Josephine “Josie” Cleage

February 1, 2013African-American Genealogy & Slave Ancestry Research, Cleages#Josephine CleageKristin

Josephine “Josie” Cleage was my grandfather Albert B. Cleage’s older sister and today I will tell what I have learned about her.

Josephine Cleage, who was always called Josie, was born in 1873 in Louden County, Tennessee. She was the first child of Louis and Celia (Rice) Cleage. In the early years, Louis worked on a farm and Celia kept house. Eventually there were four younger brothers – Henry, Jacob, Edward and Albert. Josie’s father Louis was remembered as a drinker who didn’t always bring his pay home. He started working on the railroad and several years later her parents went their separate ways.

Left to right: Albert, Josephine, Edward. Back L Henry, back R Jacob

In September 1894, twenty year old Josie married 22 year old James Cleage. Although they were both named Cleage, it was not because they were related. Josie’s family was enslaved on Alexander Cleage’s plantation while James Cleage’s family was enslaved on David Cleage’s plantation. James’ parents were Jerry Cleage and Charlotte Bridgeman. You can read more about them here -> Jerry Cleage and Charlotte Bridgeman and here -> Jerry Cleage, A Slave for Life

Both were born after the Civil War. Their first daughter, Henrietta was born in 1897 with second daughter Lucille following in 1899.

In April of 1897 Josie’s mother, Celia, married her second husband William Roger Sherman of Athens, Tennessee. By 1900 the whole family was living in Athens. Josie, now 27, and her family were living next door to her mother, step-father and brothers. Husband James, 29 was teaching school. According to the 1900 census Josie was able to read and write.

Sometime after 1890 Jacob Lincoln Cook, founded the Athens Academy. James Cleage was one of the small group of dedicated educators that worked with him and taught there in the early years. In 1900 J.L. Cook was appointed president of Henderson Normal Institute in Henderson, North Carolina. James also went to North Carolina and began teaching at the Institute. In 1901 Josie and James first son, James Oscar, was born there. My grandfather, Albert, lived with his aunt’s family while he was attending high school at Henderson Normal. He graduated in 1902. By the time Albert David (called David) was born in 1907, the family was back in Athens, Tennessee, but not for long.

By 1905 Henry and Jacob Cleage had relocated to Indianapolis, Indiana and in 1908 James, Josie and their growing family joined them there. Their youngest daughter, Hattie Ruth was born in Indianapolis in 1909. James worked a porter and later at a printing shop. Josie stayed home and raised the children and kept the house.

Josephine+with+other+members — Josephine Cleage is wearing the dark dress, on the far right.

Both James and Josie were active in Witherspoon Presbyterian Church. I found these short items in the Indianapolis Star “News of The Colored Folk” during 1911.

March 11, 1911
Officers of the Witherspoon United Presbyterian Church entertained its members at the church at a banquet Tuesday night. Dr. H.L. Hummons was toastmaster. Addresses were made by Henry and James Cleage, Mrs. Lillian T. Fox and Mrs. M.A. Clark.

April 9, 1911 Sunday
The Witherspoon United Presbyterian Church will give its annual musicale Friday evening at the church on North West street. The following program will be given: Solo, Mrs. T.A. Smythe; reading, Mrs. James Cleage; clarinet solo, Philip Tosch; reading, Mrs. Harriet Mitchel; quartet, Messrs. Lewis, Thompson, Chavis and Thompson. The church choir will render three selections. Mrs. Daisy Brabham has program in charge.

My uncle Henry Cleage remembered family visits to Indianapolis during the summers. He said his Aunt Josie was a real intellectual who read a lot and could talk about a variety of topics. He also remembered catching fireflies and that someone in the family had a goat. My aunt Anna Cleage Shreve remembered her uncle James as a very quiet, gentle man who helped around the house. Uncle Edward’s daughter Juanita Cleage Martin wrote in her memoirs that she remembered her aunt as being tall with a pleasant smile, easy going with a lot of hair.

Josie’s children all finished several years of high school and then got married or started working or both. Lucille seems to have been the first to relocate to Detroit where her uncles Albert, Jacob and Henry settled. After Josie’s husband James A. Cleage died in 1933, Josie also moved to Detroit. In 1940 she was living not far from her brothers with her son David and his family on Stoval.

Josephine Cleage died in July of 1956 at age 82 and is buried in Detroit Memorial Park East Cemetery.

February Photo Collage Festival – 28 photos, 28 posts.

January 30, 2013February Photo collage Festival, PhotographsKristin

This February Julie@Anglers Rest is hosting a February Festival of Collages. It all started after Pauleen of Family history across the sea posted a collage and we started commenting. Before we knew it, this challenge was born. Participants will post a collage of 28 photographs on January 30 or 31 and for each day of February we will blog about one of the photos. There are no other rules. It doesn’t have to be about genealogy. To participate you just post a link to your collage on Julie’s page at the link above.

