There was an older cemetery in use when she died, supposedly Oberlin's first cemetery, dismantled later, bones in theory sent to the newer, second cemetery, said to be Westwood. Not all bones were sent with their markers. Of those already markerless, bones perhaps were combined. No formal records have been found, only a story that the moves happened. This is maybe the fifth case of a dismantled cemetery in northern Ohio, with graves erratically moved in the mid-to-late 1800s, that this writer has encountered.
"...Eliza, a slave of mixed race, was owned by John Hancock, a lawyer, judge, state legislator, and U.S. congressman whom [her son] Hugh knew to be his father. When he was five years of age and the Civil War was threatening, Hugh and his mother were sent by John Hancock to Oberlin, Ohio, a thriving community of whites and free blacks." (Quote from Oxford University, its African American Studies Center, in a bio of son Hugh Berry Hancock, written by Sheila Gregory Thomas. Sheila was one of Eliza's great-granddaughters, born to Hugh Ella Hancock Gregory, youngest daughter of Eliza's son Hugh. The article is archived online, as of 2020, at OxfordAASC.com.)
Death year is calculated from the above and the fact she was no longer with that son for his first Census. This was done in Ohio in 1860, little Hugh freshly arrived, as he was just 5, matching the age cited in Sheila's bio of Hugh. Perhaps Eliza had been very ill when they were sent to Ohio.
According to other sources, two boys were sent to Oberlin. Only one would survive to adulthood and also be remembered as a Hancock.
After she died, Hugh would be reared in Oberlin. His paperwork whoed him first with the Pattersons, who had teachers in the family. They were from North Carolina, just as his mother had been, so perhaps were relatives. His US Census of 1860, with them, was when he was five. It showed an older boy present. Ten years later, at age 15, for the 1870 US Census, Hugh lived down the street. He was the only child in the house of a recently widowed barber named William Timothy Henderson ("W. T."). Mr. Henderson was of uncle-like age, with a woman of a grandmotherly age named Elizabeth House also present. Mrs. House had been the mother of WT's first wife, staying on after her daughter died. That daughter had been Cornelia Foster , buried in Oberlin in 1866.
North Carolina was perhaps more generous to people of color than Texas had been. His parents' relationship was not of legal record in Texas, yet there was a record of the Henderson-Foster marriage back in Mecklenburg County, in the Carolinas in 1857. They and others from Mecklenburg came to Oberlin, with Quakers among those known to have freed their slaves. Freeing was done with more certainty by sending them to Ohio. Others from the Carolinas came after the Civil War gave them freedom.
Hugh and his possible older brother were found without Eliza in their 1860 Census, so we know their ages that year, not hers. No birth date, no age at death has been found for her. We use a round number to signal her birth year is an estimate, possibly "off" by five or so years, "good enough" to put her in the correct generation. Being 25 years old at her second son's known birth would be around the average.
Judge Hancock woul be named as his father on her son's death record in Idaho. The data collection did not ask for mother's information.
Note that diseases in this part of Ohio were brought in by passengers on schooners on the Great Lakes, at first, then, later, by those traveling by steamboat. Eliza could have arrived left Texas healthy, then contracted something wicked after arrival. The area had seen cholera beginning in the 1850s, would see yellow fever by the 1870s, but would be encountering typhoid fever around 1860.
To control some fantastically contagious and deadly diseases that could come in, the locals had learned to bury victims together and quickly, no time for individual markers. Also, when adult children left an area, which Hugh would do, there was no one to care for the stone, which could be broken, tossed, buried under grave dirt.
Had long had she and they needed to stay hidden?. The Fugitive Slave Act, written by a southern controlled US Congress, had essentially forbade going north, promising to punish everyone involved.
It would have been easier to abandon him at the beginning, in his birth state? Yet, she brought him along, a squirming four year old turning five, who needed playtime, naps, and to go potty.
The situation of this second son, Hugh, and his father, Judge John Hancock, was described in the memoirs of a college professor and high school superintendent, a man who had married Hugh's youngest daughter, Hugh Ella.
Hugh met Hugh Ella's mother, Susie Elvira James while both attended the "preparatory" program then offered at Oberlin's famed Congregational school, run by a team that included the Rev. Finney. This was an era when there were no public high schools and sexes frequently were kept separate. The preparation was generally to teach or to run a school, or to ready a person for a professional degree, the big ones then being law, the ministry, and medicine.
Susie E. enrolled at Oberlin's conservatory, known or its music studies, so was there an extra year, 1876 through 1878. They returned to their native Texas, marrying in 1879, to have four daughters, the last nine years after the rest, as Susie turned 40 and Hugh may have already turned sick, making it clear there would be no son to call junior. They doubtlessly hoped all would be well in Texas due to Reconstruction. It wasn't. He taught, they bought a house, he then ran a saloon with a political name, of record on East Pecan in Austin, circa 1886. He became political. He would be one of the last persons of color of his era selected to be a Texas delegate to his young party's National Convention.
Jim Crow stepped in.
Hugh and Susie had daughters who needed to stay in school, a quality school, to be as well-educated as he and Susie had been. That might not happen if they stayed in Texas, a place with many good people of all colors, but a good number of toxic ones as well.
He and Susie took all four Texas-born daughters to Evanston, Illinois. (This was the "street car suburb" north of Chicago that has Northwestern University.) Their youngest, Hugh Ella, was just three, when the interviewer for the 1900 Census found them there and learned Hugh's mother, not named for the Census, but called Eliza in his bio, had been born in North Carolina.
Again, Hugh was without his mother in Oberlin Twp., from the 1860 census, through the 1870, but in Texas for the 1880. The 1890 Census burned. The 1900 found them in Evanston.
He and another Texas boy, maybe his brother, were living with the Pattersons in 1860. Mr. Patterson was North Carolina-born, just like Hugh's mother. The Pattersons were people who were teachers. The Pattersons were good at that occupation, as the family had even more members teaching by their 1870 Census.
The census taker called their color "Mulatto", or "mu". Mulatto was their era's word for a complexion between W for White and B for Black.
European ethnics with dark hair who tanned well might also be rated "mu", seen in censuses for Germans of the Bavarian sort, Italians, and French-Canadians. Thus, the state of birth had to also be checked, to see if "mu" meant more than color. An admission that cross-race marriages had occurred, despite laws passed in the south against it, was omething some people did not want, so the "mu" designation disappeared later, maybe by 1910, and people pretended everyon was either B or W, no having a foot in two worlds allowed.
Hugh's wife Susie was similar in background, inter-racial, but not sent to Ohio until she finished a convent curriculum in Maryland. Her education was said to be paid for by her father, who would be a major in the Confederacy. Her father was named O'Connor, her mother a slave woman, probably named James, that her family regarded as Major O'Connor's common-law wife.
Judge John Hancock, in contrast, was an Alabama-born man of a family from Virginia. He opposed secession and avoided service in the confederacy, refusing to back a war he did not believe in. We've not found documentation, but some recall, without giving their old sources, that he escaped into Mexico to avoid serving in a war he thought was wrong. . He owned slaves before the Civil War, loved one slave , then lost them all after the Civil War.
Hugh's family regarded the relationship as a common-law marriage, as done in wife Susie's family for her parents. The Judge had done so much for Hugh, paid for Oberlin, let him use the family name. The Judge and others in the Hancock family had success as attorneys. He strongly encouraged Hugh to attend the University of Michigan for law school. Hugh declined.
