RLP 350: Florence (Creer) Kelsey and the Challenge of a First Job

Nicole (1s):
This is Research Like a Pro, episode 350 Florence Creo Kelsey, and the Challenge of a First Job. 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 genealogy professional. Diana and Nicole are the mother-daughter team at FamilyLocket.com and the authors of Research Like a Pro A Genealogist Guide. With Robin Wirthlin 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. Let’s go.

Nicole (42s):
Today’s episode is sponsored by Newspapers.com. Hi, Welcome to Research Like a Pro everyone.

Diana (49s):
Hi Nicole. How are you doing?

Nicole (51s):
I’m great. Are you still enjoying that cool thing you found on Full Text Search?

Diana (58s):
Yes. So, at RootsTech Nicole and I were experimenting with some different things and one of the ones I was experimenting with was Full Tech Search because I was getting ready to teach my class on probate records and I wanted to show how that could really open up probate records and find things for people in new locations that you never knew about. And I put in my Thomas Beverly Royston, I actually used Thomas B Royston, which is what he usually went by in the records. And I found a whole new record and a new location. And I know I had done Full Tech Search back when it first came out a year ago, and this record did not pop up. So it must have been, you know, in the time since I last used it and during RootsTech that they added the collection.

Diana (1m 44s):
Anyway, I found a record that was amazing. We’ll talk about it, you know, in a future episode, but it’s been so fun to learn a little bit more about him and his family. And it actually has, for the first time ever, him in the same record as his sister, who I had hypothesized as his sister through a bunch of indirect evidence. And it still doesn’t actually say his sister, but to have him be mentioned in the same record is amazing ’cause I didn’t have that before.

Nicole (2m 15s):
Yeah, that was so exciting in our hotel room when you found that, and you were saying that it also has her husband’s name, we think, right?

Diana (2m 24s):
Oh yeah. It has her husband’s name. And what it is is a marriage settlement. It’s kind of like a prenuptial agreement. I can’t think what they called it back then. But she apparently had two young enslaved boys that were her property. And you know, under the common law, when a woman married all of her property became her husband’s. So to keep it separate and to keep her property, they had to do a legal document. And that’s what it was all about.

Nicole (2m 54s):
That is a unique record type. It’s really cool that so many things have been added to the full tech search capabilities. And it just seems like at first it was limited to just a few record sets, like Mexican Notarial records, US probate, and then they’ve just been steadily adding to and increasing that behind the scenes. And unless you go try it, you wouldn’t even know that there’s so many more collections available to Full Text Search now. So it’s just so worthwhile to check it out. And then I was playing with it too before my workshop on AI writing, and I just thought it would be a fun exercise to do, ’cause it was like a two and a half hour workshop to just have everyone go see if we can find like one more interesting record about the person we’re writing about or just play with it for a minute.

Nicole (3m 43s):
And so in my example slides, I was doing our ancestor Melissa Welch. And so I put in like, I think I searched for her name and then I searched for her father’s name and found a whole new record for George Welch. And then I also, when I put in Melissa’s name, I found a record in a county in Mississippi that I thought could be a match because that’s where Melissa’s uncle lived. And it had like Melissa Welch and Lucy Welch, which, her mother’s name was Lucindra Keaton Welch. So I thought that was a match, but then I wasn’t sure. And so I kept looking into the Lucy Welch, and it looks like she was married to a Samuel Welch, so I don’t think that’s the right family.

Nicole (4m 29s):
But then again, maybe George Welch was also known as Samuel. I never knew if George had a middle name, or, anyway, it was just an interesting record that I still have no clue what it means or if it’s the same family or a different family. So I’m, I’m actually really excited to explore that one further and just figure out if it belongs to her family or just a different family completely. So it’s during a time period where I’ve kind of lost track of the family, So it would be neat to know the answer to that.

Diana (5m 1s):
Right. And when you kept telling me the different names that were so similar between the two families, it just makes you start thinking, what are the odds that two different families would have so many similarities, right? You’re gonna really have to dig in and see what you can find. But it has happened before that you have people of very similar names. Yep. So I’m excited for you to find out more. It would be so fun to find them in a new location.

Nicole (5m 27s):
Yes, it would.

Diana (5m 29s):
It’s always the best to find a new location. And that was the case with Thomas B Royston because he’s in Clark County, Georgia, which I did not have any clue that the family would’ve been there. It’s just to the north of Green County and Morgan County. And so anyway, it’s exciting. Gonna have some fun, aren’t we, with looking for some new research on our family?

Nicole (5m 55s):
Right.

