Last One Standing
For 2023, I’m writing responses to the 52 Ancestors in 52 Days prompts provided by Amy Johnson Crow on her ”Generations Café” website and Facebook page.
One element of family history that may go unnoticed by researchers is the “last one standing” phenomenon – what I’ve decided to call the LOS – identifying the last remaining member of a sibling group.
My Aunt Mary was the LOS among her siblings – her brother died in 2011 and her sister (my mother) died in 2012. My father, who died in 2001, was not the LOS among his siblings; his younger brother Don died in 2011 and his younger sister Evelyn died in 2012.
The LOS experiences the loss of their past – of anyone who knew them as children (assuming both parents are also gone, which is likely). There’s no one who shares the memories of the old family farm, the store that Dad ran, or the neighborhood they grew up in. No one remembers their school or what they did in their free time.
It was in partial recognition of this that I wrote and published my personal story in 2016. My older brother died in 2014, and I realized that, although I was not the LOS, only my younger sister stood between me and that status. I have always lived across the country from my Mom and Dad’s families, so no cousins or nieces/nephews share my frame of reference.
I decided to look at the past few generations of my family to identify the LOS of each set of siblings. I’ve organized this by the parents of the generation I’m analyzing.
Warner Lismond Arnold and Angelina Wilcox (paternal great-grandparents)
LOS was their 4th child, Nellie Vandia Arnold, who died in 1963 at the age of 80. She was the older sister of my grandfather John Cecil Arnold, who had died in 1957. Nellie married twice – to Charles Isaac in 1899, with whom she had four children, and to Lyman Burch in 1920, with whom she had one child. Nellie had been born in Kansas, while her family was on the move after the Civil War, but she married and settled down in Hancock County, Illinois, where a lot of the rest of the family lived.
Howard Percival Ellefritz and May Wilson (paternal great-grandparents)
LOS was their youngest daughter, my great-aunt Marian Ellefritz. She was the youngest of this couple’s 10 children; my grandmother, Orpha Lydia Ellefritz, was their oldest child. Marian died in 1993, seven years after Orpha died. Marian married William Tuttle in 1930, and they lived in Keokuk, Iowa (just across the Mississippi River from Hancock County, Illinois) before moving to eastern Virginia sometime before 1950. They had three children in Virginia. What I find interesting about this story is that I have lived in Virginia my entire life – including the whole time that these not-so-distant relatives have lived here – and I don’t recall ever meeting them. Marian’s older sister, Elma, lived in Arlington, Virginia, while I was growing up, and my family spent a lot of time with her family. I don’t think Marian was ever part of our family gatherings. Marian was living in Norfolk while I was in college in Williamsburg (less than 40 miles away) and I never knew she was there.
Thomas C. Workman Sr. and Mary Elizabeth Thomas (maternal great-grandparents)
LOS was their second-youngest child, my great-aunt Rosa Jane Workman (1900-1997). I want you to look at that lifespan – she died at the age of 97. As I was trying to identify the LOS for this family, I discovered a pattern of extraordinary longevity that I hadn’t noticed before. Here are the lifespans of her nine siblings that lived to adulthood: 98, 96, 84, 82, 75 (my grandfather), 68, 66, 56, and 30 (he died in the 1918 influenza epidemic). To put this in context, the life expectancy figure for the United States was in 1900 (all of these people were born between 1885 and 1903) was 46.3 years for men and 48.3 years for women. Discounting my great-uncle who died from influenza, the average age at death for these siblings was 72.2 years – 25 years above the average. Extraordinary.
She married Chesna Mitchell in El Campo in 1919, and they had two sons and a daughter. My Aunt Mary remembers playing with their son Hensley in the 1920s, before she and the rest of my mother’s family moved to Arizona. I’ve connected with one of Rosa’s grandchildren through Ancestry DNA.
