Nancy Caroline Humphrey-9568
I am researching every detail I can find of the life of my great great grandmother Nancy Caroline (or Carrie) Humphrey Dunston Martin McMaster so I can write a book about her. She led a remarkable life!
First was fighting her first husband for custody of their children when she couldn’t put up with his controlling ways anymore. It took her five years and bribes of first money and then land, but she succeeded in the end.
She then married husband #2 (maybe—I can’t find any official marriage record, nor a divorce record when they split up ten years later) and moved from Michigan to Chicago. After running her own barbershop near the Stockyards, her children had all moved out and begun families of their own. That’s when she started a new chapter of her life and moved to Montana to become a homesteader in the middle of gold country at age 50.
She then switched gears when a new town was built literally across the street from her farm, so she subdivided it to take advantage of the building boom and opened the first restaurant in town (operating it out of a tent until the building was constructed). She then married her former farmhand (15 years her junior) Lloyd, and he ran the hotel above her restaurant.
At this time, they both became actively involved with the state’s Spiritualist community, attending state conventions and Carrie hosted weekly meetings on the topic in her restaurant.
For what might be a variety of reasons (maybe money problems, since they left behind unpaid taxes and a $400 lawsuit, maybe they saw that the mines were drying up), they moved to Oklahoma. There, they eventually became full time Spiritualists—he was a “divine healer,” and she was a trance medium and pastor of the home-based First National Spiritualist Church. In 1920, she was arrested for illegal fortune telling, and her unsuccessful appeal two years later was reported in newspapers around the country, since she was trying to get the appellate judges to rule on whether Spiritualism was a religion. They continued to offer their services until she passed in 1928.
Before I began my research, the only thing we knew about her was the barbershop in Chicago, and that was because her son Jesse, my great grandfather, also became a Chicago barber, and her business card was included in the stash of family photos I have inherited. Jesse never told his daughters about his childhood, so I think the upheaval of his mom walking out was just too painful for him to remember, even though he was eventually reunited with her. Whether he knew anything about her life in Montana of Oklahoma, I am just not too sure. He did have one sister Rose follow Carrie to both states, so she would have known what was going on with their mother, but who knows if she kept her siblings updated. If so, none of them mentioned anything to their children. I’ve since become acquainted with a few distant cousins who are descended from Jesse’s siblings, and no one knew anything about Carrie.
Edited to add: I have been watching YouTube videos of a bottle digger who lives in the Dakotas. I asked him how I might be able to get him to explore Carrie’s restaurant/hotel building in Montana. I am keeping my fingers crossed that he’ll get out there and can find a stash of discarded stuff in the building’s old privy, which is where all the best stuff was tossed.
