my son Jacob, who’s 12 about the patron naming system and he’s been very interested in finding out if he has any Viking ancestors. Oh,

Diana Elder (3m 38s):
That’s great.

Nicole Elder Dyer (3m 39s):
And so we’ve been talking about that a little tiny bit, and he looked in our family tree and went back to all of our Scandinavian ancestors and was looking at all the names and just thought it was so cool that they were doing the patron naming system that he had learned about in school. Oh,

Diana Elder (3m 54s):
That’s so fun. It’s great when you can connect the pieces between school and your actual family. And I, that’s what actually hooks a lot of people on family history. When I hear their origin stories of how they got started, they’ll say, oh, I had to do this project in fourth grade or eighth grade or whatever, and then they start asking questions, started getting fascinated with their family stories. That

Nicole Elder Dyer (4m 16s):
Is so true for announcements, just a reminder that we have an Airtable quick reference guide that you can purchase to learn more about how to use Airtable, and that’s $10. And then the next research, like a pro webinar in our webinar series for this year is from Heidi Mathis, one of our family locket researchers, and she will be sharing a webinar titled Incorporate DNA into Your German Research, the Schlag case, who were the parents of Burkhart Schlag, a mid 19th century German immigrant, and she’s going to talk about how indirect documentary evidence points to parents.

Nicole Elder Dyer (4m 58s):
Does DNA n a evidence confirm this hypothesis? So she’ll be talking about her German research and 19th century immigration and applying d n a evidence. So that should be wonderful. Also, the next research, like a pro study group is this fall beginning in August. And if you’d like to be a peer group leader during that study group, please send in your recent research reports and an application and then sign up at our website and you can receive our Monday newsletter that has new blog posts and podcast episodes linked as well as any deals or coupon codes. Join us at the National Genealogical Society Conference, the Family History Conference in Richmond, Virginia that’s right around the corner, and we’re excited to see you there.

Diana Elder (5m 41s):
Yes, that is coming so fast and it’s going to be a wonderful opportunity for learning all about research in Virginia neighboring states, and also just general methodology using D n A and technology, all sorts of things. So many good topics. Well, our subject for today is about my grandfather Edward Raymond Kelsey, and the part of his life where he was a hobo, and this is just a fun, fun piece of his life to explore and talk about this. So often when I really dove into learning about this, I learned more. So my mother had compiled Edward Raymond, Kelsey’s life history.

Diana Elder (6m 25s):
She would interview him and talk to him about different things and she wrote the following, dad completed his education when he was 18 in 1904. He grew restless and wanted to get out in the world. He was a fireman on the railroad for many years, but he grew restless of this. So he spent a period of time just traveling around. In those days he would be called a hobo. He traveled up through Oregon and Washington. He told me about the hobo jungles, which were always located by a river. There would be tins left there by other hobos. He was adventuresome, and I’m sure those days would stand out in his mind.

Nicole Elder Dyer (7m 4s):
I wonder what a hobo jungle is.

Diana Elder (7m 8s):
Well, we have the pictures, which I think is really fun that we actually have pictures. Somebody took pictures of him in this hobo jungle. I don’t know whether he had his own little camera or somebody else did. It kind of makes sense that maybe he had a camera and had, hey, snap a shot of me here,

Nicole Elder Dyer (7m 25s):
I guess since we inherited the photos that they were his, yeah,

Diana Elder (7m 29s):
Somehow he got those photos. But it just looks like a campsite, you know, a bunch of different people all camping together.

Nicole Elder Dyer (7m 36s):
It reminds me of like a hostel, like in Europe when I was on study abroad, we stayed in a hostel.

Diana Elder (7m 42s):
Yeah,

Nicole Elder Dyer (7m 42s):
It’s kind of like a place where you just, people travel through and

Diana Elder (7m 46s):
Very inexpensive in the, in the woods, basically free.

Nicole Elder Dyer (7m 50s):
He looks really comfortable in that life of an outdoorsman and camping and hunting. And I know he was into that in his later life as well, even into his eighties, he would take his sons and go up into the Idaho mountains with their horses and mules and set up camp for a few days and hunt deer and elk.