I actually met Rosa. In 1972, Tim and I lived briefly in San Antonio, Texas, while Tim fulfilled his minimal military obligation as the Vietnam War was winding down. Lori had been born in September of that year, and we were in Texas from October through January of 1973. Rosa still lived in El Campo, Texas, where my mother was born, 2 ½ hours away. So we drove there to see the place. My Aunt Mary had helped us connect with Great-Aunt Rosa, and we were able to visit with her a bit before heading back to San Antonio. I had no idea she lived another 25 years.
Frank Anthis and Martha Elizabeth Kyle (maternal great-grandparents):
LOS of this family was their second-oldest daughter, my great-aunt Martha Elizabeth Anthis, who lived to be 91 years old (1883-1974). She was the older sister of my grandmother Susan Vernon Anthis, who died in 1944 at the age of 46. I don’t know much about her, despite the fact that she was still alive in the mid-1970s. She married twice and had five children. She outlived her first husband, so they must have divorced somewhere along the line. Both of them remarried. She moved to California at some point.
Miles Arnold and Vandia Orilla Brown (paternal 2nd great-grandparents):
LOS was their youngest daughter, my great-aunt Emma Violette Arnold. She was the sister of my great-grandfather Warner Lismond Arnold -- who was, by the way, the second to the last man standing of that generation. He died in 1938, but Great-Aunt Lettie (that’s what she was called) lived another thirty years, dying in 1969 at the age of 100. I got married in 1969, which means I could easily have met her. I never did, even though she lived in the same county as my father’s sister Evelyn, whom we had visited several times. I am surprised to learn that.
Leonard William Wilcox and Alvera Hackley (paternal 2nd great-grandparents)
LOS was my great-aunt Eva Marie Wilcox. She was the sister of my great-grandmother Angelina Wilcox, who was the second to the last man standing of that generation. Lina died in 1915 and her sister Eva lived only another four years – to 1919. My information about this is a little shaky – I haven’t been able to find out much about the other siblings in this family.
Solomon Ellefritz and Mary Ann Botts (paternal 2nd great-grandparents)
LOS was my great-aunt Eugenia Ellefritz. She was the sister of my great-grandfather Howard P. Ellefritz, whose lifespan (52 years) was shorter than all of his siblings who lived to adulthood (one died at birth and another died at age 5). Eugenia lived 88 years. Her brother Thaddeus also lived a long life, dying at the age of 82. When she died she was living with her nephew, Kurt Van Zayle, in Los Angeles. She is identified as divorced on the 1950 census.
William Wilson and Lydia Deuel (paternal 2nd great-grandparents)
LOS was my great-uncle William Wilson (1873-1967), who died at the age of 94. He was the brother of my great-grandmother May Wilson, who was outlived by three other siblings: her sister Eva, who died in 1951 at the age of 80, and her sister Ellen, who died in 1952 at the age of 83. All of these siblings lived their entire lives in Hancock County, Illinois.
James A. Workman and Jemima Kitchens (maternal 2nd great-grandparents)
There is a tie for LOS in this family between my 2nd great-uncle Jessie Pleasant Workman (1881-1953) and my 2nd great-aunt Genevieve Adeline Workman. They are the younger siblings of my great-grandfather Thomas Calvin Workman, Sr. (1854-1930).
This is also a complicated family story. James A. Workman married twice and had children with both of his wives. His first child was born in 1848 and his last child was born in 1883. My grandfather Thomas Calvin Workman, Sr., was born to his first wife, Jemima Kitchens, and the two LOS candidates – Jessie and Genevieve – were born to his second wife, Addie. Just as an aside James had married Addie when she was 13 years old, and she died 13 years later at the age of 37, less than a year after bearing her 10th child. These men ran through women.
I don’t know much about either of the LOS candidates. Jessie lived in Illinois his entire life and had five children, and Addie moved to San Bernardina, California, sometime in the 1920s. She married and had three children.
