One of Those Days

Greetings gentle reader, and welcome to my musings for the week. And trust me, I will eventually explain the tiny image above.

I have to admit up front that this post will — no doubt — contain more typos than usual. That’s because yesterday afternoon I got dose seven of Covid vaccine and it’s starting to hit me: headache, general fuzziness, you know the drill.

But once this has passed I should be a super human, capable of withstanding every disease known to mankind, right?

If only.

You might ask why I got another dose. I mean, it seems the entire world has given up on worrying about Covid, and almost no one gets the booster these days. The latter may be true — I haven’t looked into booster uptake — and I know the former is true. But, Covid is not gone, and it’s showing signs of coming back, at least to some degree.

Our local sewers are carrying a gradually increasing virus load lately, and my occasional glimpse into the sewers of Silicon Valley says the same thing is happening there. There is conversation about “FLiRT” variants and what they will do. So far they aren’t particularly different, but cases are on the rise. Slowly, I admit. This doesn’t look like the arrival of Omicron — which was a viciously steep spike — but things are definitely trending in the wrong direction.

The current crop of vaccines does have some efficacy against the latest variants, and it had been six months since my last dose, so I went out and did the deed. It seemed wise.

But enough of that. Let’s talk about something more interesting.

I finally got a subscription to the newspaper archive associated with ancestry.com and attempted more research on one of my relatives. Lots of information is still missing, but I learned a bit more and it is time to tell the story as I know it so far.

A while back I mentioned Clara Stacy, who had two husbands, twelve children, and wound up living in an asylum between 1907 and her death in 1943. Today we’ll turn our attention to her sister, Sarah Adeline (Addie) Stacy, born in 1860 and died in 1917.

Addie was the seventh of eight children (Clara was the youngest), born to Darius and Almeda Stacey. (Darius has come up before. He’s the one who fought for the Union in the US Civil War, and about whom there is a claim that he had a brother — David — that fought for the Confederacy. I still can’t find any information about that mystery brother, but I digress.)

Addie’s father died when she was just four. I haven’t got a lot of information about her childhood, but her mother didn’t remarry for eight years. I suspect the older children helped take care of the younger ones, and other family members provided support. This was rural Iowa and there was family around.

Addie married Charles N. Tovrea in 1876. It appears he was (or later became) a coal miner working in the mines in Iowa. They had seven children, one of whom died very young. The youngest was Chas Tovrea, born in 1893.

And now we hit the first oddity in Addie’s life. Her husband died in January of 1911. I have his obituary, and it is very strange. He died of “miner’s asthma” at the home of his sister. It lists four of his children surviving him, and three of them match the names I have. (The forth is helpfully given as “Mrs. Gebhart”, so I’d have to track down which daughter married someone with that last name, and I am already way off in the weeds. But again, I digress.) Guess who is not mentioned in his obituary? His wife, Addie. She’s not there.

That might be because she was no longer his wife, of course. It turns out she married Vittoria (Victor) Minella in 1898, about thirteen years before her first husband died, and only five years after the birth of her youngest child with her first husband. I have records of her second marriage, and they line up with what I know, including mentioning her parents by name. What I have not been able to find is any record of a previous divorce or why that might have happened.

It seems life was good for a while in the Minella home. They had one child I have been able to find so far, Catherine, born in 1902. But somewhere things clearly went wrong.

On June 23, 1914, Addie shot and killed Victor in their home.

Apparently there were guests over for dinner. The news report says Addie heard her son Charles, who was injured in a coal mine say “Vic, you would not hurt a cripple, would you?” And, quoting from the news report: “She then ran thru the house, and before entering the bed room reached behind a mirror which hung in the corner of the room, took from its hiding place the revolver and entering the room commenced shooting at her husband.” He was hit twice and died instantly. I’ll spare you the gory details.

Addie was arrested and claimed her husband had threatened to kill her son with a razor. But during the inquest the children said he didn’t have a razor and wasn’t threatening murder.

The article goes on to say that friends and acquaintances of Victor said he was a good man and that Addie was “quarrelsome.” And in an act that I find hard to fathom, the author of the article goes on to say that he personally knows Victor to be “an industrious and honest citizen.” Journalistic integrity? Maybe not.

Addie was sentenced to 18 years in the Anamosa State Penitentiary for second degree murder. I’ve seen multiple records indicating she appealed something — her sentence or conviction, I can’t tell — all the way up to the Iowa Supreme Court. An Iowa register of convicts (pictured above, see… I promised to explain it) says that review happened on June 29, 1916. Ancestry records say she died on June 5, 1917, but there is no good attribution for that date, and no sure location. I have been unable to find a death certificate or obituary. My guess is that her appeal failed and she died in prison, but I could easily be wrong.

I continue to dig — mostly out of morbid curiosity — but so far the newspaper archives aren’t helping much. To be clear, Addie is not on my direct bloodline — she’s a great great aunt — but her story has some fascinating twists. In fact the stories of a number of people in her family are rather amazing.

So, that’s what I know (or think I know) about the first actual criminal I’ve found in the family history. There are so many unanswered questions. I’m sure I will never resolve them all.

Everything else going on this week has been related to the monthly community email. My inbox is overflowing, and I am way behind, but I have a few days left to catch up, and I will manage it somehow.

Now if you will pardon me, I am going to take a brief nap. Sleeping was tough last night because of pain at the vaccine injection site. Take care!