Diana Elder (8m 9s):
Yeah. And I remember as a little girl, those deer hunts and my dad loved to hunt as well and would go along with them. And I would remember that my mother would try to feed us some venison and I didn’t like it very much. My dad was just happy to ha I mean, he just loved any kind of food and so he thought it was great, but I wasn’t as thrilled with it. But I do remember all the uncles and my dad and grandpa going out hunting. So you know, this whole life for Edward to be on his own, out traveling and in the picture it shows some type of a little stove, which I think is interesting.

Diana Elder (8m 52s):
So I, I have a feeling that they just established these hobo jungles and left some things there for people as they came through that you know, the next person could use as well because you know, they were traveling light. Very interesting time of history.

Nicole Elder Dyer (9m 8s):
Yeah, I wonder if that was just left there as kind of like a, you can use this when you’re here and then he also was holding like a cast iron skillet in the other picture.

Diana Elder (9m 15s):
Yeah, they wouldn’t be packing that type of things. For sure. I think a lot of those things were left there.

Nicole Elder Dyer (9m 22s):
It’s kind of funny that there’s a sign that says Quaker Oats hanging on the tree either.

Diana Elder (9m 28s):
Yeah,

Nicole Elder Dyer (9m 29s):
Probably from a crate that was maybe like on a train. Yeah.

Diana Elder (9m 33s):
Well, let’s do a little bit of background about Ed and maybe we can discover why he was out doing this or discover more about him. He was born on 12 November, 1886 in Springville, Utah. His parents, Selena Betos and William Henry Kelsey Jr. Were both born in England and immigrated as young children to Utah with their parents. And William built a beautiful brick house complete with fancy gingerbread trim where Ed grew up. And I visited that house with my grandfather and his mother often when I was young I was so entranced with this house because it really is lovely and it has since been sold away from the family and it’s now become a historical landmark there in the area.

Diana Elder (10m 21s):
When we moved to Utah from Seattle, I really wanted to go back inside the house, but it was no longer in the family. And it just so happened that I was at a wedding reception for a niece and met this woman who lived in Springville and I mentioned that my great-grandfather had built this house and she said that Kelsey house, I lived just down the street from that. And so she put me in contact with the current owner at that time and she was so kind and invited me to come over. So we went and toured the house. She has made some updates, you know, as you can imagine, a house built in the 1880s would need some updates over a hundred years later, but it still looks the same from the outside and the inside is still basically the same configuration, just just updated.

Diana Elder (11m 12s):
So it was so neat to get to go back into that house and remember what it was like when I was a little girl visiting.

Nicole Elder Dyer (11m 19s):
And I remember going there as a teenager with you and taking pictures there in front of the house and I think I walked through it with you, didn’t I? Well,

Diana Elder (11m 29s):
At that time we didn’t know the owners, so we just walked around the front of it and in the sidewalk it says William Henry Kelsey has that, you know, whatever. They carved it out into the cement when they were pouring the sidewalk. So with you, I don’t remember that. You got to go inside the house with with me. Maybe on another trip here. We’ll see if we could go back. I don’t know if she is still, the owner at that time is still there. But it was fun because my mother hadn’t been in the house for years and when she came to visit, I took her back and she got to go through it again. And that was fun just to hear more of her stories about visiting her grandmother.

Diana Elder (12m 9s):
And so that was neat.

Nicole Elder Dyer (12m 11s):
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Diana Elder (13m 11s):
So one of the questions that I always had about Ed was why did he want to get out into the world so much? He had this beautiful home, it was really on a nice lot. And the thing that came to my mind though was that right next to this home were the railroad tracks and his mother often fed the hobos that wandered by. So maybe growing up he was so enthralled with their stories that he wanted to go explore the world as well. And he started working as a fireman on the railroad. So he would’ve known the rail system in and out. And probably all of that led to him feeling comfortable and striking out on his own.