I decided to combine several themes in my collage. I have several photos of places I lived that weren’t covered in the A-Z challenge last year. I have some Sepia Saturday themes that I will cover on the appropriate Saturdays. I have been working on investigations for two separate family lines. I will write up one of them during this challenge. One is “What happened to Hugh Reed and his family?” I will be writing about each of the members of this family. I will be writing about what happened to the cousins who appeared in this photo in answer to the question “What did they do when they grew up?”. I’ve filled in the remaining spaces with relatives or events I haven’t written up but want to. The first post will appear on Friday, February 1. I will be going through the pictures in no particular order.

A Trip to the Cleaners

January 25, 2013Cleages, Photographs, sepia saturday#DetroitKristin

I found this photo of an unidentified cleaners in my Cleage photographs. There are no Cleages in the photo. It’s pasted on a piece of cardboard and a child, has scribbled in pencil all over the picture. I assume unidentified Cleaners is located in the neighborhood of the Old Westside of Detroit.

I have not been able to identify either the cleaners or the owners. There is a “Detmer Woolens” calendar on the wall but I can’t make out the year even when I scan it at 600 dpi. The dress the woman behind the counter is wearing, the narrow pant legs of the menby the counter and in poster on the wall and the short hair on the calendar girl make me think the photo was taken in the mid-1930s. I found this history of Detmer Woolens interesting.

Sepia Saturday 161 Header — To read more Sepia Saturday posts CLICK!

and here is the link

Looking Over the Fence 1937

January 21, 2013Cleages, sepia saturday#black album, #Pearl Reed CleageKristin

This is my grandmother’s page from the “Black Album”. The photographs are the actual size you see if you enlarge the photograph above. They seems to have been cut from a proof page. Every member of the family except the youngest, Anna, had a page. Judging by the ages of the people in the book I think they were taken about 1935 – 1937. My grandmother would have been about 50.

The prompt this week shows a man facing away from us and leaning on the top of a truck. In my photograph my grandmother is leaning on the backyard fence of the house on Scotten. There is a spade in front of her and a pile of leaves behind. It looks like she was working with her plants. I remember my uncle Louis telling me once, after she was dead and he was old and not very well, that his mother always had the most beautiful flowers and that she would save the geraniums from year to year and they thrived. We were sitting in back of his cottage in Idlewild and looking at the geraniums and petunias his sister Gladys had planted in some flower boxes. The house on Scotten is a vacant lot now. Strangers live in the cottage in Idlewild.

Ice Skating in 1986 and 1961

January 16, 2013memoriesKristin

idlewild_skating_1986_blog — Out on the ice – James (or is that Kamau?), Jann, Ife, Shashu, Tulani & Ayanna.

This photo was taken in 1986 during the first winter we lived in Idlewild. We used a variety of shovels to clear the ice – new red plastic snow shovels, ancient metal snow shovels and a coal shovel we found in the garage. My aunt Gladys and uncle Hugh were in their 60s then and out skated all of us. They had racing skates and glided around with their hands behind their back looking so cool. You can see a photo of them in earlier years here – Skating Champions.

For most of the 20 years we lived there, the ice was frozen solid, 4 or more inches deep by Christmas and remained frozen until early spring. Ice fishermen came from far and wide to drill holes and sit on buckets or in little huts and fish through the ice. Once a car drove across from the far side to our side. This year Idlewild Lake hasn’t frozen at all because of the warm winter.

When I was in High school my sister and I would walk up to Northwestern High School and skate on the rink in a corner of the field. I found several articles in the Illustrated News from December 1961 and January 1962 about the lack of a warming shelter or place to leave your shoes while you skated at this same rink. I was in the 9th grade that year and I do remember this. Click on the pages below to enlarge and read the articles.

Part 1 of the story – the problem is raised.

Part two of the story…citizens become involved.

Part three of the ice skating shelter story – problem solved.

An Award Free Blog

January 14, 2013UncategorizedKristin

If anybody wants to use this, feel free. No need to link back either.

After reading To Award Or Not to Award on the blog Seeking Susan~Meeting Marie~Finding Family about giving and receiving blogging awards. I was sorry to learn that people are falling out over this. I had no idea it was such a loaded topic. I have decided that Catherine is right. It is only fair if bloggers, like me, who never fulfill the requirements of passing on the awards to other bloggers, let people know so that when awards are being given out, they go to people who will do all that is required. I googled and found quite a few “Award Free Blog” badges but I decided to design my own and post it in my sidebar. This doesn’t mean I don’t appreciate the awards I’ve received or that I am judgmental about who gets or gives awards. I do and I’m not.

