Ancestry Magazine

By chance, this family’s favorite vacation spot turned into a research mecca for the family’s history.

My husband, John, really loves Colorado, especially the area of Leadville. Leadville, located at 10,200 feet above sea level, is the highest incorporated city in the United States and was a booming mining camp in the 1880s. We live in Texas, but for the past twenty years we’ve spent many vacations enjoying Leadville’s scenic beauty and colorful history.

While I appreciate the area’s spectacular vistas, they don’t strike the same primal chord with me that they do with my husband. (I’m sure his love of Colorado must be connected to his Norwegian ancestry.) As he enthuses over the unequalled skiing, snow-mobiling, mountain climbing, hiking, and fishing offered by the area, I can’t help but wish that I could be indulging in my own passion—family history—while we’re vacationing in Leadville. I have often thought that if someone in my family had lived in Leadville, I would be able to do research at the local library. It has a very good genealogy section and I would love to use it.

About three years ago a cousin sent me a copy of a newspaper clipping of the obituary of my great-great-aunt Amanda (Brackville) Hudson, who passed away in Arkansas in 1911.Aunt Amanda was an older sister of my great-grandmother Lenora h Jane (Brackville) Carter, and was known in the family as Aunt Nunas. I was thrilled to receive the clipping as the Brackville family has been very difficult to trace.

The obituary was not long, but the information in it was intriguing. It gave no mention of the given name of Aunt Amanda’s husband, just that she had lived most of her married life in California and Colorado and had returned to her home state of Arkansas after her husband’s death. Using the clipping, I was able to estimate that she had been married about 1865, and that her husband died about 1889. I filed the clipping and moved on to other easier research projects, remaining stalled on the Brackville family.

But I couldn’t get that brief mention of Colorado out of my mind. During the time the Hudsons were living in California and Colorado, the two areas had one major thing in common—mining. And Leadville was the mining capital of Colorado. I mentioned wistfully to my husband on more than one occasion, “Wouldn’t it be something if Aunt Amanda lived in Leadville during the time she was in Colorado?”

While on vacation to Leadville this past August, I felt an almost physical tug to search the old cemetery each time I drove past it. We had visited the cemetery years before and I had found it to be a wonderful glimpse into history, with gravestones dating back to the 1870s. Even though the urge to return to the cemetery on this particular trip was almost overwhelming, I didn’t give in. After all, neither my husband nor I had ever had any family in Leadville that we knew of.

By the time our vacation ended and we returned home, the 1880 every-name index had been added to the Ancestry.com census database, along with direct links to the actual images. This time I couldn’t resist the urge. I had to see where Aunt Amanda was living in 1880 on the remote chance that it was Leadville.

When I entered Amanda Hudson and Colorado into the search boxes for the 18 80 census, only one entry popped up—Amanda A. Hudson. My Aunt Nunas’s middle name was Ann, so the middle initial was an unexpected bonus that fit.

As I read the results across the line on the screen, my heart began to beat faster. The age and state of birth were right, and yes, this Amanda A. Hudson was enumerated in Leadville, Colorado! But was she my Aunt Nunas?

After clicking my way to the original image, I knew almost immediately that she was the right Amanda Hudson. My great-great-aunt Dot was also listed in the household. Dot was actually Civility Brackville, Amanda Ann’s oldest sister. Aunt Civility never married; she spent her lifetime living with one sister and then another after the deaths of her parents in 1877. She was affectionately known as Dot by her family.

A two-year-old child enumerated as Gracie was another corroborating factor, as Grace Lee was listed as Aunt Amanda’s surviving daughter in her 1911 obituary. An eleven-year-old son named Leanza was also enumerated with the household, but I had never heard of this child. The head of household for the Hudson family was listed as Dr. J. M. Hudson. Unbelievably, I actually had family in Leadville.

I was so excited to locate both Aunt Nunas and Aunt Dot in Leadville in the 1880 census that I spent the following weekend organizing and typing all the Brackville family information I had been able to locate thus far into a research report.

My husband, who is always supportive of my frenzied research projects, rarely gets involved in the details. He prefers instead to nod encouragingly as I bore him with recitations of my finds. On this Saturday morning, though, he mumbled as he woke up, “Go to Google and type in Brackville.” At the time I was sure that he was talking in his sleep, but I took his advice.

Since Brackville is an uncommon surname, only twenty-one hits came up. The majority referenced original records for members of my B rackville family. By Sunday evening I had a fairly good overview of my great-grandmother’s generation of the Brackville family typed up in narrative format, covering an approximate nine-decade time period. I also had lots of questions.

