Two Rivers

Dad. A Seattle Police lieutenant, badge 2246: joined 21 March 1962, served in Homicide among other units, retired 8 January 1986. He went by his middle name — he signed his own mother's death certificate as "P. Craig Van De Putte."

He married twice. Barbara Nilsen was first — they married in King County in 1958, when she was not yet twenty — and she died at University Hospital on 17 January 1966, of lupus, aged twenty-six. She was the daughter of Erling Nilsen and Clara Nass, and she is buried at Evergreen. He married Betty Ann Dowd in King County the year after.

Dad’s older sister, and for a long time the only person on this side of the family we could not put a date to. She married twice — first a Macaulay, who was Marylyn’s father, and then, in February 1954, Kenneth Morgan. Four children in all: Marylyn, Aaron, Kurt and Stephen. She worked for King County as a section supervisor, and the family lived out in the SeaTac country south of the city.

She died of cancer at Group Health on the thirtieth of December 1988, fifty-six years old, and was cremated at Washington Memorial Park. Ken signed the certificate.

A clerk in 1988, filling in two boxes near the top of her death certificate, wrote her father as Homer Van de Putte and her mother as Janice Hammack. That is how we have her at all — not from anyone’s memory, but from two lines on a form, which put her in this family beyond argument.

Grandpa, and the one man on this page nobody living met — until this summer, when four documents gave him back. He was Octave’s son, born in Seattle in the August after his parents buried three children in eight days. He was five foot ten and a hundred and sixty pounds, with blue eyes and brown hair.

He was living in San Francisco when he married Janis Carolyn Hammack — not in a church and not in the Midwest, but in front of a justice of the peace at Tumwater, sixty miles south of Seattle, on 22 July 1931. She gave her occupation to the clerk as Daddy’s girl. Joan was born six months later; Dad came in 1938.

On the morning of 16 February 1942 he walked into Local Board No. 4 on Harrison Street, registered for the draft with the rest of the country, gave his employer as the Seattle-Tacoma Shipyard, named his mother at Kent as the person who would always know where he was, and signed his name. At noon he died on the sidewalk at Fourth and Pine, of a coronary occlusion, thirty-seven years old. He was buried three days later at St Patrick’s, in the same ground as his father and the three children of 1904. Janis was thirty-four, with Joan at ten and Dad at four, and she was a widow for forty-one years.

Dad’s great-grandfather, and the one who went first. He was born in the Kalverstraat house on 12 May 1868 — a sister, Celina, had come in 1866, then Octave, then Joseph Henri in 1870, then Camille Gomar — and he was across the water before he was twenty. By May 1888 he was buying six lots in Gilman Park, now Ballard, and he was trading again in 1890. He married Eugenia Johnson — Jennie, a Michigan girl — at Spokane in 1892.

Then the winter of 1904. They lost three children in eight days at their house on East Olive Street — Philip, five; Frank, eight; Jeanette, nine. They lie together in one plot at St Patrick’s, out at Kent. That August Jennie bore another son, and they named him Homer: Dad’s father, born into a house that had just been emptied.

The marriage did not survive it. By 1910 the two boys who lived, Florent and Homer, are in a relative’s household and written down as nephews; somewhere before 1920 Octave and Jennie divorced, and she married Henry Schatz and went out to Kent, where she was still living when Homer named her on his draft card in 1942. Octave died on Mercer Island on 30 April 1937, a labourer, sixty-eight, and his certificate says divorced. It also names his own father and mother — Philippe Vande Putte and Melanie Desmet, of Belgium — and that one line is what ties this whole side of the family to a single village. He was buried with his three children.

His younger brother is why this page was wrong for a long time. Camille Gomar Vandeputte was born at Zulzeke on 5 January 1873, eight weeks after their father died; he came out to Seattle in his turn, married Marguerite Comiant in King County in 1900, kept a grocery, and died on Mercer Island in 1930 — the same island his brother would die on seven years later. He is buried at Calvary. Gomar is a Flemish name with no English form; Homer is what it becomes in the mouth of an American clerk, so he died Homer J. Vande Putte. And Octave had already named a son Homer. There were two Homer J. Vande Puttes in Seattle, uncle and nephew, thirty-one years apart.

