Why Joseph Christian Saalman, my father's grandfather, came to leave Branchville
and finally reside in the Chicago area is not known to me or my father. Economic
reasons seem likely, although Mansfield Frakes said that great-grandfather Saalman
"wasn't well-regarded" back home. So could there have been some unhealed rift between
Joseph and the rest of the family? From knowing those of my father's and grandfather's
generations, this possibility does not at all seem unlikely to me. I have heard
that some of them would not speak to others for years over some trivial matter or
perceived slight. Regardless, my Grandpa Ben Saalman's generation is gone now, the
opportunity to know the how and why of his father's family schism, if there was
one, has faded away. Dad now regrets that he never spoke about this with his dad,
Benjamin.
What is known, is that Joseph Christian's son
Benjamin Franklin Saalman
married my grandmother, Rubie Orilla Geeding on December 15, 1912. They first lived
in the town where she was born, a town called Fairfield, not 30 miles south of Dad's future
home of Flora, and 95 miles due west from his Benjamin's birthplace of Birdseye,
Indiana.
Benjamin worked for the Chicago and Eastern
Railroad
in these years.
The train job may then have moved Ben and Rubie from Fairfield to Fithian, 161 miles
north and just east of Champaign, where their first son Hollis was born August 21,
1914. It may be that Ben and Rubie moved there because her family moved there or
the other way around; in either case, her parents are known to also have lived in
Fithian, per the memoir of Rubie's mother, Corinina Knowlton Geeding.
From 1916 to 1921, Ben and Rubie's family lived in Danville, Illinois, a major hub
for the C & E Railroad and located just 19 miles east of Fithian. The next three
children, Helen, Wilma and my Dad, Howard, were born in Danville. The family's final
move was 150 miles north by northeast to Harvey, Illinois, where the last two children,
Bernard and Lois, were born, from 1923 - 1925, and the family put down permanent
roots.
Dad says they moved to Harvey when he was two months old, making it June, 1921.
Did Benjamin's parents follow Benjamin's family there or move with them? When I
posed this question to dad, he was seriously doubtful, implying that it would not
have been tolerable, in the typically taciturn Saalman way. Dad remembers his maternal
grandmother Saalman, Nancy Virginia Pollard Saalman, sitting on the front porch
of her house in Harvey smoking a pipe and speaking German. Her husband, his Grandpa Joseph Christian
was born in 1860 and died in 1933 at age 73, when dad was 12 years old.Next »