George Thomas and Caroline Roberts (maternal 2nd great-grandparents)
The LOS of this family is complicated to determine, because George died early and Caroline married a second time and had another child. The LOS of this specific couple is my great-grandmother Mary Elizabeth Thomas (1859-1925), who died at the age of 61.
Mary moved with her family to Kansas and then to Nebraska before she married Tom. Tom had been married before, but his first wife, Eddie, sickened and died while they were in Nebraska. Mary’s family was distantly related to Tom’s family, and they had traveled to Nebraska together. When Eddie became ill, Mary helped take care of the family. It wasn’t a surprise that she and Tom married within six months.
In 1889, they participated in the first Oklahoma Land Run, claiming land in Logan County in central Oklahoma. They later moved to Texas,
John Anthis, Jr. and Matilda Starnater (maternal 2nd great-grandparents)
The LOS from this family was Mary Elizabeth Anthis (1853-1927), who died at the age of 74. She was the younger sister of my great-grandfather Franklin Anthis, who had died in 1899. Mary outlived her last sibling by 22 years; her other brother, Isaac, died in 1905.
Mary lived her entire life in Wabash County. She married William Johnston in Illinois in 1873 and they had two children. I don’t know any more about her than this.
Oliver Kyle, Jr., and Susan Amesley Overman (maternal 2nd great-grandparents)
The LOS of this family was my great-uncle Harry Lee Kyle (1870-1949), who was 79 when he died. He was the younger brother of my great-grandmother Martha Elizabeth Kyle, who died in 1932 at the age of 75.
Harry is an interesting fellow. He was not the natural son of Oliver and Susan; family lore suggests that he was left on their doorstep shortly after he was born, and they took him in. The 1880 census identifies him as the family’s 10-year-old adopted son, although I can’t find any evidence that he was ever formally adopted. The census says that he was born in “Ioway,” which tells you something about how people pronounced the name of that state. He did take the family surname of Kyle.
He married in Texas and had two children, but he had divorced and moved to Los Angeles by 1900. There he remarried and apparently worked with the railroads.
Spencer Arnold and Martha Pease (paternal 3rd great-grandparents)
The LOS for this family was my 2nd great-grandfather Miles Arnold (1821-1899), who died at the age of 78. The rest of his siblings died at 75, 72, 66, and 35.
I told the story about Miles earlier in this essay. When he moved his family away from Ohio after the Civil War, the rest of the family remained in Ohio.
Harley Philander Brown and Anna Alden (3rd great-grandparents)
I haven’t had a lot of luck fleshing out this family. If my info is correct (and the word “if” is carrying a lot of weight here), the LSO of their nine children was my second great-uncle Alvin Edward Brown, who died in 1924 at the age of 90. He was the younger brother of my 2n’d great-grandmother, Vandia Orilla Brown, who died in 1900 at the age of 75.
Alvin spent his entire life in Licking County, Ohio, near Columbus. I think he was married three times and had 10 children. I found information that he served in the Civil War; the registration record shows that the Provost Marshal at the time was Captain A. C. Deuel; I have Deuel ancestors that were living in New York, Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois in the 19th century. It is possible that Alvin served under another of my ancestors.
David Alonzo Wilcox and Lorena Hopkins (paternal 3rd great-grandparents)
The LOS of this family was my 2nd great-grandfather Leonard William Wilcox, who died in 1870 at the age of 62. This was not a very long-living family; his siblings who lived to adulthood had predeceased him after living 69, 42, and 40 years. This is a little shaky – I’ve had trouble fleshing out this whole branch of my family tree.
Aaron Hackley Jr. and Catharine Hackley (paternal 3rd great-grandparents)
The LOS of this family was this couple’s only child – my 2nd great-grandmother Alvira Hackley, who died in 1878 at the age of 61. This is another part of my very shaky tree branch and I can’t say anything else about this family.