Perhaps due to the Pattersons, Hugh preferred teaching. He probably found the situation in Austin was unlike what the Pattersons had had in Ohio. According to accounts by people of color , with "poor whites" seeing the same in their schools, there were often no books, too few days of school per year, little help in monitoring and encouraging attendance, no rewards, lots of punishments, clocks that either were not on time or put where the kids could not see them or were totally missing, and, in the worst-off places, only one high school per county, put next to the lawyers' homes and the courthouse, not near the working class or the farmers, and so on.
He would have been surrounded by family back in Austin, but did they acknowledge a relationship? The Judge's family stayed wealthy for a long time. They retained thousands of the acres their slaves had worked north of old Austin. Parts of the old plantation, which ran as far north as modern Anderson Lane, were still urbanizing and being annexed to modern Austin as late as the 1970s.
John Hancock's brother (cousin?), the one named George Hancock, was of record as doing some things similarly. However, he became the subject of a Reconstruction complaint by a freedman. The freedman's wife had left, taking their two children with her. The freedman asked a Reconstruction official or help in bringing his children back. He informed the official that his eparted wife had first lived for several years with George Hancock, that in those years, she had had "a white daughter" and "a black boy", before having two children with the freedman.
There was a third side of the Hancock family, William Ryan Hancock, another big land owner once in the Austin area, but to the south, down by what had once been the hamlet of Manchaca. He was born while these men's parents were still in Virginia, so he would be John and George's older brother or cousin.
That William's son, William Lewis Hancock, had several sons with first wife Eudocia (William and Walter) Those young men moved away, but kept the family name going, so Hugh was not the last male Hancock. ( William Lewis Hancock died in 1916, a year of the Spanish Influenza.)
Those sons of William did not inherit, as the land went to W.L.'s second wife, not to his sons by his first. However, being the one in the family with all the land did not guarantee success. One of the Hancock wives, Sue A., one of many Sue Hancocks, so initial needed, was still wealthy in 1920. She called herself a landlord of farms in the census that year, after she had moved north, into Austin, living with her eldest daughter by an earlier husband, so not a Hancock. That daughter was still single, working as a postmaster. Sue A. may have lost title of the land by the start of the Depression. Events of the time caused many, north and south, to lose their land-- agricultural prices falling sharply as balloon payments on farm debt came due . The 1930 Census found her female-led household struggling, the stepdaughter no longer a postmaster, now working as a housekeeper for a private family . The wife died in 1931, the stepdaughter in 1939. Her death report said she had died of pellagra, emphasized that this was a mal-nutrition disease. It is caused by a lack of niacin, also called vitamin B-3, and/or tryptophan. The main preventable cause is poor diet due to poverty. B-3 is found in tuna, unaffordable in a depression. It is found in fortified grains, suddenly expensive, as the Dust Bowl ruined wheat crops up by the Texas Panhandle.
Hugh had a presumed half-brother known as "E.B. Hancock " who worked with Judge Hancock, both of their signatures seen together in some court work filed at Travis county, Texas.. Which E.B.? There was an Austinite listed as Edward Brigham Hancock on his death record, middle name matching his mother's maiden name Brigham. , There was an Edwin B., possibly the attorney who married a German woman while studying in Leipzig/Leipzic. (Hard to say who was who, too many Edwins.) He died in the Spanish influenza years, too. However, the doctor signing the death record called his case "malignant la grippe".
Hugh died even earlier. At Evanston, his youngest Hugh Ella, at age 3, not old enough to protest, would see her name mis-spelled as Huella. Did this cause some relatives to miss that key record for their family? Hugh was described by Hugh Ella as separating from her and her mother early in her childhood, to go to Idaho.
He went to Pocatello, Idaho. It was then a wild place whose existence as a town was made possible by the new extension of a Chicago-based railroad line, to and then through, the state's southeastern corner. Men without women were mining up in the mountains. Settlers with families attempted less successful hay farms and more successful irrigated orchards below the mountains. Settlements stretched along the winding Snake River, until it meandered into Oregon.
An old black-and-white tourist postcard circa 1901 showed a handsomely be-feathered chieftain riding on horseback into Pocatello, with his braves. There were reports of prostitution in Pocatello, back in the "good old days".
Was it a place not particularly good for children? He left his daughters behind.
Swedish ancestors of this writer's spouse were enticed away from good schools in their railtown back in Minnesota, to Pocatello. There were carpentry jobs for farmers, at first, offsetting the problem that the land was poor without adding an irrigation system. The building boom due to the new rail track and depots ended, leaving only the land as an income source. There were no high schools. The highly intelligent grandmother of this writer's spouse thus "stopped out" of school at age 12. The father had behavioral issues not made better by the fact that harvested hay had low value. Things did not improve until they moved a bit further west , gave up farming to move into a town with a high school, so the younger children could graduate.
Hugh Ella was only 3 when they lived in Evanston, only 13 when Hugh died, knew nothing about how bad it might be in Pocatello for children in that era, so felt abandoned. His absence meant she barely knew him, had to rely on whatever her mother Susie knew (or guessed), little chance to find out more about Hugh's mother, such as the simple thing of her maiden surname. Hugh died before the 1910 census could ask more questions, to tell us specifically what he was doing out there.
Was he still married at his death? His obituary said he was. His working wife came from her state-level institutional work in Austin, Tx, to attend his funeral, a married daughter also there. Did their time in Evanston convince Susie that she perhaps needed to return to Austin to find work? Did he perhaps refuse to go with her, as his prior time there had been so awful?
The thing of interest? The middle names of his Hancock cousins generally proved to be the maiden names of their mothers.
Hugh's middle initial of B, seen often, never otherwise explained, stood for Berry, said Hugh Ella's husband. Had Berry been Eliza's maiden name?
Finally, life is complex. Did his father betray two women? commit moral bigamy?
Hugh's family regarded Hugh as the product of a father who wanted him to use the same last name and paid for his education at Oberlin, and a slave woman turned free once in anti-slavery Ohio. A "common law" marriage was generally legal in their era, meant married by co-habitation, not needing to be long, not needing to produce children, merely had to have been announced as a marriage, even if only casually, to a neighbor, by just one of the two parties. It was a legal relationship with legal rights in their era, needed divorce or death before either could remarry. Despite all of this, because Eliza was of color, and Judge Hancock was white, their relationship was not a legal marriage in Texas, as care ha been taken by the state's lawyers to declare inter-racial marriages illegal.
The problem? John Hancock married a woman a second way, later, with a paper record, in front of witnesses, dated and stamped. Her name was given as "Sue E. Richeson" in one version of that marriage record, said by others to have been born "Susan Richardson", but she might have been a widow Richardson, entering a second marriage, as no old source listed her parents.
The point that matters? Hugh would have been only 6 months old. His own mother would have felt betrayed by the second marriage. She could not charge John with bigamy, as her marriage was not the legal one in Texas, or North Carolina, or Virginia or Alabama. Of the states they knew best, the marriage would have been legal only in Ohio.