Diana (5m 55s):
Well, let’s do our announcements for today. For our next part of the Research Like a Pro webinar series for April we will be meeting on Tuesday, April 15th at 11:00 AM Mountain Time, and the presenter will be Jill Nock. And the title of her presentation is A Mighty Duo: Autosomal DNA and Indirect Evidence Reveal Harrison Johnson’s Biological Father.

Diana (6m 35s):
Harrison Johnson was born circa 1813 in either Maury County or Hickman County, Tennessee. No direct evidence has been found to tie him to a father. Autosomal DNA and indirect evidence team up to break a long-standing brick wall. So this will be a great presentation. Anyone who’s done research in Tennessee knows how difficult that is, especially in this era. And Jill is one of our research team members and we’re excited to have her join us. She is accredited in the US upper South, so Tennessee is one of her regions and she uses autosomal DNA to work through all sorts of projects. So we’re excited to have her with us. Our next Research Like a Pro study group, begins August, 2025, and this one will be without DNA. So if you want to get your feet wet with the study group, this is a great one to start with. And the Peer Group Leader application is on our website, and we would encourage you to apply if you think you would like to be part of that program.

Diana (7m 22s):
Please join our newsletter to get news of all the different things that we are doing and for any coupons we have for discounts on our courses or products. And we are looking forward to the National Genealogical Society Family History Conference, which will be May 23rd to the 26th in Louisville, Kentucky. And we hope to see many of you there.

Nicole (7m 45s):
Yes, we do.

Diana (7m 48s):
Well, let’s get to our topic for the day, which is Florence Creer Kelsey, and the Challenge of a First Job. So this was part of the 52 Ancestor series this year by Amy Johnson Crow and the prompt was a challenge, and I was trying to think about what would’ve been fun to write about and research for one of my ancestors and thought about my grandmother, Florence, and I knew that she had started young working, having to go and teach school. So I thought, I want to learn more about that part of her life. You know, I think most of us in this era have had a job outside the home, whether you worked at the gas station or you babysat, or you worked at a fast food place.

Diana (8m 35s):
I know I taught piano lessons. That was my job all through high school. And of course when you have a job, you have the challenge of answering to a boss, or maybe you have to move to a new location or learn new skills. And really thinking about an ancestors’ first job is such a fun way to add context to their life. So Florence had to leave home to teach school while still a teenager. And she was born on December 12th, 1892 in Spanish Fork, Utah. She was the oldest of 12 children and three of those babies died at birth. And so there were nine living children.

Diana (9m 16s):
And so as you could imagine with that many children being born and being the oldest, she had a lot of responsibility in the household, and especially with her younger siblings as those new babies would come along. When she was about 15, her mother suffered an accident that left her mother mostly in a wheelchair for the rest of her life. And so Florence and her sister Ann took on even more responsibilities, and soon Florence had to begin working outside the home to help with the family finances.

Nicole (9m 47s):
Gosh, that must have been so hard. Well, Florence wrote about these early years and said, I attended schools at Spanish Fork after I had completed my junior year in high school. Uncle John Creer, who was the county superintendent, asked me to go to Castilla, a little town in the mountains above Spanish Fork to teach school. It was a most unpleasant experiences. There was real deep snow And it was difficult for the pupils to attend regularly. Each weekend I would catch the train and go home. After one year I came back to Spanish Fork and was a librarian in the new high school. I was glad for the job so I could help out at home. Wow.

Nicole (10m 27s):
So even though it was unpleasant, she stuck with it for a whole year. She was 17 in 1909 when she left home to start teaching school at Castilla. This was the height of Castillo’s popularity with its hot springs, attracting train loads of summer visitors seeking a cure for their affliction during the school year. However, when Florence was living there, it was likely not as busy. William Fuller obtained the swampy land via a federal land patent in 1899 and built a small house with a wooden tub for bathing.

Diana (11m 0s):
Well, as I was doing this research, I wanted to learn a little bit more about this area, and I found a little snippet that historian Linda Thatcher wrote, and she said the Southworths obtained the land from Fuller and began to improve it. They filled the swampy area with gravel and built a three story red stand stone hotel. Other structures included indoor and outdoor swimming pools, a store, a dance pavilion, private bathhouses, several private cottages and a saloon. Picnic areas, a baseball diamond and stables were also provided. During the summer months, the Denver and Rio Grande Railroad ran excursion trains to Castilla.