Johannes Ilgenfritz and Parmilia “Milly” Jarvis (paternal 3rd great-grandparents)
So, this family is officially ridiculous, but I’ll give this a whirl. Two of the 22(!!) siblings in this family tie for this honor – my 2nd great-grandfather Solomon Ellefritz (1825-1894) and his half-sister Sarah (1803-1894). Solomon was 69 and Sarah was 91.
Here’s what happened in this family. Johannes married three times and had children with all three wives. His first child was born in 1773 and his last child was born in 1829. Sarah was born to his second wife, Keturah, who was roughly the same age as Johannes’s oldest child by his first wife, Margaret. Solomon was born to Johannes’s third wife, Milly, who was roughly the same age as Johannes’s oldest grandchild.
When Johannes died in 1831 at the age of 81, he left behind five children under the age of 12. Randy old goat.
Joshua Mills Botts and Tabitha Allen Walton (paternal 3rd great-grandparents)
The LOS of this family was my 2nd great-aunt Matilda Louise Botts (1852-1941), who lived to be 88 years old. She is the younger sibling of my 2nd great-grandmother Mary Ann Botts (1838-1913), who was 79 when she died. This family also features some longevity: Matilda’s sister Amanda lived to be 87 and her sister Barbara lived to be 83.
My 2nd great-grandmother Mary Ann remained in Hancock County for her whole life, but several of her siblings moved west – to Missouri and eventually to Idaho and Oregon.
James F. Wilson and Elizabeth Stuart (paternal 3rd great-grandparents)
The LOS of this family was my 2nd great-uncle Stephen S. Wilson (1842-1923), who lived to be 81. He was the brother of my 2nd great-grandfather William Wilson (1836-1906), who died at the age of 70. I know almost nothing about Stephen’s life.
Joseph Putney Deuel and Melinda Cody (paternal 3rd great-grandparents)
The LOS of this family was my 2nd great-aunt Elta Deuel, who died at the age of 84. She was the older sister of my 2nd great-grandmother, Lydia Deuel, who died from complications of childbirth in 1881 (bearing her 8th child), at the age of 36. Elta outlived her last sibling by seven years.
I learned some interesting things about Elta. Her obituary says that at the time of her death, she was one of the 100 women living who had been regular army nurses during the Civil War. When her husband, Jared Hubbs, enlisted in the army in 1861, she stayed at home with two small children, one of whom died a few months later.
James Workman and Elizabeth Bilyeu (maternal 3rd great-grandparents)
The LOS of this family was my 2nd great-aunt Delia Workman (1866-1940), who was 74 years old when she died. This is another multiple-marriage family. Delia is the (much) younger sister of my 2nd great-grandfather James Abraham Workman, who was born in 1827.
James Workman had married Elizabeth in 1826 and they soon had three children, including my James Abraham. However, Elizabeth died shortly after the birth of her third child, Samuel. James soon married Elizabeth’s sister, Lydia Bilyeu, but she died without having any children. James married his third wife, Eliza Rayburn, and had nine children with her. Delia was their last child, born when Eliza was 40 and James was 60. Another randy old goat.
Delia married twice – to John Millington in 1886 and to Jessie Shockman after John died in 1913. She spent all of her life in the Springfield area of Illinois
She stayed around and became an army nurse. She was granted a $12.00 monthly government pension as a reward for her work.
John Kitchen and Sarah Hicks (maternal 3rd great-grandparents)
I am putting these names in here as a placeholder. I am not at all sure that they are the parents of my 2nd great-grandmother Jemima Kitchens and I have no idea how many children they had.
Mysterious Mr. and Mrs. Thomas (maternal 3rd great-grandparents)
This is an even more pathetic placeholder. I have not been able to uncover even a hint of the identity of the parents of my maternal 2nd great-grandfather George Thomas.