These were the dates when interracial marriage was made illegal, closely connected to when a state's constitution was written or its British-authorized legislature first met while under the British king :
Virginia 1691
Maryland 1692
North Carolina 1715
Alabama 1822
Texas 1832
Oberlin's area was settled after 1800, by New Englanders and New Yorkers, plus a few Pennsylvanians. Only one of their states had declared inter-racial marriage illegal:
Delaware 1721 (a south-bordering state, settled after Maryland and Virginia)
UNIVERSITY SOURCE FOR DATES: webpages.uidaho.edu/engl_258/Lecture%20Notes/american_antimiscegenation.htm
"...Eliza, a slave of mixed race, was owned by John Hancock, a lawyer, judge, state legislator, and U.S. congressman whom [her son] Hugh knew to be his father. When he was five years of age and the Civil War was threatening, Hugh and his mother were sent by John Hancock to Oberlin, Ohio, a thriving community of whites and free blacks." (Quote from Oxford University, its African American Studies Center, in a bio of son Hugh Berry Hancock, written by Sheila Gregory Thomas. Sheila was one of Eliza's great-granddaughters, born to Hugh Ella Hancock Gregory, youngest daughter of Eliza's son Hugh. The article is archived online, as of 2020, at OxfordAASC.com.)
Death year is calculated from the above and the fact she was no longer with that son for his first Census. This was done in Ohio in 1860, little Hugh freshly arrived, as he was just 5, matching the age cited in Sheila's bio of Hugh. Perhaps Eliza had been very ill when they were sent to Ohio.
According to other sources, two boys were sent to Oberlin. Only one would survive to adulthood and also be remembered as a Hancock.
After she died, Hugh would be reared in Oberlin. His paperwork whoed him first with the Pattersons, who had teachers in the family. They were from North Carolina, just as his mother had been, so perhaps were relatives. His US Census of 1860, with them, was when he was five. It showed an older boy present. Ten years later, at age 15, for the 1870 US Census, Hugh lived down the street. He was the only child in the house of a recently widowed barber named William Timothy Henderson ("W. T."). Mr. Henderson was of uncle-like age, with a woman of a grandmotherly age named Elizabeth House also present. Mrs. House had been the mother of WT's first wife, staying on after her daughter died. That daughter had been Cornelia Foster , buried in Oberlin in 1866.
North Carolina was perhaps more generous to people of color than Texas had been. His parents' relationship was not of legal record in Texas, yet there was a record of the Henderson-Foster marriage back in Mecklenburg County, in the Carolinas in 1857. They and others from Mecklenburg came to Oberlin, with Quakers among those known to have freed their slaves. Freeing was done with more certainty by sending them to Ohio. Others from the Carolinas came after the Civil War gave them freedom.
Hugh and his possible older brother were found without Eliza in their 1860 Census, so we know their ages that year, not hers. No birth date, no age at death has been found for her. We use a round number to signal her birth year is an estimate, possibly "off" by five or so years, "good enough" to put her in the correct generation. Being 25 years old at her second son's known birth would be around the average.
Judge Hancock woul be named as his father on her son's death record in Idaho. The data collection did not ask for mother's information.
Note that diseases in this part of Ohio were brought in by passengers on schooners on the Great Lakes, at first, then, later, by those traveling by steamboat. Eliza could have arrived left Texas healthy, then contracted something wicked after arrival. The area had seen cholera beginning in the 1850s, would see yellow fever by the 1870s, but would be encountering typhoid fever around 1860.
To control some fantastically contagious and deadly diseases that could come in, the locals had learned to bury victims together and quickly, no time for individual markers. Also, when adult children left an area, which Hugh would do, there was no one to care for the stone, which could be broken, tossed, buried under grave dirt.
Had long had she and they needed to stay hidden?. The Fugitive Slave Act, written by a southern controlled US Congress, had essentially forbade going north, promising to punish everyone involved.
It would have been easier to abandon him at the beginning, in his birth state? Yet, she brought him along, a squirming four year old turning five, who needed playtime, naps, and to go potty.
The situation of this second son, Hugh, and his father, Judge John Hancock, was described in the memoirs of a college professor and high school superintendent, a man who had married Hugh's youngest daughter, Hugh Ella.
Hugh met Hugh Ella's mother, Susie Elvira James while both attended the "preparatory" program then offered at Oberlin's famed Congregational school, run by a team that included the Rev. Finney. This was an era when there were no public high schools and sexes frequently were kept separate. The preparation was generally to teach or to run a school, or to ready a person for a professional degree, the big ones then being law, the ministry, and medicine.
Susie E. enrolled at Oberlin's conservatory, known or its music studies, so was there an extra year, 1876 through 1878. They returned to their native Texas, marrying in 1879, to have four daughters, the last nine years after the rest, as Susie turned 40 and Hugh may have already turned sick, making it clear there would be no son to call junior. They doubtlessly hoped all would be well in Texas due to Reconstruction. It wasn't. He taught, they bought a house, he then ran a saloon with a political name, of record on East Pecan in Austin, circa 1886. He became political. He would be one of the last persons of color of his era selected to be a Texas delegate to his young party's National Convention.
Jim Crow stepped in.
Hugh and Susie had daughters who needed to stay in school, a quality school, to be as well-educated as he and Susie had been. That might not happen if they stayed in Texas, a place with many good people of all colors, but a good number of toxic ones as well.
He and Susie took all four Texas-born daughters to Evanston, Illinois. (This was the "street car suburb" north of Chicago that has Northwestern University.) Their youngest, Hugh Ella, was just three, when the interviewer for the 1900 Census found them there and learned Hugh's mother, not named for the Census, but called Eliza in his bio, had been born in North Carolina.
Again, Hugh was without his mother in Oberlin Twp., from the 1860 census, through the 1870, but in Texas for the 1880. The 1890 Census burned. The 1900 found them in Evanston.
He and another Texas boy, maybe his brother, were living with the Pattersons in 1860. Mr. Patterson was North Carolina-born, just like Hugh's mother. The Pattersons were people who were teachers. The Pattersons were good at that occupation, as the family had even more members teaching by their 1870 Census.
The census taker called their color "Mulatto", or "mu". Mulatto was their era's word for a complexion between W for White and B for Black.
European ethnics with dark hair who tanned well might also be rated "mu", seen in censuses for Germans of the Bavarian sort, Italians, and French-Canadians. Thus, the state of birth had to also be checked, to see if "mu" meant more than color. An admission that cross-race marriages had occurred, despite laws passed in the south against it, was omething some people did not want, so the "mu" designation disappeared later, maybe by 1910, and people pretended everyon was either B or W, no having a foot in two worlds allowed.
Hugh's wife Susie was similar in background, inter-racial, but not sent to Ohio until she finished a convent curriculum in Maryland. Her education was said to be paid for by her father, who would be a major in the Confederacy. Her father was named O'Connor, her mother a slave woman, probably named James, that her family regarded as Major O'Connor's common-law wife.
Judge John Hancock, in contrast, was an Alabama-born man of a family from Virginia. He opposed secession and avoided service in the confederacy, refusing to back a war he did not believe in. We've not found documentation, but some recall, without giving their old sources, that he escaped into Mexico to avoid serving in a war he thought was wrong. . He owned slaves before the Civil War, loved one slave , then lost them all after the Civil War.
Hugh's family regarded the relationship as a common-law marriage, as done in wife Susie's family for her parents. The Judge had done so much for Hugh, paid for Oberlin, let him use the family name. The Judge and others in the Hancock family had success as attorneys. He strongly encouraged Hugh to attend the University of Michigan for law school. Hugh declined.
Perhaps due to the Pattersons, Hugh preferred teaching. He probably found the situation in Austin was unlike what the Pattersons had had in Ohio. According to accounts by people of color , with "poor whites" seeing the same in their schools, there were often no books, too few days of school per year, little help in monitoring and encouraging attendance, no rewards, lots of punishments, clocks that either were not on time or put where the kids could not see them or were totally missing, and, in the worst-off places, only one high school per county, put next to the lawyers' homes and the courthouse, not near the working class or the farmers, and so on.
