In many cases, I don’t know how our club member is related to these folks who share their family names, but in this month’s example, because the House family is pretty well documented, I know that our member is this woman’s husband’s fourth cousin, twice removed. She was born Nancy Elizabeth Mann in 1868 in Buffalo City, Arkansas and at 17, she married 25-year-old farmer, Ivy House. By 1913, after baring six children, though, things were strained and the couple divorced. Ivy soon married a much younger woman, and their youngest daughter, Rose, ill since birth, died of edema in the care of her older sister, Anna, rather than her mother or father. In Rose’s obituary as well as her tombstone, father Ivy is mentioned, but not mother Nancy.
Interestingly, Anna, had recently married Henry Jauch, at that time going by Henry Metz, whose wife, Ruby Metz, had committed suicide after having long battles with insanity in their home state of Nebraska—she only seemed rational at the ranch in Laramie, Wyoming.
Most of the surviving seven members of the House family cannot be found in the 1920 US Census. As poor, farm laborers, (losing the farm in Arkansas) they also seldom made the newspapers. But then, in 1922, there is a story in The Greeley Tribune detailing the story of Mrs. N House, an escaped mental patient from the Weld County Hospital showing up in Laramie.
“County authorities there state they will furnish her with transportation to Meeker, Colorado, and insist she will go there.”
“On two occasions the county commissioners have furnished her with transportation to go to Meeker. She has returned both times, however. Twice she has been before a lunacy commission here and has each time been held sane and discharged. Mrs. House likes life in the woman’s section of the county jail, but despises the county hospital, judging from her remarks. As she commits no crimes, it is impossible to keep her in jail and as she is legally held sane, she cannot be committed to a state institution.”
“Her favorite diversion is coming to the county commissioner’s office and telling her woes in detail to Commissioner Peters, who is the supervisor of the poor. When she is here, the commissioners find it practically impossible to transact business.”
“How Mrs. House got to Cheyanne, no one knows. She is in the custody of the Red Cross there.”
A decade later, Anna is a patient in the Napa State Hospital for the Insane. Henry is in Redding, where he works as an auto mechanic. Soon he marries wife #3. Cordeila Lowry. Cordie lived to 101 dying in Hemet and—somewhat surprisingly—doesn’t become a mental patient.
Commissioner A.F. Peters (52 at the time) lost his wife seven years later and lived alone till his last months in 1941 when he moved to Laguna Beach to live with his son, John, a horse veterinarian, including at the Del Mar Racetrack.