The far end of the Flanders stream, and for a long time only two names on a single sheet of paper — Homer J.'s 1930 certificate, written down by a clerk on Mercer Island half a century and an ocean from wherever they were standing when they had him. They no longer rest on one sheet. Octave Vande Putte died in Seattle on 30 April 1937 and his certificate names the same father and the same mother. Two brothers, one couple behind them.

They were married in the village on 9 August 1865, at five in the evening, and the marriage act is the most generous document on this side of the page: it gives Philippe’s own birth as 17 January 1827 at Zulzeke and Melanie’s as 14 September 1833, in the same village. He was a farmer, thirty-eight; she was thirty-one. Both of them had already buried a father.

His parents were Pieter Vandeputte and Ferdinanda Cousaert, both dead before the wedding. Hers were Eugenius Desmet, dead since 1859, and Regina De Keyzer, who was sixty-four and stood in the room to give her consent — the only one of the four grandparents alive to see it. Melanie outlived Philippe by twenty years and died at Meulebeke in 1892.

Philippe’s parents, and the oldest people on Dad’s side of this page. We know them the way you know anyone who survives in one sentence of somebody else’s paperwork: two of their son’s documents name them, place them in the village, and give their dates. Ferdinanda died on 9 November 1840 — both papers agree on that. Pieter died on a sixth of May, and the two papers do not agree on which one: his son’s marriage act of 1865 says 1858, his son’s death act of 1872 says 1850. The day and the month are the same in both. One clerk wrote one Dutch word wrong, and until somebody reads Pieter’s own act we do not know which clerk it was.

Set those against Philippe’s own dates and a shape comes out of them. He was thirteen when his mother died, and somewhere between twenty-three and thirty-one when he buried his father. He was dead himself before he was fifty, and his last son was born eight weeks later and never saw him. Three generations in one village, and in each of them a boy grew up short a parent.

Their own records are still in the Zulzeke registers, unread — a marriage somewhere before January 1827, and two death acts that would settle the year, give their ages and birthplaces, and put one more generation behind them.

Melanie’s parents, and new to this page — they come out of the 1865 marriage act, which had to account for all four parents before it could let the wedding happen. Eugenius was already six years dead. Regina was sixty-four, a farmer’s widow living in the village, and the act records her as present and consenting: she was in the room.

They also explain the man who keeps turning up. Jean Baptiste Desmet — who registers Octave’s birth in 1868, reports Philippe’s death in 1872, and walks to the town hall again in January 1873 to register the posthumous baby — is Melanie’s brother, and so their son. Three of the four Belgian documents on this page were declared by him. When the Vandeputte men were gone, the Desmets did the paperwork.

Zulzeke is a farming village in East Flanders, near Ronse, folded into Kluisbergen now. The family farmed on the Kalverstraat, and the street does both jobs in this story. On 12 May 1868, at two in the morning, Melanie had a son there and Philippe walked to the town hall the same afternoon to name him Octave Cyrille. Four years later, on 5 November 1872, at two in the afternoon, Philippe died in that house — Kalverstraat 22, forty-four years old. Melanie was pregnant when he died.

On 5 January 1873, at one in the morning, she had a son, and her brother walked to the town hall to register him — Camille Gomar, the last of them, born eight weeks after the funeral and into a house with no father in it.

But the stream this family came down runs through the other boy: the one born in that same room at two in the morning, five winters earlier. Octave was buying land in Ballard before he was twenty. That is the whole distance between this village and a Seattle shipyard — a farmhouse on the Kalverstraat, a farmer dead at forty-four, and a grandson who would sign his name one February morning and be dead by noon.

Octave was not the only one to come. Stanislas married Mary Van Bossche in King County in 1890; Frank and Octave turn up together at a south-county social in 1894. And the King County census of 1 June 1889 catches three Belgian-born Vandeputte boys on a single page out in the White River precinct, aged twenty, nineteen and sixteen. Octave’s age is right and Camille Gomar’s is right to the year; the middle boy is set down under an F, which is not the initial of the brother who belongs between them, and who he was is a question this page still cannot answer.

Van de putte is a Flemish habitational name — "from the well." It is thickest in West Flanders, but the register that matters here is one province east.

Grandma. A retired clerk who did appliance repair. She died at home of osteosarcoma and was cremated at Washelli. Her certificate is the document that settles the most: it names her husband — Homer Van De Putte — and her parents, Henry C. Hammack and Florence Richmond, of Ohio. She had been a widow since 1942 — forty-one years, in the house she died in. She had a sister, Pauline Elizabeth Hammack (1899–1994), who never married and was named for their grandmother.