Diana (11m 42s):
And one of the most popular runs was the Moonlight Excursion from the 10 Tick Mining District in Juab County to Castilla. And the train stopped at stations along the way to pick up passengers for an evening of dining and dancing. So this actually sounds like a really fun resort that I sure lots of people wanted to go to. But in the winter when Florence was there and it was snowing, it would’ve been a much different story. Now let’s have a word from our Sponsor. Have you ever wished you could step back in time and see the world your ancestors lived in? With Newspapers.com you can. It’s like having a time machine right at your fingertips. With a simple search, you can explore more than a billion pages of historical newspapers dating from 1690 to 2025 from the US, UK, Canada, Australia, and beyond.

Diana (12m 31s):
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Nicole (13m 9s):
Well, who were the students that Florence would’ve taught at Castilla? Her history talks of the students’ difficulty in reaching the area to attend school since this was a recreational area in the summer, her students were probably children of the locals who lived in the canyon or the small town of Thistle, 6.5 miles further in. A cigar factory and a quarry in the area provided jobs for the men.

Diana (13m 36s):
So Florence’s history tells us a little bit more about that. She says, when I taught at Castilla, I lived with the Southworth family. Mrs. Southworth was a sister to the sculptor, Cyrus Dallin, who lived at Springville. And so of course I had to do a little research to learn more about that. And I found out that Daisy Dallin Southworth was indeed the sister of Cyrus E Dallin, a world famous sculptor. And her obituary ran with a headline Sister of Famed Springville Sculptor Dies. Daisy was born in Springville in 1869 and married CK Sydney Southworth on 25 February, 1891 in Castillo in Utah County.

Diana (14m 19s):
So I found them on the census 1910, And it shows this family of CK and Daisy and that they had six children ages four to 18. And I decided, figured, that the younger ones were likely Florence’s students. She would’ve been teaching children just younger than herself. So the census shows the head of household EK Southworth was 43, Daisy was 41, Kenneth was 18, Colonna 16, that was a daughter, dallin 14, Alice 12, Catherine seven, and Pauline four. So I would imagine that that could have been a challenge in and of itself, trying to be the teacher to students that were just a little bit younger.

Nicole (15m 3s):
Oh my goodness. That would’ve been so fun to be teaching your peers and younger, and probably a little daunting.

Diana (15m 14s):
Yes, indeed. Especially if it was your first job. And I was a teacher. I taught fourth grade and I remember that first year was so hard because you don’t know what you’re doing, you just have no idea. And so she went out with, without any training. I mean, I had taken classes at Brigham Young University on teaching and I had a mentor teacher there in the school and all sorts of support. So here she just takes the train out to this really small area and then is expected to try to teach these children. And it just reminds me of TV shows we’ve seen where you see that experience going on. You know, there’s lots of movies and I can just picture my grandmother in this little schoolhouse.

Diana (15m 58s):
I don’t even know where she taught her classes. She didn’t really say that. So probably somewhere on the resort they had a place where she could teach.

Nicole (16m 4s):
Oh my goodness. Yeah. And she did say it was an unpleasant experience. It, I wonder though, you know, she said it was unpleasant because the students didn’t really come regularly.

Diana (16m 16s):
Yeah, it would be really difficult because you know, if you give an assignment, they show up maybe once a week. I think that’d probably be really hard to, to try to manage and teach anything. Although she didn’t really enjoy it she did take pride in her ability to help provide for her family and buy something lovely for herself. And she writes with my first paycheck, I bought a fur neckpiece and muff. I had my picture taken with it. I also bought several things for my parents’ house, such as curtains, a bedspread, et cetera. I enjoyed the pink and black willow plum I bought for myself. And we have a picture of Florence with her fur neckpiece and muff.

Diana (16m 57s):
And it’s just so fun to look at that and think about her and how neat it must have been for her to go buy something special. Well, researching this part of Florence’s life just added so much context to her story. And now when I read her history, I can picture this young teenage girl taking the train each week to travel five miles up the canyon to teach school. She persevered and she was really thankful that the next year she was able to work as the librarian at the new high school in Spanish Fork and live at home and not have to teach school to students that didn’t show up much. And it was an unpleasant experience.

Nicole (17m 39s):
I love that she bought that for herself and she probably did feel so good knowing that she could purchase something for her family’s home, you know, that they needed. And I always have loved that picture of her sitting in the chair wearing the fur. And she just looks so young and beautiful and her hair has kind of that little wave to it And it is just so neat to see her at that time of her life. So I did have a question. What is the pink and black willow plum?