On Monday morning I received an unexpected package from a second cousin who lives several states away. The package was filled with original photos and tin-types of the Brackville family from the 1850s to about 1910.

The arrival of the photos was an incredible coincidence—I had not previously known that they even existed. There were several handwritten notes on the photos, as well as a number of visual clues in the photos themselves, that helped answer some of the questions that had surfaced during the previous weekend of research on the Brackville family.

It was a long three months before my husband and I could schedule another visit to Leadville. This time, we went straight to the library, which has city directories for 1879 to 1900. With my husband’s help, I quickly found Dr. John M. Hudson, veterinary surgeon, listed in both the 1879 and 1880 city directories. By comparing the two entries, we were able to determine that in 1879 he was boarding in a hotel and officing in a livery stable. By the 1880 entry, he had a home address, a veterinary office, and a partnership in his own livery stable.

Unfortunately, there was no listing for Dr. Hudson in the 1881 city directory and we found no further mention of him in any of the other records at the Leadville library.

Although many of the original buildings from the 1880s still remain in Leadville, we were disappointed to find buildings of a later era at the addresses listed in the 1880 city directory for Dr. Hudson’s home, veterinary office, and livery stable. Since Dr. Hudson didn’t die until about 1889, I doubted we would find him buried in Leadville anyway. But is it possible that the eleven-year-old son, Leanza Hudson, is buried there? If young Leanza died in Leadville, it might explain why he was previously unknown in the family.

From the logos on some of the old photographs, I suspected that Dr. Hudson may have moved his family to Denver after leaving Leadville. After another four months of anticipation, a family ski trip to Leadville for spring break gave me the perfect opportunity to spend a day in the Denver library.

I began my search with the 1881 Denver City Directory, but had no luck for a few years of directories. My first find was an entry for the Denver photography studio of J.E. Beebe, whose logo was on a photo of Grace Lee Hudson that was taken when she was a young girl. The Beebe photography studio appears for the first time in the Denver City Directory in 1887, when Grace would have been about nine years old, based on her reported age of two on the 1880 Census.

Dr. John M. Hudson, veterinary surgeon, doesn’t show up in the Denver City Directory until 1888. That year he is listed on the same street as the Beebe photography studio, with an address just two blocks away. But he isn’t listed in the 1889 directory, which correlates with the information in Aunt Amanda’s obituary. According to that clipping, he died about 1889. There is a listing in 1889 for Mrs. J.M. Hudson, although she had moved to a different address than the one given the previous year for Dr. Hudson. I decided to follow up on a hunch that was based on an old family story.

Oral family history says that another of Aunt Amanda and Aunt Dot’s sisters—Ellen Brackville—married a Thomas O’Connor, and that the O’Connors lived in Denver for some time where they operated a rooming house. I haven’t been able to locate the O’Connors on the 1880 Census, and there are multiple Thomas O’Connors listed in the Denver city directories during the 1880s. None were associated with a rooming house, though, so I had no way of determining which, if any, of the Thomas O’Connors listed in Denver wa s married to my Aunt Ellen.

On the off chance that Aunt Amanda might have moved in with her sister Ellen O’Connor after the death of Dr. Hudson, I checked the address given in the 1889 City Directory for Mrs. J. M. Hudson against those listed for the various Thomas O’Connors in the same directory. Sure enough, there was a Thomas O’Connor listed at the same address as that of Mrs. J. M. Hudson. I could now track Aunt Ellen during her time in Colorado as well! I also learned that Thomas O’Connor’s business address was listed as a saloon, not a rooming house.

Aunt Amanda wasn’t listed in the 1890 directory, but according to her obituary she had moved back to Little Rock, Arkansas, by 1890, where she remained until her death.

More questions are now nagging me. Where was Aunt Amanda between 1881 and 1888? Georgetown, Fair Play, Breckenridge, and Central City were all booming mining communities in Colorado during that time. Did the Hudsons spend time in one or more of those towns before moving on to Denver? And now that I know how to identify the right O’Connor family in Denver, I’d love to know more about that saloon! Plus, I still have a real desire to visit the old cemetery in Leadville again.

I can’t wait to return to Colorado. I have plenty of research to keep me occupied for many more vacations!

Marcy Carter-Lovick of Southlake, Texas, has been researching her family history for the past three years. She is a member of the National Society of Daughters of the American Revolution, the National Society of United States Daughters of 1812, and the Daughters of Union Veterans of the Civil War.

Return to July/August 2004 issue of Ancestry Magazine.