I do not think I will be able to write every night. I am doing reading and research but more than two hours a night is not feasible. Not that anyone is reading this anyway – I guess I just needed to say it, to give myself permission.
I was thinking about Nelson’s naturalization petition and how he said he was following a brother. Although I do not remember Grandma talking about having any Marr family members in the US, I think this is the most plausible scenario for how Nelson and Jean arrived. He already had a relative here. I wanted to figure out which relative it was, which might give me more clues about how they chose Arizona, of all places.
I have not found where all five of his brothers died, but I know at least three of them died in the Isle of Man. (Nelson had five sisters, too.) So, I picked one brother whose death I cannot locate, thinking maybe he went to the United States and Nelson – with Jean – followed him. John Thomas, born in 1882, shows up in immigration records; he arrived in 1900, when Nelson was only 12 years old.
There are other men named John Thomas Marr in Ancestry, but none others from Laxey, Isle of Man. I found the John Thomas Marr related to Nelson from his draft registration card, dated September 12, 1918. It shows that he was born in the Isle of Man.
And here is Nelson’s card, dated June 5th, 1917.
I was so focused on how Nelson and Jean got to Arizona, I lost sight of the timing of their arrival, that is, the beginning of World War I. By the time Jean arrived in October, 1914, the war in Europe was fully underway. By February 1915, Germany had imposed a naval blockade of the UK.
It is too late now for me to spend time spinning out all the implications of this information. What little I have discovered now, though, feels significant to understanding my great-grandparents’ lives: Nelson had a brother who went to work in a copper mine, in a place called Bisbee, Arizona, in 1900. Thirteen years later, Nelson and Jean got married and moved to Bisbee, too. Nelson got a job as copper miner, and Jean had Ivy in 1916. Of course, with the war taking place off the coast of their former home, where most everyone in their families lived, they would have been acutely aware of the toll the war was taking on people back in the UK. The United States technically joined World War I in April, 1917 and Nelson registered for the draft in June. I assume he was ineligible due to his physical issues: “broken arches” but he claimed exemption based on the fact that he was married with a child. His brother, John Thomas, single, without children or any physical issues, registered more than a year later.
Were Nelson and John Thomas required to register for the draft? Nelson did not apply for naturalization until 1919, so he registered as a non-citizen. Did he register because he would have registered if he’d still been in the Isle of Man? What does it feel like to be counted for the draft in a country that’s not your own? Did it feel like home yet? And, I know this sounds like a silly question: did Nelson know he had “broken arches” when he went in for the registration?
Here’s the last picture I have for this post. There’s no date or location on it to be able to place it, but I am going to try, anyway.
I know the woman seated, holding the baby, is Jean, my great-grandmother. I am pretty sure the baby is Ivy; she looks like my grandmother and presumably, if it were Jeanne (second-born), then Ivy would appear in the picture, too. No, I am sure it is Jean’s first-born, Ivy.
So, who is the other woman? Could she be Margaret, Jean’s older sister? She does not look old enough to be Jean’s mother. I included a picture of Jean and Margaret in this post and there’s a resemblance, I guess.
The critical piece is, I think, this woman must be in Arizona with Jean. They obviously did not travel back to Scotland to take a family portrait so the picture was taken in Bisbee, or at least, in the United States somewhere. Could Jean’s sister have traveled to be with Jean, after she had her first baby? I like that idea; it is nice to imagine Jean and her sister were close enough that Margaret would make such an arduous trip to visit Jean and her new niece. Maybe that trip was special enough to merit a portrait?