He would have been surrounded by family back in Austin, but did they acknowledge a relationship? The Judge's family stayed wealthy for a long time. They retained thousands of the acres their slaves had worked north of old Austin. Parts of the old plantation, which ran as far north as modern Anderson Lane, were still urbanizing and being annexed to modern Austin as late as the 1970s.
John Hancock's brother (cousin?), the one named George Hancock, was of record as doing some things similarly. However, he became the subject of a Reconstruction complaint by a freedman. The freedman's wife had left, taking their two children with her. The freedman asked a Reconstruction official or help in bringing his children back. He informed the official that his eparted wife had first lived for several years with George Hancock, that in those years, she had had "a white daughter" and "a black boy", before having two children with the freedman.
There was a third side of the Hancock family, William Ryan Hancock, another big land owner once in the Austin area, but to the south, down by what had once been the hamlet of Manchaca. He was born while these men's parents were still in Virginia, so he would be John and George's older brother or cousin.
That William's son, William Lewis Hancock, had several sons with first wife Eudocia (William and Walter) Those young men moved away, but kept the family name going, so Hugh was not the last male Hancock. ( William Lewis Hancock died in 1916, a year of the Spanish Influenza.)
Those sons of William did not inherit, as the land went to W.L.'s second wife, not to his sons by his first. However, being the one in the family with all the land did not guarantee success. One of the Hancock wives, Sue A., one of many Sue Hancocks, so initial needed, was still wealthy in 1920. She called herself a landlord of farms in the census that year, after she had moved north, into Austin, living with her eldest daughter by an earlier husband, so not a Hancock. That daughter was still single, working as a postmaster. Sue A. may have lost title of the land by the start of the Depression. Events of the time caused many, north and south, to lose their land-- agricultural prices falling sharply as balloon payments on farm debt came due . The 1930 Census found her female-led household struggling, the stepdaughter no longer a postmaster, now working as a housekeeper for a private family . The wife died in 1931, the stepdaughter in 1939. Her death report said she had died of pellagra, emphasized that this was a mal-nutrition disease. It is caused by a lack of niacin, also called vitamin B-3, and/or tryptophan. The main preventable cause is poor diet due to poverty. B-3 is found in tuna, unaffordable in a depression. It is found in fortified grains, suddenly expensive, as the Dust Bowl ruined wheat crops up by the Texas Panhandle.
Hugh had a presumed half-brother known as "E.B. Hancock " who worked with Judge Hancock, both of their signatures seen together in some court work filed at Travis county, Texas.. Which E.B.? There was an Austinite listed as Edward Brigham Hancock on his death record, middle name matching his mother's maiden name Brigham. , There was an Edwin B., possibly the attorney who married a German woman while studying in Leipzig/Leipzic. (Hard to say who was who, too many Edwins.) He died in the Spanish influenza years, too. However, the doctor signing the death record called his case "malignant la grippe".
Hugh died even earlier. At Evanston, his youngest Hugh Ella, at age 3, not old enough to protest, would see her name mis-spelled as Huella. Did this cause some relatives to miss that key record for their family? Hugh was described by Hugh Ella as separating from her and her mother early in her childhood, to go to Idaho.
He went to Pocatello, Idaho. It was then a wild place whose existence as a town was made possible by the new extension of a Chicago-based railroad line, to and then through, the state's southeastern corner. Men without women were mining up in the mountains. Settlers with families attempted less successful hay farms and more successful irrigated orchards below the mountains. Settlements stretched along the winding Snake River, until it meandered into Oregon.
An old black-and-white tourist postcard circa 1901 showed a handsomely be-feathered chieftain riding on horseback into Pocatello, with his braves. There were reports of prostitution in Pocatello, back in the "good old days".
Was it a place not particularly good for children? He left his daughters behind.
Swedish ancestors of this writer's spouse were enticed away from good schools in their railtown back in Minnesota, to Pocatello. There were carpentry jobs for farmers, at first, offsetting the problem that the land was poor without adding an irrigation system. The building boom due to the new rail track and depots ended, leaving only the land as an income source. There were no high schools. The highly intelligent grandmother of this writer's spouse thus "stopped out" of school at age 12. The father had behavioral issues not made better by the fact that harvested hay had low value. Things did not improve until they moved a bit further west , gave up farming to move into a town with a high school, so the younger children could graduate.
Hugh Ella was only 3 when they lived in Evanston, only 13 when Hugh died, knew nothing about how bad it might be in Pocatello for children in that era, so felt abandoned. His absence meant she barely knew him, had to rely on whatever her mother Susie knew (or guessed), little chance to find out more about Hugh's mother, such as the simple thing of her maiden surname. Hugh died before the 1910 census could ask more questions, to tell us specifically what he was doing out there.
Was he still married at his death? His obituary said he was. His working wife came from her state-level institutional work in Austin, Tx, to attend his funeral, a married daughter also there. Did their time in Evanston convince Susie that she perhaps needed to return to Austin to find work? Did he perhaps refuse to go with her, as his prior time there had been so awful?
The thing of interest? The middle names of his Hancock cousins generally proved to be the maiden names of their mothers.
Hugh's middle initial of B, seen often, never otherwise explained, stood for Berry, said Hugh Ella's husband. Had Berry been Eliza's maiden name?
Finally, life is complex. Did his father betray two women? commit moral bigamy?
Hugh's family regarded Hugh as the product of a father who wanted him to use the same last name and paid for his education at Oberlin, and a slave woman turned free once in anti-slavery Ohio. A "common law" marriage was generally legal in their era, meant married by co-habitation, not needing to be long, not needing to produce children, merely had to have been announced as a marriage, even if only casually, to a neighbor, by just one of the two parties. It was a legal relationship with legal rights in their era, needed divorce or death before either could remarry. Despite all of this, because Eliza was of color, and Judge Hancock was white, their relationship was not a legal marriage in Texas, as care ha been taken by the state's lawyers to declare inter-racial marriages illegal.
The problem? John Hancock married a woman a second way, later, with a paper record, in front of witnesses, dated and stamped. Her name was given as "Sue E. Richeson" in one version of that marriage record, said by others to have been born "Susan Richardson", but she might have been a widow Richardson, entering a second marriage, as no old source listed her parents.
The point that matters? Hugh would have been only 6 months old. His own mother would have felt betrayed by the second marriage. She could not charge John with bigamy, as her marriage was not the legal one in Texas, or North Carolina, or Virginia or Alabama. Of the states they knew best, the marriage would have been legal only in Ohio.
These were the dates when interracial marriage was made illegal, closely connected to when a state's constitution was written or its British-authorized legislature first met while under the British king :
Virginia 1691
Maryland 1692
North Carolina 1715
Alabama 1822
Texas 1832
Oberlin's area was settled after 1800, by New Englanders and New Yorkers, plus a few Pennsylvanians. Only one of their states had declared inter-racial marriage illegal:
Delaware 1721 (a south-bordering state, settled after Maryland and Virginia)
UNIVERSITY SOURCE FOR DATES: webpages.uidaho.edu/engl_258/Lecture%20Notes/american_antimiscegenation.htm
There was an older cemetery in use when she died, supposedly Oberlin's first cemetery, dismantled later, bones in theory sent to the newer, second cemetery, said to be Westwood. Not all bones were sent with their markers. Of those already markerless, bones perhaps were combined. No formal records have been found, only a story that the moves happened. This is maybe the fifth case of a dismantled cemetery in northern Ohio, with graves erratically moved in the mid-to-late 1800s, that this writer has encountered.