Diana Elder (13m 53s):
So it’s really interesting that when I started doing the research more on him, that I found him twice on the 1910 census. I had really only seen him in the census with his family in Springville, but as I was doing some searching, he popped up as a border in Scofield, Utah on that 1910 census. So when the enumerator came around, whether he was living in a household or not, maybe his family told them, you know, he’s part of the family. We never know exactly what those situations were. Maybe he was just visiting at home. And so they, they put him on both censuses, but both times he named his occupation as a fireman on the railroad.

Diana Elder (14m 33s):
Well then I had to start researching a little bit about Scofield, Utah because we never knew where exactly the railroad was he was working on. At least I didn’t know, maybe my mother did, but I hadn’t even thought to ask about that. So I learned that Scofield was a hub for railroad lines and there were the Carbon County mines right there. So they were carrying the coal out of those mines and putting it onto the rails and sending it wherever they sent it. So I’m sure that he associated with plenty of fellow railroad workers and they had probably come from all over and maybe some of them talked about the Great Northwest and he decided that he would get out of that area where he was just going back and forth around the, the mines on the rails and go explore the northwest.

Diana Elder (15m 23s):
You know, maybe they talked about the trees and we know the big difference between the Northwest and Utah. So it’s kind of fun to think about how he would have decided to go off on this ground adventure.

Nicole Elder Dyer (15m 35s):
Yeah, having grown up in Seattle, when we moved to Utah and I was 16, I was just a little bit surprised that the landscape was so dry the year that we moved there to Utah, it was just a a drought year. So the mountains were pretty brown. I mean Utah is beautiful, but the northwest is like a rainforest in comparison. So yeah, it’s fun.

Diana Elder (15m 57s):
It’s much different. And when you’re used to having all that green and tall trees everywhere, it does look pretty barren when you come to the desert. You have to get used to it, change your idea of what beauty is. And now we love it. We love the mountains and we can always go up and find our trees there and we planted trees, but it was quite a difference. And I can just imagine further down, you know, down in Scofield, the mining is, I don’t know, that would’ve been a very pretty place, but who knows, you know, it was, there were several canyons all around there and the canyons are beautiful. We’ll have to go take a trip sometime and go check it out.

Nicole Elder Dyer (16m 33s):
Yeah, and that’s a really good hypothesis about him talking with other railroad workers to get an idea or maybe made a friend of somebody who encouraged him to go, you know, adventure or maybe they went together, maybe he just heard stories about different places and wanted to go explore. So that’s a good hypothesis. That makes a lot of sense.

Diana Elder (16m 55s):
Well, he loved reading. He was really educated. He stopped school at the eighth grade, which is very typical for that era. But he always was learning and studying and did a lot of things in his later life that showed he was pretty brilliant. And so I think he just had this hunger for learning more and understanding the world around him. You know, having grown up just in this one place in Utah being pretty, you know, back in the day you really didn’t travel that much. And so I think this was an opportunity for him to travel.

Nicole Elder Dyer (17m 33s):
Right. Sometimes when you grow up in a small town with that adventurous spirit, you want to just go out and see the world. So let’s talk about the historical context of this hobo life. Apparently the term hobo came into existence in the 1890s and hobos were also called tramps. And Josiah Flint romanticized the life of riding the rails for free to see the world. A fascinating look at the hobo jungles and hobo life can be found in some articles called In Search of the American Hobo. The article quotes author Alan Pinkerton, who in 1877 described the hobo jungles or camps where the men passed their time.

Nicole Elder Dyer (18m 18s):
So that’s a fun find.

Diana Elder (18m 20s):
Yeah, I would like to read the book by Josiah Flinch. It’s titled Tramping with Tramps. It was reprinted in 1969, so you know, it was written quite a while ago where I probably interviewed a lot of these men that were out doing the hobo life or or Tramping with Tramps. I, I love that title. It would be fun to get a copy of that and read that. I would love to learn a little bit more about that. And Alan Pinkerton was writing this in 1877, so you know, that was just right there. Grandpa was a little bit later than that, but it was definitely the time period. So that would be fun to read as well. And his book is called Strikers, communist Tramps and Detectives, which is a very interesting title with a lot of different things put together in it.

