Mightier Acorns

“What’s an ‘Ahnentafel’?” you ask – read this introductory post for my explanation.

What Is “Ours” to Share?

Before I get into the substance of Esther’s story, I feel like I should address something about photographs.

Specifically, there is an ethical grey area created by Ancestry’s end-user agreements and copyright law that makes it hard to know if or when I can share a photograph that I find on Ancestry. Genealogy is at its best when we can follow academic standards, cite our sources to stable, reliable data, and trust the provenance of the artefacts we come across, such as photographs of people or even of the things they made and/or passed down. But personal photos and artifacts rarely come with the sort of documentation that allows us to treat them with academic rigor.

For example, I found a photograph of Esther and Don Shuffler on Ancestry. The user who uploaded the photo had a username similar to “IowaCousin123,” which makes it hard to trust that they are who they appear to be (are they in Iowa? are they a cousin?). The right thing to do before sharing that photograph here would be to reach out to that user and get their permission – except…

• a) Ancestry’s privacy rules protect their identity. I don’t have any way to know whether they are who they say they are or whether they have any knowledge (trustworthy or otherwise) about the photo’s origins.
• b) Under Ancestry’s copyright policy, photos and artifacts uploaded to their site belong to the user who uploaded them. But I can’t tell who originally uploaded a given photo.

I took a chance last week and posted a found photo of Don Shuffler with his brothers, mother, and grandmother. After I did that, I found additional copies of the same photo, and others shared by several people, including this one of Don and Esther (which you might or might not be able to see, depending on Ancestry’s sharing rules):

Ancestry Photo of Don and Esther Shuffler

I’m not too worried about getting into trouble because I’m a small, independent publisher, not profiting from the use of these photos, and posting them for educational purposes. But I don’t want to upset anyone, either, or frighten others away from sharing, so unless I have express permission to post what I find here, I’m probably not going to do it.

The Picture of the Midwest

Esther Anna Thompson was the youngest of three daughters born in Council Bluffs, Iowa, on 16 Jun 1908 to Danish immigrants, Thomas Christian Thomsen (1876–1951) and Lena Dagmar Jensen (1874–1952).

Lena was born in Chicago, where her parents had married soon after immigrating, so technically, she was first-generation American, but Lena and Tom passed her middle name to their first daughter, Marion Dagmar, so I think it’s safe to assert that their family was still in close touch with their Danish heritage.

That said, living in Iowa in the early decades of the Twentieth Century, the “Thomsen” family more often appears as the English-sounding “Thompson” in official records and newspaper references.

The Thompson sisters grew up in Council Bluffs, and their father made a steady living as a car inspector for the railroads. They were educated in local schools, married local boys, and modeled the Midwestern middle-class lifestyle that so many people seem nostalgic for. Of course, the foundation of that middle-class lifestyle depended on the strength of the unions keeping wages high and work sites safe; high taxes paying for good schools; and the heavily subsidized railroads keeping commerce afloat. I’m sure the Thompson sisters didn’t have to think about those things, though.

Four Weddings and a Funeral

Esther’s eldest sister, Dagmar, born in 1901, married Hans Paulson Ranum (1896–1963) on 16 March, 1923. Hans was a recent immigrant from Denmark, arriving in New York in 1920. Hans and Dagmar had a son and a daughter, whom they raised in Council Bluffs.

Esther, as you may know, married Don Shuffler on 4 June 1926, when both were 17 years old. Their elder daughter, Elaine, was born six months later, on 11 December 1926.

Middle sister, Ruth, married William T Miller (1902–1935) at age 24 on 6 July 1929. They had a daughter named Bernice in 1930, but Ruth divorced William in 1932, accusing him of desertion. He died in a sanatorium in Missouri in 1935, at 33 years of age, another victim of tuberculosis.

Ruth married Harry William Roundtree (1902–1985) on 2 December, 1936, and soon, they had a son together.

A Quiet Life

Clearly, life in Council Bluffs was not without its share of drama and tragedy. And yet, when we want to see our ancestors’ lives a certain way, we tend to look past those small, less fatal dramas and hold on to the nostalgia of what we think of as a better time. This is the puzzle for the family historian: finding ways to acknowledge the difficult while also capturing the welcome mundane moments in between.

Dagmar and Hans divorced in 1945. Their son, Raymond, fought in World War II and in Korea, and served in the Naval Reserves for 40 years before retiring to teach middle school in Ventura, California. He died in 1993, leaving a wife, four children, and several grandchildren. Their daughter, Joyce, married in 1949 and moved with her husband to Washington, DC, where she worked for the government. She died in 1979 after battling cancer, also leaving behind four sons.

Ruth’s daughter, Bernice, was adopted by her stepfather and grew up as Bernice Roundtree. She married Dick Fowler and had two daughters. Bernice was only 37 when she died in 1970. Ruth’s son, Thomas K. Roundtree, served in the U.S. Army and worked for the Council Bluffs Water Works for 40 years before retiring in 2001. He died in 2022, leaving behind two sons and a grandson, as well as several step-children.

As for Esther and Don, their daughters married two McCullough brothers. Elaine married John Edward McCullough in 1945. They had a baby son, Earl Randolph McCullough II, who did not survive infancy. They remained together until 1959, when they divorced. Coincidentally, John’s second wife, Caroline “Kay” Taylor, was also a divorcee. Her first husband was Tom Roundtree.

And, of course, you already know the story of their second daughter, June, who married John McCullough’s younger brother, Bob.

The Story That Isn’t A Story

Throughout all of this, Don and Esther seem to have remained a steady presence in Council Bluffs, as part of this extended family. When I started composing what I wanted to say about them, there didn’t seem to be a whole lot of information to work with, but as I looked at their loved ones, I realized how important that role is – being a calm center and just showing up for decades on end.

Sometimes, when a lot is going on, I forget how appealing that calm center can be.