Amos in Iowa?

This is my sixth post in the Guild of One-Name Studies (GOONS) blog challenge 2020. The challenge is to post 10 blogs in the first 12 weeks of the year.

Amos Casbon is not a new character in my blog. He can be considered the patriarch of what may be the largest branch of Casbons living in America. He was the son of James and Mary (Jackson) Casbon and the brother (or half-brother?) of Margaret “Maggie” Casbon, about whom I wrote in the fourth post of the GOONS challenge. Amos was born 6 July 1869 at Cottenham, Cambridgeshire, England.^[1] He was only a toddler when his family emigrated to Porter County, Indiana, USA, in late 1870. He was probably only 4 or 5 years old when his mother died. His father remarried in 1876.^[2] James was murdered in an unprovoked attack in August 1884, when Amos was 15 years old.^[3]

After his father’s death, there is little solid information about Amos until his marriage to Carrie Belle Aylesworth in 1900. He was probably forced to grow up fast, without the support of a close loving family. Family tradition has it that Amos and his stepmother did not get along and that he was estranged from his sister Margaret, who seemed to have strayed from the “straight path.” He might have lived with and worked for local farmers. He was said to have lived for some time with his older cousin, Jesse Casbon, who also lived in Porter County. My impression is that this was an unsettled time in Amos’s life.

We know that he worked as a grip for a Chicago streetcar company for four years in the late 1890s.^[4]

In addition, a 25 January 1900 news announcement tells us that Amos, then living in Chicago, was job hunting in the Boone Grove (Porter County, Indiana) area.^[5]

Last May, when I spent time at the Valparaiso Public Library, I discovered that Amos had also spent some time in his late teens and perhaps early twenties living and working in Iowa. The discovery was made when I found this news item on microfilm.

Why is this important? For one thing, it puts another data point on the timeline of Amos’s life, during a time about which we have little other information. The timeline is probably only important to me and to those descendants of Amos who share in interest in their family history (of whom there are several).

The second reason is that Amos’s presence in Iowa connects him to another branch of the family, specifically the branch living in Iowa that consisted Emma (Casbon) and Robert Rigg, and their nephew George Washington Casbon (see “Introducing the Iowa Casbons! Part 1”). Emma, although 22 years older, was Amos’s first cousin, the daughter of his uncle Thomas Casbon (1803–1888). George, who was five years younger than Amos, was his second cousin, the son of Emma’s brother Sylvester Casbon. Emma, Robert, and George lived on a farm in Tama County, Iowa, about six miles away from LaPorte City, where Amos was reported to be living in 1889.

It is unlikely to be a coincidence that that Amos was living and working so close to his Iowa relatives. It is a little surprising, though, since the Rigg family had moved to Iowa in 1876, when Amos was only 7 years old. Considering the difference in their ages, he was hardly old enough to have formed a close personal friendship with Emma, or with George, who was only 2 years old when he moved to Iowa.

We can infer from this that family ties between all the branches of the family—Amos, his stepmother and sisters, Emma’s family in Iowa, and her siblings in Indiana—were still very close. There had probably been occasional family visits between Iowa and Indiana, and letters were probably frequently exchanged. Even though Amos might not have had a close relationship to Emma and George, he was a member of the larger family. That bond was strong enough to bring him to Iowa as a young man.

Ties between the Iowa and Indiana Casbons remained strong for a generation or two. We know this from photographs and other items documenting visits between the Iowa and Indiana families. There is even a news item from 1931 reporting that Amos and his family had returned “from a trip to points in Iowa visiting friends and relatives.”^[6]

By my generation, the ties between the Iowa and Indiana clans were virtually forgotten. For that matter, the ties between my branch and the descendants of Amos were very weak. Even though their families continued to live in the same county in Indiana, I never met or knew any of these cousins until recent years. I don’t believe this was the result of any kind of hostility; it was just a natural process that happened as each generation grew in size and the degrees of separation increased. Thankfully, as a result of efforts by members of all three branches to reconnect with our common heritage, not to mention modern conveniences such as Facebook and email, we are communicating and sharing stories with each other again.

[1] England, birth registration (PDF copy) for Amos James Casburn, born 6 Jul 1869; registered September quarter 1869, Chesterton District 3b/452, Willingham Sub-district,  no 45; General Registry Office, Southport.
[2] “Indiana Marriages, 1811-2007,” FamilySearch (https://www.familysearch.org/search/collection/1410397 : accessed 24 October 2015) >Porter >1871-1875 Volume 4 > image 242 of 246; Indiana Commission on Public Records, Indianapolis.
[3] “Murder! That is About what is Made out of the Case of Old Man Casbon,” Porter County (Indiana) Vidette, 28 Aug 1884, p. 1, col. 2.
[4] “Boone Grove Couple Will Observe 50th Anniversary,” The (Valparaiso, Indiana) Vidette-Messenger, 21 Nov 1950, p. 1, col. 6.
[5] “Boone Grove Items,” The Porter County Vidette, 25 January 1900.
[6]“Aylesworth,” The Vidette-Messenger, 27 Nov 1931, p. 6, col. 1.