Janis's parents. Henry was born at Lancaster, Ohio on the last day of October 1875; Florence in Ohio in 1877. They came out to Seattle around 1925 and took the house at 4903 Burke Avenue — the same house Janis would die in fifty-eight years later, and the address Homer gave on his draft card the morning he died. The two halves of Dad’s family were not just in the same city; they were under the same roof. Florence died there in 1929, the day after her fifty-second birthday, and Henry followed in 1948. Both of them were put on a train home to Lima, Ohio, to be buried. Their certificates name their own parents — Michael Hammack and Nancy Wiseman, Edward E. Richmond and Pauline Alexander. He signed his own draft card in 1918 in full: Henry Clay Hammack, assistant manager of the repair parts department at the Lima Locomotive Works, grey eyes, brown hair. He had started out a stenographer. He named his son Clay.

Henry's parents, and for a long time only two names copied off a coroner's file with no birthplaces beside them. They turn out to be real, and they are still in the ground at Forest Rose Cemetery in Lancaster, their headstones standing. Henry was the youngest of at least six — Charles, Edwin, Ella, Lizzie, Orrin and Henry — born to a mother of about forty-four, twenty-two years after the eldest. When his sister Ella died at Lancaster in 1931 the court wrote down where the family had got to: one brother on King Avenue, one in New Jersey, and Henry C. Hammack, of Seattle, Washington.

Michael's parents. The names are Pennsylvania German, like most of the names around Lancaster in those years — Mauck, Shambaugh, and Wiseman, which was very likely Weissmann before it crossed the Atlantic. This family carried mothers' maiden names forward as middle names, generation after generation, which is how a man born in 1800 comes to be called Shambaugh and a boy born in 1853 comes to be called Charles Weisman Hammack. The habit is a kind of memory, and it runs back further than Ohio: Rev. John's own brother, born in Berks County in 1759, was Joseph Davis Wiseman — their mother was Elizabeth Davis.

Nancy's parents, and Rev. John's son. Philip was a farmer in Walnut township who read books and took the National Intelligencer, and in 1848 he stood as the Whig candidate for Fairfield County's seat. He died at fifty-five. One of his daughters was Nancy, who married Michael Hammack. One of his sons wrote all of this down.

Charles Milton Lewis Wiseman — Grandma Janis's great-uncle — became the historian of Fairfield County. He published the Centennial History of Lancaster in 1898 and Pioneer Period and Pioneer People of Fairfield County in 1901, and in 1902 a thirty-eight page pamphlet on his own people, The Wiseman Family and the Old Church at New Salem. He wrote because he thought what was known "ought to be gathered in one volume and preserved." A hundred and twenty-five years later his book is free on the internet, and it is how the rest of this page got written.

In his 1901 book C. M. L. Wiseman set down where the family came from. Isaac Wiseman and his wife Elizabeth left Berks County, Pennsylvania for Rockingham County, Virginia, "soon after the war of the Revolution," with seven sons. One of them, John, became a Methodist preacher commissioned by Bishop Asbury, and at sixty moved his whole family to Ohio — farmer, carpenter, blacksmith, wagon maker, cabinet maker, shoe maker and preacher, "and in all, a good, conscientious workman." His stone at New Salem still gives his age to the day: aged 81 years, 5 months and 4 days. Of him his grandson wrote one more sentence: "Rev. John Wiseman was a soldier of the Revolution under General Washington, and was one of the sufferers at Valley Forge." That is the family's own account, written down sixty years after his death by a man who knew the house he died in.

John's father, and the man the 1901 book begins with. He was born at Amityville in Berks County and married Elizabeth Davis there in 1758; they had eleven children, seven of them sons, and John was the second. He died in Monroe County, Virginia — West Virginia now — and the grave there carries a government headstone that settles what the family actually did in the war — "Isaac Wiseman, 2nd Class Private, Pennsylvania Militia, Revolutionary War" — and the dates cut into it, 1738 and 1818, match the family Bible to the day. He lies at Old Rehoboth, the oldest Methodist meeting house west of the Alleghenies, in the yard of the log church where Bishop Asbury preached — the same bishop who, in 1785, commissioned his son John. Behind him stand his own parents, Isaac Wiseman and Mary Neal "Marsy" Marshall, born about 1690: ten generations back from Craig, and the oldest names anywhere on this page.