"...Eliza, a slave of mixed race, was owned by John Hancock, a lawyer, judge, state legislator, and U.S. congressman whom [her son] Hugh knew to be his father. When he was five years of age and the Civil War was threatening, Hugh and his mother were sent by John Hancock to Oberlin, Ohio, a thriving community of whites and free blacks." (Quote from Oxford University, its African American Studies Center, in a bio of son Hugh Berry Hancock, written by Sheila Gregory Thomas. Sheila was one of Eliza's great-granddaughters, born to Hugh Ella Hancock Gregory, youngest daughter of Eliza's son Hugh. The article is archived online, as of 2020, at OxfordAASC.com.)
Death year is calculated from the above and the fact she was no longer with that son for his first Census. This was done in Ohio in 1860, little Hugh freshly arrived, as he was just 5, matching the age cited in Sheila's bio of Hugh. Perhaps Eliza had been very ill when they were sent to Ohio.
According to other sources, two boys were sent to Oberlin. Only one would survive to adulthood and also be remembered as a Hancock.
After she died, Hugh would be reared in Oberlin. His paperwork whoed him first with the Pattersons, who had teachers in the family. They were from North Carolina, just as his mother had been, so perhaps were relatives. His US Census of 1860, with them, was when he was five. It showed an older boy present. Ten years later, at age 15, for the 1870 US Census, Hugh lived down the street. He was the only child in the house of a recently widowed barber named William Timothy Henderson ("W. T."). Mr. Henderson was of uncle-like age, with a woman of a grandmotherly age named Elizabeth House also present. Mrs. House had been the mother of WT's first wife, staying on after her daughter died. That daughter had been Cornelia Foster , buried in Oberlin in 1866.
North Carolina was perhaps more generous to people of color than Texas had been. His parents' relationship was not of legal record in Texas, yet there was a record of the Henderson-Foster marriage back in Mecklenburg County, in the Carolinas in 1857. They and others from Mecklenburg came to Oberlin, with Quakers among those known to have freed their slaves. Freeing was done with more certainty by sending them to Ohio. Others from the Carolinas came after the Civil War gave them freedom.
Hugh and his possible older brother were found without Eliza in their 1860 Census, so we know their ages that year, not hers. No birth date, no age at death has been found for her. We use a round number to signal her birth year is an estimate, possibly "off" by five or so years, "good enough" to put her in the correct generation. Being 25 years old at her second son's known birth would be around the average.
Judge Hancock woul be named as his father on her son's death record in Idaho. The data collection did not ask for mother's information.
Note that diseases in this part of Ohio were brought in by passengers on schooners on the Great Lakes, at first, then, later, by those traveling by steamboat. Eliza could have arrived left Texas healthy, then contracted something wicked after arrival. The area had seen cholera beginning in the 1850s, would see yellow fever by the 1870s, but would be encountering typhoid fever around 1860.
To control some fantastically contagious and deadly diseases that could come in, the locals had learned to bury victims together and quickly, no time for individual markers. Also, when adult children left an area, which Hugh would do, there was no one to care for the stone, which could be broken, tossed, buried under grave dirt.
Had long had she and they needed to stay hidden?. The Fugitive Slave Act, written by a southern controlled US Congress, had essentially forbade going north, promising to punish everyone involved.
It would have been easier to abandon him at the beginning, in his birth state? Yet, she brought him along, a squirming four year old turning five, who needed playtime, naps, and to go potty.
The situation of this second son, Hugh, and his father, Judge John Hancock, was described in the memoirs of a college professor and high school superintendent, a man who had married Hugh's youngest daughter, Hugh Ella.
Hugh met Hugh Ella's mother, Susie Elvira James while both attended the "preparatory" program then offered at Oberlin's famed Congregational school, run by a team that included the Rev. Finney. This was an era when there were no public high schools and sexes frequently were kept separate. The preparation was generally to teach or to run a school, or to ready a person for a professional degree, the big ones then being law, the ministry, and medicine.
Susie E. enrolled at Oberlin's conservatory, known or its music studies, so was there an extra year, 1876 through 1878. They returned to their native Texas, marrying in 1879, to have four daughters, the last nine years after the rest, as Susie turned 40 and Hugh may have already turned sick, making it clear there would be no son to call junior. They doubtlessly hoped all would be well in Texas due to Reconstruction. It wasn't. He taught, they bought a house, he then ran a saloon with a political name, of record on East Pecan in Austin, circa 1886. He became political. He would be one of the last persons of color of his era selected to be a Texas delegate to his young party's National Convention.
Jim Crow stepped in.
Hugh and Susie had daughters who needed to stay in school, a quality school, to be as well-educated as he and Susie had been. That might not happen if they stayed in Texas, a place with many good people of all colors, but a good number of toxic ones as well.
He and Susie took all four Texas-born daughters to Evanston, Illinois. (This was the "street car suburb" north of Chicago that has Northwestern University.) Their youngest, Hugh Ella, was just three, when the interviewer for the 1900 Census found them there and learned Hugh's mother, not named for the Census, but called Eliza in his bio, had been born in North Carolina.
Again, Hugh was without his mother in Oberlin Twp., from the 1860 census, through the 1870, but in Texas for the 1880. The 1890 Census burned. The 1900 found them in Evanston.
He and another Texas boy, maybe his brother, were living with the Pattersons in 1860. Mr. Patterson was North Carolina-born, just like Hugh's mother. The Pattersons were people who were teachers. The Pattersons were good at that occupation, as the family had even more members teaching by their 1870 Census.
The census taker called their color "Mulatto", or "mu". Mulatto was their era's word for a complexion between W for White and B for Black.
European ethnics with dark hair who tanned well might also be rated "mu", seen in censuses for Germans of the Bavarian sort, Italians, and French-Canadians. Thus, the state of birth had to also be checked, to see if "mu" meant more than color. An admission that cross-race marriages had occurred, despite laws passed in the south against it, was omething some people did not want, so the "mu" designation disappeared later, maybe by 1910, and people pretended everyon was either B or W, no having a foot in two worlds allowed.
Hugh's wife Susie was similar in background, inter-racial, but not sent to Ohio until she finished a convent curriculum in Maryland. Her education was said to be paid for by her father, who would be a major in the Confederacy. Her father was named O'Connor, her mother a slave woman, probably named James, that her family regarded as Major O'Connor's common-law wife.
Judge John Hancock, in contrast, was an Alabama-born man of a family from Virginia. He opposed secession and avoided service in the confederacy, refusing to back a war he did not believe in. We've not found documentation, but some recall, without giving their old sources, that he escaped into Mexico to avoid serving in a war he thought was wrong. . He owned slaves before the Civil War, loved one slave , then lost them all after the Civil War.
Hugh's family regarded the relationship as a common-law marriage, as done in wife Susie's family for her parents. The Judge had done so much for Hugh, paid for Oberlin, let him use the family name. The Judge and others in the Hancock family had success as attorneys. He strongly encouraged Hugh to attend the University of Michigan for law school. Hugh declined.
