While Facebook and Insta and Twitter do an amazing job of broadcasting the details of people's travels, accomplishments and families, that's not exactly a new concept. Well before the internet and computers, newspaper "social" columns recorded comings and goings, births and deaths, relationships and gossip. It was exactly such nineteenth century "Social Media" that provided the clues to finding the mother of my adopted great-grandmother, Minnie.
Last week, I detailed the DNA-based research process I used to locate Minnie's father, Richard Moffatt of Brooklyn, NY. His name was the key to finding a June, 1877, birth record for a daughter, called Alma Moffatt, and the name of her mother: Libby Barker, and a street name, which I knew to be that of Moffatt's residence. I wasn't able to find a marriage record, and no searches of "Libby Barker" in Brooklyn around that time turned up any kind of lead. Moffatt's landlady, Eliza Parsons, had a daughter named Libby, and I built a family tree for her but couldn't find any DNA matches to anyone in it, although I tried really hard because she was a descendant of the brother of Noah Webster, he of "Blue Backed Speller" fame.
Returning to the drawing board, I did a cursory search of my DNA matches to see if any had "Barker" in their trees. Several did, but only one was from a cluster that I hadn't already placed somewhere in my ancestry. That ended up being a good one, though... the match had a distinctive name and provided enough names in their family tree for me to determine that their great-grandfather was a man named John Gue Barker who had married their great-grandmother in San Francisco. The west coast is a bit of a hike from Brooklyn, but I wanted to see whether perhaps there was a connection.
San Francisco newspapers were a tremendous help. Although not as immediate as today's social media, there were often multiple editions each day. I quickly became absolutely fascinated with the meteoric life of John Gue Barker.
Searching on Barker's name, I found a biography in a 1921 History of Stanislaus County, California. Usually written by either the subject or a family member, these were roughly the equivalent of today's LinkedIn Profiles, i.e. not a lot of journalistic fact-checking occurs on the content:
So John Gue Barker WAS originally from New York City! Did he perhaps have a relative named Libby Barker? I decided to try searching for him in New York, and found this article:
While I wasn't expecting to encounter Potsdam, which is on the far-north border of New York and Canada, the name of John G. Barker and the mention of San Francisco for an event in March of 1888 seemed promising. And here was mention of a sister. Now I needed to identify Mr. and Mrs. C.D. Salfield.
From papers across the country, I learned that Carl David Salfield of San Francisco was the purveyor of "Dr. Salfield's Rejuvenator," a patent medicine. It sounds like quite the thing!
Salfield was a frequent flyer in San Francisco newspapers, characterized variously as a "crackpot" and a civic activist. He created a neighborhood preservation society for the Haight-Ashbury District, championing crazy concepts like safe and reliable drinking water, fire protection, and accessible schools.
And there it was -- the name of Carl Salfield's wife, John Gue Barker's sister: Libby (Barker) Salfield.
This finding was extra special... Libby's given name was Elizabeth Alma Barker. For someone hoping to find the birth mother of Alma Moffatt, this seemed serendipitous.
But all I had was a single, tenuous DNA connection to a descendant of Libby Barker Salfield's brother. Was she the *right* Libby Barker? I needed more DNA connections -- so I headed back to creating family trees for matches I shared with the descendant of John Gue Barker.
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