Wiley Roberts and Nancy Markham (maternal 3rd great-grandparents)
The LOS in this family was my 2nd great-uncle Solomon Hudson Roberts (1827-1914), one of the three children in this family, who died at the age of 87. He was the brother of my 2nd great-grandmother Caroline Roberts (1832-1914), who died in Nebraska at the age of 72. I don’t know much about Solomon. He was born in Overton County, Tennessee, and moved with his family to Illinois by the 1850s. Sometime after 1880 he moved to Iowa, where he was living when he died. He married and had seven children
John Anthis Sr. and Sarah Johnson (maternal 3rd great-grandparents)
The LOS for this family was my 2nd great-aunt Martha Anthis (1836-1925), who was 88 years old when she died. She was the younger sister of my 2nd great-grandfather John Anthis, Jr., who died in 1857 at the age of 30. Martha outlived her siblings by 24 years; her brother Madison died in 1901. Her other siblings all died at relatively young ages – 59, 37, 27, and 25. I can’t account for this.
Martha lived her entire life in Wabash County, Illinois. She married Abner Spidel in 1862, and they had nine children.
Andrew Starnater and Elizabeth (Betsey) Hunt (maternal 3rd great-grandparents)
The LOS in the family was my 2nd great-uncle Richard E. Starnater (1825-1880), who died at the age of 55. He was the younger brother of my 2nd great-grandmother Matilda Jane Starnater, who died in 1856 at the age of 34. Richard lived his entire life in Indiana; he married in 1850 and had six children.
Oliver (Coil) Kyle Sr. and Nancy Jones (maternal 3rd great-grandparents)
The LOS of this family was my 2nd great-uncle George Kile (1826-1892). He died at the age of 66. He is the older brother of my 2nd great-grandfather Oliver Kyle, Jr., who died after the Siege of Vicksburg in 1863. George had served in the Civil War as well, in the 101st Illinois Infantry.
George lived in Illinois, where he married in 1857 and had two children
William Sutton “Jake” Overman and Cyntha Lambert (maternal 3rd great-grandparents)
The LOS of this family was my 2nd great-aunt Rebecca Overman (1833-1916), who died at the age of 73. She was the older sister of my 2nd great-grandmother Susan Amesley Overman, who died in 1910 at the age of 82.
This family moved from Virginia to North Carolina and to Ohio before landing in Missouri by 1850. They went to Texas in the 1870s. I’m not sure what happened to “Jake.” He disappears from the records shortly after 1850.
Rebecca then moved with her family to Texas, where she married in 1873. She had one child, who died in California without ever having married.
Now that I’ve completed this exercise, I’m not sure if it has actually taught me anything. Don’t you hate it when that happens. It reminds me of working on my dissertation for my Ph.D. in government back in the 1970s. I had developed an analytical framework that I hypothesized would reveal some previously undiscovered relation between two phenomena I was looking at. This was going to be a whiz-bang finding that was going to elevate me to the heights of academia. Well, when I completed my analysis (it took me a couple of months to collect and sort the data during the pre-Excel years), I realized that it had proven absolutely nothing. The correlation I had hypothesized was just not there – and there wasn’t even a negative correlation that would have allowed me to hang my hat on something. When I realized that this had gone nowhere, I sighed, appealed to my friends to sympathize with my bad fortune, and then threw the whole thing away.
The analysis I’m presenting today didn’t take me two months. I was able to flesh out some lines and find some patterns I hadn’t understood before. I will probably find ways to use this information at some point down the line.
This was more than a little tedious, but this is all I have today. Not exactly a nothing-burger, but certainly a diet-burger.
Actually, I am impressed by your level of research! I haven't gone past great grandparents on either side, and most of that was in the family Bible my brother inherited.
But what struck me was that both of my parents were LOS, altho my Dad was the oldest of three, while my Mother was the youngest of eight. If Dad ever gave it a thought, he would have decided to be LOS out of shear determination and orneriness! Mother, on the other hand, always believed that as youngest, it was her responsibility to be LOS and make sure that all her siblings had been well taken care of before she died. Different perspectives for different folks, I guess. Now that I think of it, I have always assumed that my younger brother will die first. I wonder why?
Wow. That’s a mess of relatives and cousins!