Thank You and Some Thoughts About Blog Awards

January 12, 2013UncategorizedKristin

There has been a flurry of blog awarding going on recently and I have received a few. I love knowing that people read my blog and I’m overjoyed when they like it. I must admit though that I have always been uneasy about the passing the award along part and even the posting and writing about it part. It took as long for me to write this post about awards as it does to write a regular blog post.

Awards I received during the award frenzy of 2009-2010.

I remember the blogging award frenzy of 2009 -2010. It finally reached the point where there was nobody left to receive the awards because everybody had been nominated at least once. It hasn’t gotten quite that far this time but it’s heading there. This post – Blogging Genealogy: Blog Awards and SEO and the discussion now happening on Pauleen’s blog here – Blog of the Year 2012 Award Updates raise some interesting questions and concerns about blog awards in general.

Instead of fulfilling the requirements for the awards, I would like to thank everybody who has given me an award and those who have read my blog and commented either here or on facebook or Google + or Follow Friday me on Twitter, and also those who read and think about what I post without commenting. Instead of passing on the awards I am going to continue visiting blogs I enjoy, commenting when I have something to say and I’m going to set up a list of blogs that I read regularly and enjoy so that my readers can check them out for themselves if they want to.

Now the awards and Thank yous.

Because of the “Wonderful Team Member Readership Award” I discovered how to see the number of comments every reader ever made on my blog since moving to this site. Who knew? I didn’t. Sheryle of A Hundred Years Ago was my most prolific commentator with 74 comments.

THANK YOU Liv, Catherine, Pauleen, Julie, Kathy, Shelley and Andrea for the following awards

Liv of Claiming Kin

Catherine of Seeking Susan~Meeting Marie~Finding Family

Shelly of My Genealogical Journey/Danish West Indian Family History

Andrea Kelleher of How did I Get Here? My Amazing Genealogy Journey.

Yvette Porter Moore of Root Digger Genealogy

Wendy of Oregon gifts of Comfort and Joy

Pauleen of Family History Across the Seas

Julie of Anglers Rest

Kathy of Abbie and Evaline selected me for the Liebster Blog Award – “liebster” meaning “dearest” in German.

Doris Graham Cleage On A Beach

January 11, 2013Grahams, sepia saturday#Doris Graham CleageKristin

Here is my mother in a fragment of a photograph. I don’t recognize the beach. We can’t see who is on either side of her. Her hair is long and parted in the middle. Ribbons tie it on each side. A blanket seems to be behind her shoulders but not resting on them. Over her left shoulder are some people and loudspeakers on a pole. Over her right shoulder is a building, a jungle gym and a light on a pole.

I have other photos of my mother in bathing suits but none look like this one. She looks young, in her early 20s. I was born when she was 23, in 1946. Was it before or after I was born? The expression on her face reminds me of this photograph taken in Los Angeles in 1944. So long ago. All of my children are older than she was then.

2012.12W.25 — To see more swim suits, beaches and other Sepia Saturday offerings, CLICK!

Dr. Cleage Made City Physician – 1930 Detroit, MI

January 9, 2013Cleages#Albert B. Cleage Jr, #Albert B. Cleage Sr, #Henry CleageKristin

The article below sounds good, Mayor Bowles of Detroit fulfilled an election promise and appointed a black person, my grandfather, as city physician. I had read about this before in an article that praised Mayor Bowles for making the appointment. There was a veiled reference to the Mayor having been accused of being a member of a “secret group”.

Recently my cousin Jan was scanning photographs and old newspaper articles and she sent me the badly deteriorated copy of the article below. This article also praises Mayor Bowles for his appointment and talks about the negative pressure he has been receiving because of it. Although the end of the articles has crumbled there was enough left to make me wonder just what was going on? I googled Mayor Charles Bowles and Aaron C. Toodle, the mysterious pharmacist cited in the article below.

As it turns out, Mayor Bowles ran for Mayor several times, twice with the backing of the Ku Klux Klan. He was reputed to have ties with the bootleggers and racketeers in Detroit and this resulted in a petition of recall just 8 months after his election. My grandfather held the post of city physician for many years.

Both of the Newspapers quoted below were black newspapers. The first is the “Chicago Defender”. The second is the “Detroit Independent.” The racist statements were made in a white paper, “The Detroit Free Press”.

“Detroit, June 20 – The announcement was made from Mayor Charles Bowles’ office that Dr. Albert C. Cleage, West side physician, had been appointed to the position of city physician, the appointment to become effective July 1.

Dr. Cleage, who has been a resident here for the last 15 years, will be the first member of the group to be elevated to the position of city physician. Mayor Bowles is carrying out pre-election promises to appoint members of the group to better positions.

Dr. Cleage is a graduate of Knoxville college, Knoxville, Tenn. class of 1906. Dr. Cleage finished the medical course at Indiana university and was appointed interne at the City hospital, Indianapolis.