Perhaps due to the Pattersons, Hugh preferred teaching. He probably found the situation in Austin was unlike what the Pattersons had had in Ohio. According to accounts by people of color , with "poor whites" seeing the same in their schools, there were often no books, too few days of school per year, little help in monitoring and encouraging attendance, no rewards, lots of punishments, clocks that either were not on time or put where the kids could not see them or were totally missing, and, in the worst-off places, only one high school per county, put next to the lawyers' homes and the courthouse, not near the working class or the farmers, and so on.
He would have been surrounded by family back in Austin, but did they acknowledge a relationship? The Judge's family stayed wealthy for a long time. They retained thousands of the acres their slaves had worked north of old Austin. Parts of the old plantation, which ran as far north as modern Anderson Lane, were still urbanizing and being annexed to modern Austin as late as the 1970s.
John Hancock's brother (cousin?), the one named George Hancock, was of record as doing some things similarly. However, he became the subject of a Reconstruction complaint by a freedman. The freedman's wife had left, taking their two children with her. The freedman asked a Reconstruction official or help in bringing his children back. He informed the official that his eparted wife had first lived for several years with George Hancock, that in those years, she had had "a white daughter" and "a black boy", before having two children with the freedman.
There was a third side of the Hancock family, William Ryan Hancock, another big land owner once in the Austin area, but to the south, down by what had once been the hamlet of Manchaca. He was born while these men's parents were still in Virginia, so he would be John and George's older brother or cousin.
That William's son, William Lewis Hancock, had several sons with first wife Eudocia (William and Walter) Those young men moved away, but kept the family name going, so Hugh was not the last male Hancock. ( William Lewis Hancock died in 1916, a year of the Spanish Influenza.)
Those sons of William did not inherit, as the land went to W.L.'s second wife, not to his sons by his first. However, being the one in the family with all the land did not guarantee success. One of the Hancock wives, Sue A., one of many Sue Hancocks, so initial needed, was still wealthy in 1920. She called herself a landlord of farms in the census that year, after she had moved north, into Austin, living with her eldest daughter by an earlier husband, so not a Hancock. That daughter was still single, working as a postmaster. Sue A. may have lost title of the land by the start of the Depression. Events of the time caused many, north and south, to lose their land-- agricultural prices falling sharply as balloon payments on farm debt came due . The 1930 Census found her female-led household struggling, the stepdaughter no longer a postmaster, now working as a housekeeper for a private family . The wife died in 1931, the stepdaughter in 1939. Her death report said she had died of pellagra, emphasized that this was a mal-nutrition disease. It is caused by a lack of niacin, also called vitamin B-3, and/or tryptophan. The main preventable cause is poor diet due to poverty. B-3 is found in tuna, unaffordable in a depression. It is found in fortified grains, suddenly expensive, as the Dust Bowl ruined wheat crops up by the Texas Panhandle.
Hugh had a presumed half-brother known as "E.B. Hancock " who worked with Judge Hancock, both of their signatures seen together in some court work filed at Travis county, Texas.. Which E.B.? There was an Austinite listed as Edward Brigham Hancock on his death record, middle name matching his mother's maiden name Brigham. , There was an Edwin B., possibly the attorney who married a German woman while studying in Leipzig/Leipzic. (Hard to say who was who, too many Edwins.) He died in the Spanish influenza years, too. However, the doctor signing the death record called his case "malignant la grippe".
Hugh died even earlier. At Evanston, his youngest Hugh Ella, at age 3, not old enough to protest, would see her name mis-spelled as Huella. Did this cause some relatives to miss that key record for their family? Hugh was described by Hugh Ella as separating from her and her mother early in her childhood, to go to Idaho.
He went to Pocatello, Idaho. It was then a wild place whose existence as a town was made possible by the new extension of a Chicago-based railroad line, to and then through, the state's southeastern corner. Men without women were mining up in the mountains. Settlers with families attempted less successful hay farms and more successful irrigated orchards below the mountains. Settlements stretched along the winding Snake River, until it meandered into Oregon.
An old black-and-white tourist postcard circa 1901 showed a handsomely be-feathered chieftain riding on horseback into Pocatello, with his braves. There were reports of prostitution in Pocatello, back in the "good old days".
Was it a place not particularly good for children? He left his daughters behind.
Swedish ancestors of this writer's spouse were enticed away from good schools in their railtown back in Minnesota, to Pocatello. There were carpentry jobs for farmers, at first, offsetting the problem that the land was poor without adding an irrigation system. The building boom due to the new rail track and depots ended, leaving only the land as an income source. There were no high schools. The highly intelligent grandmother of this writer's spouse thus "stopped out" of school at age 12. The father had behavioral issues not made better by the fact that harvested hay had low value. Things did not improve until they moved a bit further west , gave up farming to move into a town with a high school, so the younger children could graduate.
Hugh Ella was only 3 when they lived in Evanston, only 13 when Hugh died, knew nothing about how bad it might be in Pocatello for children in that era, so felt abandoned. His absence meant she barely knew him, had to rely on whatever her mother Susie knew (or guessed), little chance to find out more about Hugh's mother, such as the simple thing of her maiden surname. Hugh died before the 1910 census could ask more questions, to tell us specifically what he was doing out there.
Was he still married at his death? His obituary said he was. His working wife came from her state-level institutional work in Austin, Tx, to attend his funeral, a married daughter also there. Did their time in Evanston convince Susie that she perhaps needed to return to Austin to find work? Did he perhaps refuse to go with her, as his prior time there had been so awful?
The thing of interest? The middle names of his Hancock cousins generally proved to be the maiden names of their mothers.
Hugh's middle initial of B, seen often, never otherwise explained, stood for Berry, said Hugh Ella's husband. Had Berry been Eliza's maiden name?
Finally, life is complex. Did his father betray two women? commit moral bigamy?
Hugh's family regarded Hugh as the product of a father who wanted him to use the same last name and paid for his education at Oberlin, and a slave woman turned free once in anti-slavery Ohio. A "common law" marriage was generally legal in their era, meant married by co-habitation, not needing to be long, not needing to produce children, merely had to have been announced as a marriage, even if only casually, to a neighbor, by just one of the two parties. It was a legal relationship with legal rights in their era, needed divorce or death before either could remarry. Despite all of this, because Eliza was of color, and Judge Hancock was white, their relationship was not a legal marriage in Texas, as care ha been taken by the state's lawyers to declare inter-racial marriages illegal.
The problem? John Hancock married a woman a second way, later, with a paper record, in front of witnesses, dated and stamped. Her name was given as "Sue E. Richeson" in one version of that marriage record, said by others to have been born "Susan Richardson", but she might have been a widow Richardson, entering a second marriage, as no old source listed her parents.
The point that matters? Hugh would have been only 6 months old. His own mother would have felt betrayed by the second marriage. She could not charge John with bigamy, as her marriage was not the legal one in Texas, or North Carolina, or Virginia or Alabama. Of the states they knew best, the marriage would have been legal only in Ohio.