Nicole Elder Dyer (19m 8s):
That’s funny. And also about the articles by Alan Pinkerton, where he describes the hobo jungles. That’s interesting that he was describing this phenomenon before the word hobo even came into existence. So he was, you know, talking about them in terms of tramps. So at first they were called tramps, and then in the 1890s they started becoming known as hobos.

Diana Elder (19m 32s):
Right.

Nicole Elder Dyer (19m 33s):
I’m just looking at this link that you shared in the blog post that you wrote about this. And it’s talking about the hobo jungles and how it’s a description of a society of outcasts gathering, eating and sleeping together. That’s interesting. It also sounds like it’s just a place to rest and repair while on the road outside of the city. So that’s another way to look at it.

Diana Elder (19m 56s):
Well, and he says that the jungle was located near the railroad, which makes sense close enough to get to and from the train yard or rail line, but not so close as to attract unwanted attention because you know, possibly the law or the people in the community didn’t like the idea of this. And they would, if there was something going on, probably blame it on somebody who’s coming through, you know, any kind of theft or crime. I am sure they would be the ones that would be blamed.

Nicole Elder Dyer (20m 27s):
True. That’s often what happens when somebody from out of town comes through. They’re an easy target to blame if something bad happens.

Diana Elder (20m 37s):
Right. Well, and this article does go on to say that they divide the jungle camps into two classes. The temporary and the permanent and the temporary jungles are just stopovers or relay stations inhabited intermittently by men temporarily stranded and seeking a place to lay over without being molested by authorities or criminals. And so, you know, that’s probably what Edward was doing was using one of those temporary jungles. But it does say in a permanent jungle camp you could find pots or kettles, utensils of various kinds aligned, strung on witch to dry clothes. And the pictures we have certainly look like that, don’t they?

Diana Elder (21m 18s):
So it sounds like he was, or at least when he took the picture, it was in one of those more permanent hobo jungles.

Nicole Elder Dyer (21m 25s):
Right. And it matches the description that grandma gave of the hobo jungles, which were always located by a river, which we’ve been saying they’re located by the railroad. So that’s interesting. The river makes sense too, cuz you can wash, you could take a bath, you could wash your clothes, and then she said there would be tins left there by other hobos. So that’s funny that she called it tins. I think she is meaning like plates and stuff to eat with.

Diana Elder (21m 49s):
Or maybe the pots, you know, maybe the fry pans cuz you had to cook over that fire. So I would guess maybe that, so this is pretty funny. This is a list of jungle crimes, making fire by night in jungle subject to raids. Hijacking or robbing men at night when sleeping in the jungles buzzing or making the jungle a permanent hangout for jungle buzzards who subsist on the leavings of meals. I’m not sure what that means

Nicole Elder Dyer (22m 16s):
Because they’re like those kind of birds that come later and the buzzards

Diana Elder (22m 22s):
Wasting food or destroying it after eating is a serious crime. Leaving pots and other utensils dirty after using, oh, I’m all about that one. Clean up after yourself.

Nicole Elder Dyer (22m 32s):
It’s like having bad roommates. Yeah,

Diana Elder (22m 34s):
Cooking without first hustling fuel. So maybe you had to get your own fuel to cook, not use what was left there. Yeah.

Nicole Elder Dyer (22m 41s):
Go get some firewood

Diana Elder (22m 42s):
Destroying jungle equipment. I love that.

Nicole Elder Dyer (22m 47s):
Wow. It seems like there was white an established system of these hobo jungles.

Diana Elder (22m 53s):
Yeah, protocols for sure. And I’m sure people who had been doing it a while, those who were new saying, you can’t do that and you need to do this and if you don’t you’re gonna get, we’re gonna cast you out. They had to have some kind of law to themselves.