While at the City hospital Dr. Cleage took a competitive examination and finished second in a class that included graduates from practically every university in the country. Following his internship at Indianapolis, Dr. Cleage practiced medicine for three years in Kalamazoo, Mich, before coming to Detroit.

Dr. Cleage is married and the father of seven children. Albert, Jr, is a student at Detroit City College. Henry is a cello player in the all-city high school orchestra. The new appointee is an Elk and a member of the Alpha Phi Alpha and Sigma Pi Phi fraternities.”

———————–

Anti-Bowles Forces Resent Placing Negro on City Staff

“Dr. Albert B. Cleage 4225 McGraw Avenue, recent appointee of Mayor Charles Bowles to the staff of City Physicians, began his duties in that capacity last Tuesday morning. Dr. Cleage is eminently fitted for this position as he has served on the Welfare Department at Indianapolis, and is a graduate of the University of Indiana Medical College. Dr. Cleage’s salary will be $3,300 a year with a $600 allowance for a private car.

Considerable alarm has been manifested by the Anti-Bowles administration faction over the appointment of a Negro to the City Staff. Rather than credit Mayor Bowles with giving the group the representation that it should have had some years ago, this faction incriminates the mayor by charging him with making an effort to obtain a large percentage of race votes.

The Detroit Free Press charges that the appointment was engineered by John Gillespie, commissioner of public works, and that the appointment is coincidental with the dismissal of employee from the garbage department. The paper further asserts that Gillespie discharged these employees in order to replace them…(missing part)”

Free Press Hates Negroes

Negroes Appreciate Courage and Fairness of Mayor Bowles

Baseless Attack on Negroes Drive Former Enemies to Bowles Camp

When a newspaper is as anxious to run Detroit as the Free Press is it ought to have sense enough not to insult 50,000 Negro voters as it did July 1st.

Many City Physicians have been appointed in Detroit without appearing on the front page of the Free press. Why does the Free Press keep all others off the front page and put the Negro __tor (can’t make out) on the front page? For only one bad reason, only to harm the Negro and discredit Mr. Bowles by appealing to white prejudice.

The Free Press tried to make whites believe Mr. Bowles has done too much for Negroes.

If 80 percent of the welfare cases are colored, mayors long before Mayor Bowles should have had the courage and fairness to appoint a Negro.

Since no one else did, Negroes give all credit to Mayor Bowles and will stand by him for his fine attitude toward the race.

Mayor Attacked for City Race Appointment

(continued from page one)

Toodle, druggist, have been instrumental in having some of the dismissed employees re-hired. It is this activity of these men, it is believed, that the daily papers referred to when they erroneously stated:

“Dismissed employees of the garbage department said that Dr. Cleage has held a number of meetings with Aaron C. Toodle, Negro druggist at St. Antoine and Vernor Highway, for the purpose of placing Negro citizens in city jobs.”

In speaking of the consternation caused by a Negro’s being placed on the city’s payroll in a department other than the garbage department, Dr. Cleage said:

“There is absolutely no politics in this appointment. I have interested myself in getting jobs for unemployed Negroes and have succeeded in getting jobs for ten or twelve men with the city. Most of these were old city employees who had been laid off.”

_________________________

A Mystery Photo Revealed

January 3, 2013Reeds, sepia saturday#Blanche Young Reed, #WW1Kristin

I posted the photograph on the left in 2010 in Wordless Wednesday – Mystery Couple. At the time I didn’t know who either of them were and wasn’t sure about the uniform he was wearing. By googling I found that it was a World War 1 army dress uniform.

I posted the photo on the left a couple of months ago in Theresa Pearl’s Birthday – March 10, 1919. My cousin was scanning and sending me old photographs and this was one of them. Although only one of the children was labeled I knew who the other was because of other photos. I think that is probably their mother.

blanch_clifford–ww1 — Clifford Edison Young with one of his sisters.

Thresa's_birthday_1919 — Theresa Pearl, Blanche and Thomas P. Reed. 1919

Today I was looking on Ancestry.com trying to fill in some of the gaps and noticed there was a little waving leaf next to Uncle Hugh Reed’s brother-in-law, Clifford Edison Young. I decided to look and see what they had. There were several historical records, including a record of burial in the Los Angeles National Cemetery. It said that he was a Sergent in the United States Army during World War 1.

I thought of the photo of the mystery man in uniform immediately. I found the photograph and looked at it. I thought that the woman next to him looked like the woman with the two children – Blanche Young Reed. I am convinced that the soldier is Clifford but I’m not sure about the woman because Blanche had three younger sisters. Clifford was two years younger than she was and the three sisters were younger than they were. The sister in the picture looks younger than the soldier to me so I think that it was Nellie, Bessie or Elizabeth. Perhaps there is another picture that will turn up and completely solve the mystery.

2012.12W.14 — Click for more photos of WW 1, soldiers, kilts, bagpipes and/or huts.

Finding Eliza