These were the dates when interracial marriage was made illegal, closely connected to when a state's constitution was written or its British-authorized legislature first met while under the British king :
Virginia 1691
Maryland 1692
North Carolina 1715
Alabama 1822
Texas 1832
Oberlin's area was settled after 1800, by New Englanders and New Yorkers, plus a few Pennsylvanians. Only one of their states had declared inter-racial marriage illegal:
Delaware 1721 (a south-bordering state, settled after Maryland and Virginia)
UNIVERSITY SOURCE FOR DATES: webpages.uidaho.edu/engl_258/Lecture%20Notes/american_antimiscegenation.htm
"...Eliza, a slave of mixed race, was owned by John Hancock, a lawyer, judge, state legislator, and U.S. congressman whom [her son] Hugh knew to be his father. When he was five years of age and the Civil War was threatening, Hugh and his mother were sent by John Hancock to Oberlin, Ohio, a thriving community of whites and free blacks." (Quote from Oxford University, its African American Studies Center, in a bio of son Hugh Berry Hancock, written by Sheila Gregory Thomas. Sheila was one of Eliza's great-granddaughters, born to Hugh Ella Hancock Gregory, youngest daughter of Eliza's son Hugh. The article is archived online, as of 2020, at OxfordAASC.com.)
Death year is calculated from the above and the fact she was no longer with that son for his first Census. This was done in Ohio in 1860, little Hugh freshly arrived, as he was just 5, matching the age cited in Sheila's bio of Hugh. Perhaps Eliza had been very ill when they were sent to Ohio.
According to other sources, two boys were sent to Oberlin. Only one would survive to adulthood and also be remembered as a Hancock.
After she died, Hugh would be reared in Oberlin. His paperwork whoed him first with the Pattersons, who had teachers in the family. They were from North Carolina, just as his mother had been, so perhaps were relatives. His US Census of 1860, with them, was when he was five. It showed an older boy present. Ten years later, at age 15, for the 1870 US Census, Hugh lived down the street. He was the only child in the house of a recently widowed barber named William Timothy Henderson ("W. T."). Mr. Henderson was of uncle-like age, with a woman of a grandmotherly age named Elizabeth House also present. Mrs. House had been the mother of WT's first wife, staying on after her daughter died. That daughter had been Cornelia Foster , buried in Oberlin in 1866.
North Carolina was perhaps more generous to people of color than Texas had been. His parents' relationship was not of legal record in Texas, yet there was a record of the Henderson-Foster marriage back in Mecklenburg County, in the Carolinas in 1857. They and others from Mecklenburg came to Oberlin, with Quakers among those known to have freed their slaves. Freeing was done with more certainty by sending them to Ohio. Others from the Carolinas came after the Civil War gave them freedom.
Hugh and his possible older brother were found without Eliza in their 1860 Census, so we know their ages that year, not hers. No birth date, no age at death has been found for her. We use a round number to signal her birth year is an estimate, possibly "off" by five or so years, "good enough" to put her in the correct generation. Being 25 years old at her second son's known birth would be around the average.
Judge Hancock woul be named as his father on her son's death record in Idaho. The data collection did not ask for mother's information.
Note that diseases in this part of Ohio were brought in by passengers on schooners on the Great Lakes, at first, then, later, by those traveling by steamboat. Eliza could have arrived left Texas healthy, then contracted something wicked after arrival. The area had seen cholera beginning in the 1850s, would see yellow fever by the 1870s, but would be encountering typhoid fever around 1860.
To control some fantastically contagious and deadly diseases that could come in, the locals had learned to bury victims together and quickly, no time for individual markers. Also, when adult children left an area, which Hugh would do, there was no one to care for the stone, which could be broken, tossed, buried under grave dirt.
Had long had she and they needed to stay hidden?. The Fugitive Slave Act, written by a southern controlled US Congress, had essentially forbade going north, promising to punish everyone involved.
It would have been easier to abandon him at the beginning, in his birth state? Yet, she brought him along, a squirming four year old turning five, who needed playtime, naps, and to go potty.
The situation of this second son, Hugh, and his father, Judge John Hancock, was described in the memoirs of a college professor and high school superintendent, a man who had married Hugh's youngest daughter, Hugh Ella.
Hugh met Hugh Ella's mother, Susie Elvira James while both attended the "preparatory" program then offered at Oberlin's famed Congregational school, run by a team that included the Rev. Finney. This was an era when there were no public high schools and sexes frequently were kept separate. The preparation was generally to teach or to run a school, or to ready a person for a professional degree, the big ones then being law, the ministry, and medicine.
Susie E. enrolled at Oberlin's conservatory, known or its music studies, so was there an extra year, 1876 through 1878. They returned to their native Texas, marrying in 1879, to have four daughters, the last nine years after the rest, as Susie turned 40 and Hugh may have already turned sick, making it clear there would be no son to call junior. They doubtlessly hoped all would be well in Texas due to Reconstruction. It wasn't. He taught, they bought a house, he then ran a saloon with a political name, of record on East Pecan in Austin, circa 1886. He became political. He would be one of the last persons of color of his era selected to be a Texas delegate to his young party's National Convention.
Jim Crow stepped in.
Hugh and Susie had daughters who needed to stay in school, a quality school, to be as well-educated as he and Susie had been. That might not happen if they stayed in Texas, a place with many good people of all colors, but a good number of toxic ones as well.
He and Susie took all four Texas-born daughters to Evanston, Illinois. (This was the "street car suburb" north of Chicago that has Northwestern University.) Their youngest, Hugh Ella, was just three, when the interviewer for the 1900 Census found them there and learned Hugh's mother, not named for the Census, but called Eliza in his bio, had been born in North Carolina.
Again, Hugh was without his mother in Oberlin Twp., from the 1860 census, through the 1870, but in Texas for the 1880. The 1890 Census burned. The 1900 found them in Evanston.
He and another Texas boy, maybe his brother, were living with the Pattersons in 1860. Mr. Patterson was North Carolina-born, just like Hugh's mother. The Pattersons were people who were teachers. The Pattersons were good at that occupation, as the family had even more members teaching by their 1870 Census.
The census taker called their color "Mulatto", or "mu". Mulatto was their era's word for a complexion between W for White and B for Black.
European ethnics with dark hair who tanned well might also be rated "mu", seen in censuses for Germans of the Bavarian sort, Italians, and French-Canadians. Thus, the state of birth had to also be checked, to see if "mu" meant more than color. An admission that cross-race marriages had occurred, despite laws passed in the south against it, was omething some people did not want, so the "mu" designation disappeared later, maybe by 1910, and people pretended everyon was either B or W, no having a foot in two worlds allowed.
Hugh's wife Susie was similar in background, inter-racial, but not sent to Ohio until she finished a convent curriculum in Maryland. Her education was said to be paid for by her father, who would be a major in the Confederacy. Her father was named O'Connor, her mother a slave woman, probably named James, that her family regarded as Major O'Connor's common-law wife.
Judge John Hancock, in contrast, was an Alabama-born man of a family from Virginia. He opposed secession and avoided service in the confederacy, refusing to back a war he did not believe in. We've not found documentation, but some recall, without giving their old sources, that he escaped into Mexico to avoid serving in a war he thought was wrong. . He owned slaves before the Civil War, loved one slave , then lost them all after the Civil War.
Hugh's family regarded the relationship as a common-law marriage, as done in wife Susie's family for her parents. The Judge had done so much for Hugh, paid for Oberlin, let him use the family name. The Judge and others in the Hancock family had success as attorneys. He strongly encouraged Hugh to attend the University of Michigan for law school. Hugh declined.
Perhaps due to the Pattersons, Hugh preferred teaching. He probably found the situation in Austin was unlike what the Pattersons had had in Ohio. According to accounts by people of color , with "poor whites" seeing the same in their schools, there were often no books, too few days of school per year, little help in monitoring and encouraging attendance, no rewards, lots of punishments, clocks that either were not on time or put where the kids could not see them or were totally missing, and, in the worst-off places, only one high school per county, put next to the lawyers' homes and the courthouse, not near the working class or the farmers, and so on.