Nicole Elder Dyer (23m 8s):
Well, these hobo jungles, they started in the 1870s when Alan Pinkerton was riding about these camps where the tramps would come and stay. And then the word hobos began in 1890s. And then Ed graduated high school in 1904 and worked for the railroad for a bit and then he was a hobo until, the next thing we know is that in 1915 he at some point went back to his home in Springville, then got a team in a wagon and traveled alone and arrived in Burley Idaho, which is part of Kaja County. And when he arrived there, it was February 25th, 1915. And it’s interesting that he was the only member of his family who moved north to Idaho.

Nicole Elder Dyer (23m 49s):
He built a livestock business there and a farm later he invited great Grandma Flossie to come and marry him and they started a family.

Diana Elder (23m 58s):
Yep. I think the land was up for homesteading in Idaho and his brother and he went in on some land. They were kind of business partners there. And his brother Bill never married, lived in the hotel Utah, I believe, which is interesting. And I do have copies of their letters from the 19, I think started about 1918 all the way through about 1935 ish where they’re just writing back and forth about their business ventures, investments, the land. And so perhaps this new land opened up there in Cas County and that’s where I grew up in Burley. And so, you know, I knew my grandpa from the time I was a baby, but there’s the Snake River that goes through there and you have been on the boats, you know where we’ve gone down boating on the Snake River, but at that time they were starting the canal system so they could actually water the desert.

Diana Elder (24m 56s):
It was literally desert with sage brush. And so Ed would have to clear the sage, brush, clear all the rocks, and then they had this canal system built so they could start irrigating the land. And that’s when people really started going in and settling. So I’m sure that’s what drew him this idea of new land. And it wasn’t so far away from his family driving in a car. It’s about three and a half hours. So going by train it was probably a little bit longer. And of course taking a team and a wagon up would’ve been probably a day or two traveling that way, or even longer, I don’t know.

Nicole Elder Dyer (25m 31s):
Right. And knowing his adventuresome personality, I’m not surprised at all that he was ready to leave his family behind, go by himself to a new place that was just being developed and getting his own land out in the country.

Diana Elder (25m 45s):
Yes. And he became a sheep farmer. He had a whole business with his livestock as well as farming, and he brought in sheep from England and was very interested in breeding his sheep and went all over selling them and he did a lot of really neat things. I’ll have to continue writing about him because he was not content just to farm. He wanted to always be doing things better and developing new ways of doing things. So pretty fascinating individual.

Nicole Elder Dyer (26m 17s):
Yes. Well, thanks for bringing to life this part of his early years so that we can understand more about Grandpa Kelsey and I need to share this with my kids. I think they would enjoy looking at the pictures and hearing about the hobo jungles and imagining what it would be like to ride on the railroads and stopping the camp in these places that had been already set up.

Diana Elder (26m 40s):
Right. I love just digging into a little bit of a person’s life. You know, we have them on the family tree. I knew him personally, but when we just take these little small segments and research more deeply, it just adds so much color and understanding and interest to their life story. So I’m really enjoying doing these. This was one of the 52 ancestor prompts for out of place, and in thinking about an ancestor who was out of place, I just kept coming back to Edward Raymond Kelsey and thinking about how he was just a little bit out of place in his family, wanted to do something a little bit different and he did.

Nicole Elder Dyer (27m 16s):
Yeah, and it also goes along with the idea of hobos being out of place and just going from camp to camp and just not really belonging anywhere. They’re just free to see the world.

Diana Elder (27m 26s):
Exactly. Well thanks everyone for listening. We hope you can explore your ancestors and maybe do some writing about them as well. So have a great week and we’ll talk to you next time. Bye-bye.

Nicole Elder Dyer (27m 38s):
Bye-bye.

Nicole Elder Dyer (29m 55s):
Thank you for listening. We hope that something you heard today will help you make progress in your research. If you want to learn more, purchase our books, research Like a Pro and Research like a Pro with DNA on amazon.com and other book sellers. You can also register for our online courses or study groups of the same names. Learn more at family locket.com/services. To share your progress and ask questions, join our private Facebook group by sending us your book receipt or joining our courses to get updates in your email inbox each Monday. Subscribe to our newsletter@familylock.com slash newsletter. Please subscribe, rate and review our podcast. We read each of you and are so thankful for them. We hope you’ll start now to research like a pro.