Diana (18m 13s):
I have no idea, but I’m wondering if it was a dress because my grandmother always dressed to the nines when she went out. I mean, you know, at home when she was a homemaker she would wear just, you know, house dresses or whatever. But all the pictures we have of her when she’s out and about, she has beautiful coats and hats. You know, up until she was a really, really old, she always wanted to have beautiful dresses. So I kind of think that maybe that would’ve been a dress. I don’t know. I would love to know what that was myself.

Nicole (18m 50s):
While you were talking about it, I put it into ChatGPT and said, what was the plum my great grandmother bought? And it says, well this is whatChatGPT-o1 the reasoning model says. It reasoned about it for 20 seconds, which is kind of a long time. It says first, it helps to know that old retirees often use words a bit differently than we do now. When your great-grandmother wrote she enjoyed the pink and black willow plum, she was most likely talking about a dish or a piece of China, sometimes called willow wear. The famous willow pattern came in blue originally, but also in pink, red, brown, black or combinations, huh.

Nicole (19m 33s):
Here’s how we get there. Willow generally refers to the classic willow pattern, a design on dinner wear depicting a Chinese scene with a willow tree bridge, pagoda and so on. Colors. Although the blue willow China was and still is the most common, the same pattern was sometimes produced in pink, often called pink willow or red willow and black or brown.

Diana (19m 54s):
That is very interesting.

Nicole (19m 56s):
And plum in this context is best understood as a decorative term or color descriptor. It sometimes appeared in old catalogs or diaries to mean in a pinkish purpleish hue. So there’s another idea what it could be. I dunno. I also thought it might have been a dress.

Diana (20m 12s):
Well I just say that because I remember her and my mother and my, her, my aunts, my grandmother, they would talk about clothes that way I’m wearing, you know, whatever the pink and willow plum, you know, they wouldn’t say the dress, they would just describe it. I don’t understand the willow part, but maybe it was a pattern with willows. I don’t know. Maybe one of our listeners will email us and tell us a little bit more if they’ve had that same little phrase come up. But knowing my grandmother and the context and how she did like clothes.

Nicole (20m 49s):
Maybe it was a curtain that had that same pattern on the, on the willow, you know, China.

Diana (20m 56s):
Well she did say that after, you know, she mentions the curtains and the bedspread and she enjoyed the pink and will black willow plum she bought for herself. Oh, that makes more sense. That could have been a bedspread.

Nicole (21m 9s):
Yeah, maybe it was like a matching curtain and bedspread kind of or something.

Diana (21m 14s):
Yes. Oh, well that’s another fun possibility. Well, something we may never know, but it’s fun to think about.

Nicole (21m 20s):
Yeah, it is. Well thank you for researching and writing more about your grandma so that I can learn about her and share that also with my family. It’s always so nice to have these short little stories about our ancestors. So thanks.

Diana (21m 40s):
And they’re really fun to write. You know, it’s amazing what you can learn from just a little snippet out of a history or a photo when you start researching it And it adds this wonderful context that can be part of our fuller history. You know, if I do a biography of my grandmother now I’ve got a little piece of that written already. Right. And so that’s what I love about doing these short little, little writing pieces that anybody can do.

Nicole (22m 9s):
Yeah. So you had her life history that she wrote and then you researched a little more about Castilla and you found kind of some historical context there. And then you did a little research on one of the people she mentioned. So you did some FAN club research and found an obituary and a census record and a marriage record for the Southworths. So that was such a great little example of expanding on something in a person’s diary or their autobiography.

Diana (22m 37s):
Right. And pictures, you know, online we have pictures in newspapers and in other histories and those types of things would be really fun to add to, you know, a written work. If I ever do that, I would definitely wanna add pictures so I can see what it looks like. And it would be fun to actually go visit because it’s not that far away from where I live. And as far as I could tell online, none of the buildings are left, but they still have the hot springs. So you know, we could drive up the canyon and go walk out and just kind of imagine it. So that might be something I do this summer. That would be really fun. Yeah.

Nicole (23m 12s):
So if you want to see the pictures, go to Diana’s blog post about this. And there are a couple pictures of what it looked like with the houses and the stores in the, in 1917. So that’s fun.

Diana (23m 24s):
It is.

Nicole (23m 25s):
Alright everyone, well thanks for listening and we hope you have a great week. We’ll talk to you again next week. Bye.

Diana (23m 31s):
Alright, bye-bye.

Nicole (24m 8s):
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 booksellers. You can also register for our online courses or study groups of the same names. Learn more at FamilyLocket.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 at FamilyLocket.com/newsletter. Please subscribe, rate and review our podcast. We read each review and are so thankful for them. We hope you’ll start now to Research Like a Pro.