He would have been surrounded by family back in Austin, but did they acknowledge a relationship? The Judge's family stayed wealthy for a long time. They retained thousands of the acres their slaves had worked north of old Austin. Parts of the old plantation, which ran as far north as modern Anderson Lane, were still urbanizing and being annexed to modern Austin as late as the 1970s.
John Hancock's brother (cousin?), the one named George Hancock, was of record as doing some things similarly. However, he became the subject of a Reconstruction complaint by a freedman. The freedman's wife had left, taking their two children with her. The freedman asked a Reconstruction official or help in bringing his children back. He informed the official that his eparted wife had first lived for several years with George Hancock, that in those years, she had had "a white daughter" and "a black boy", before having two children with the freedman.
There was a third side of the Hancock family, William Ryan Hancock, another big land owner once in the Austin area, but to the south, down by what had once been the hamlet of Manchaca. He was born while these men's parents were still in Virginia, so he would be John and George's older brother or cousin.
That William's son, William Lewis Hancock, had several sons with first wife Eudocia (William and Walter) Those young men moved away, but kept the family name going, so Hugh was not the last male Hancock. ( William Lewis Hancock died in 1916, a year of the Spanish Influenza.)
Those sons of William did not inherit, as the land went to W.L.'s second wife, not to his sons by his first. However, being the one in the family with all the land did not guarantee success. One of the Hancock wives, Sue A., one of many Sue Hancocks, so initial needed, was still wealthy in 1920. She called herself a landlord of farms in the census that year, after she had moved north, into Austin, living with her eldest daughter by an earlier husband, so not a Hancock. That daughter was still single, working as a postmaster. Sue A. may have lost title of the land by the start of the Depression. Events of the time caused many, north and south, to lose their land-- agricultural prices falling sharply as balloon payments on farm debt came due . The 1930 Census found her female-led household struggling, the stepdaughter no longer a postmaster, now working as a housekeeper for a private family . The wife died in 1931, the stepdaughter in 1939. Her death report said she had died of pellagra, emphasized that this was a mal-nutrition disease. It is caused by a lack of niacin, also called vitamin B-3, and/or tryptophan. The main preventable cause is poor diet due to poverty. B-3 is found in tuna, unaffordable in a depression. It is found in fortified grains, suddenly expensive, as the Dust Bowl ruined wheat crops up by the Texas Panhandle.
Hugh had a presumed half-brother known as "E.B. Hancock " who worked with Judge Hancock, both of their signatures seen together in some court work filed at Travis county, Texas.. Which E.B.? There was an Austinite listed as Edward Brigham Hancock on his death record, middle name matching his mother's maiden name Brigham. , There was an Edwin B., possibly the attorney who married a German woman while studying in Leipzig/Leipzic. (Hard to say who was who, too many Edwins.) He died in the Spanish influenza years, too. However, the doctor signing the death record called his case "malignant la grippe".
Hugh died even earlier. At Evanston, his youngest Hugh Ella, at age 3, not old enough to protest, would see her name mis-spelled as Huella. Did this cause some relatives to miss that key record for their family? Hugh was described by Hugh Ella as separating from her and her mother early in her childhood, to go to Idaho.
He went to Pocatello, Idaho. It was then a wild place whose existence as a town was made possible by the new extension of a Chicago-based railroad line, to and then through, the state's southeastern corner. Men without women were mining up in the mountains. Settlers with families attempted less successful hay farms and more successful irrigated orchards below the mountains. Settlements stretched along the winding Snake River, until it meandered into Oregon.
An old black-and-white tourist postcard circa 1901 showed a handsomely be-feathered chieftain riding on horseback into Pocatello, with his braves. There were reports of prostitution in Pocatello, back in the "good old days".
Was it a place not particularly good for children? He left his daughters behind.
Swedish ancestors of this writer's spouse were enticed away from good schools in their railtown back in Minnesota, to Pocatello. There were carpentry jobs for farmers, at first, offsetting the problem that the land was poor without adding an irrigation system. The building boom due to the new rail track and depots ended, leaving only the land as an income source. There were no high schools. The highly intelligent grandmother of this writer's spouse thus "stopped out" of school at age 12. The father had behavioral issues not made better by the fact that harvested hay had low value. Things did not improve until they moved a bit further west , gave up farming to move into a town with a high school, so the younger children could graduate.
Hugh Ella was only 3 when they lived in Evanston, only 13 when Hugh died, knew nothing about how bad it might be in Pocatello for children in that era, so felt abandoned. His absence meant she barely knew him, had to rely on whatever her mother Susie knew (or guessed), little chance to find out more about Hugh's mother, such as the simple thing of her maiden surname. Hugh died before the 1910 census could ask more questions, to tell us specifically what he was doing out there.
Was he still married at his death? His obituary said he was. His working wife came from her state-level institutional work in Austin, Tx, to attend his funeral, a married daughter also there. Did their time in Evanston convince Susie that she perhaps needed to return to Austin to find work? Did he perhaps refuse to go with her, as his prior time there had been so awful?
The thing of interest? The middle names of his Hancock cousins generally proved to be the maiden names of their mothers.
Hugh's middle initial of B, seen often, never otherwise explained, stood for Berry, said Hugh Ella's husband. Had Berry been Eliza's maiden name?
Finally, life is complex. Did his father betray two women? commit moral bigamy?
Hugh's family regarded Hugh as the product of a father who wanted him to use the same last name and paid for his education at Oberlin, and a slave woman turned free once in anti-slavery Ohio. A "common law" marriage was generally legal in their era, meant married by co-habitation, not needing to be long, not needing to produce children, merely had to have been announced as a marriage, even if only casually, to a neighbor, by just one of the two parties. It was a legal relationship with legal rights in their era, needed divorce or death before either could remarry. Despite all of this, because Eliza was of color, and Judge Hancock was white, their relationship was not a legal marriage in Texas, as care ha been taken by the state's lawyers to declare inter-racial marriages illegal.
The problem? John Hancock married a woman a second way, later, with a paper record, in front of witnesses, dated and stamped. Her name was given as "Sue E. Richeson" in one version of that marriage record, said by others to have been born "Susan Richardson", but she might have been a widow Richardson, entering a second marriage, as no old source listed her parents.
The point that matters? Hugh would have been only 6 months old. His own mother would have felt betrayed by the second marriage. She could not charge John with bigamy, as her marriage was not the legal one in Texas, or North Carolina, or Virginia or Alabama. Of the states they knew best, the marriage would have been legal only in Ohio.
These were the dates when interracial marriage was made illegal, closely connected to when a state's constitution was written or its British-authorized legislature first met while under the British king :
Virginia 1691
Maryland 1692
North Carolina 1715
Alabama 1822
Texas 1832
Oberlin's area was settled after 1800, by New Englanders and New Yorkers, plus a few Pennsylvanians. Only one of their states had declared inter-racial marriage illegal:
Delaware 1721 (a south-bordering state, settled after Maryland and Virginia)
UNIVERSITY SOURCE FOR DATES: webpages.uidaho.edu/engl_258/Lecture%20Notes/american_antimiscegenation.htm
Gravesite Details
Probably in Potters Field, seen as OAP on the cemetery map, which would contain the unmarked graves or mass graves for bodies transferred from a defunct cemetery.
Family Members
Spouse
Children
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