Bird Suttenfield, Ella, and the Foundling

      

Poor Bird Suttenfield. He seems to have had a complicated love life, and a horrible death. He was also the recipient of an amazing gift.

Bird was born in Fort Wayne in November 1865, the son of Asa More Suttenfield and Louisa Bennett. He was the baby of his family, and probably was named after his uncle Ochmig Bird, who served in the Indiana State Legislature.

     When Bird was born, his family had returned to Fort Wayne after more than a decade in Missouri. Soon they uprooted again and Bird’s early years were spent in Osage County, Arkansas. By 1880, if not earlier, the family returned once again to Fort Wayne where both Bird and his parents would live for the rest of their lives. 

     Asa More was the son of early Fort Wayne settlers William Suttenfield and Laura Taylor. He farmed and worked as a wagoner and teamster. Bird followed in his father’s footsteps as a teamster.  

     On the last day of 1892, Bird’s complicated marital life began. He was 27 when he married 17-year old Ella Viola Hummel. Ella had a difficult start in life. Her parents divorced when she was a toddler and her father took the children. He died when she was 16, and now, Ella could presumably have her own home and be supported by a husband. 

     Two years later, there was a curious item in the newspaper. “On the Doorstep,” the headline read. “Baby Left at the Home of Bird Suttenfield.” 

     Yesterday evening Bird Suttenfield, a well-known citizen, living at No. 358 west Washington street, reported to Humane Agent [Louis] Schlaudroff that on Friday evening someone had left a tiny girl baby in a basket on his doorstep. The baby was about four days old and scantily dressed. Mr. Suttenfield took the little stranger in and will probably keep her. 

     The Fort Wayne News had a more detailed account:

Deserted, left alone, lily-clad and tucked away in a market basket was the two-day old baby found at the doorstep of Mr. and Mrs. Bert [sic] Suttenfield, 358 West Washington street Friday night. At midnight the coldness of the air aroused Mr. Suttenfield, and he went outdoors to carry some plants into the house to prevent the frost destroying them. On the steps of his home he heard a cooing and mumbling sound. He lowered his ear to the tender disturbances of the night and the sound continued. He bent over and found on his doorstep a basket.

In this second account, the baby is identified as a tiny baby boy, who thrust his chubby hands out of the blanket he was wrapped in when the basket was brought inside. "It was cold and hungry and fretful, but was carefully nursed and is today bright and healthy."

Why would anyone pick Bird as the person to entrust their newborn to? It’s hard to imagine that even a desperate mother would randomly pick a house, any house. Bird and Ella had been married nearly two years with no baby. Maybe the mother was someone Ella knew. This was an era in which, if you found a baby on your doorstep, you could just decide to keep it. Agent Schlaudroff worked for the Humane Society and Fort Wayne police. As in communities across the country, he was frequently advertising the need for a home for a boy or girl. It seems that Bird and Ella took in this amazing gift left at their door.

This is an illustration from an 1887 syndicated article on foundlings in New York City. About 200 abandoned babies were found in the streets of the city annually in this time period.

     Just two years later, however, on August 11, 1896, the court granted Ella a divorce from Bird. There was no mention of a child, but children were not mentioned in every newspaper report of divorce.

     By November, Ella changed her mind. She and Bird remarried in her hometown, nearby Huntington, on the 16th. Apparently, the second time around didn’t go well. After the two stayed in Huntington for two weeks, Ella returned to Fort Wayne expecting Bird to join her. Time passed. She received an envelope in the mail from him with baggage checks but nothing more. When she tried to find out his whereabouts, she was unsuccessful. On January 9th, 1897, she filed for divorce on the grounds of desertion. In February, the court granted her request and restored her maiden name. 

     Ella was back in court and in the newspaper exactly a year later. She was seven months pregnant and single. She filed a paternity suit against Solomon Keim, a Fort Wayne insurance agent. “The case was continued as it was understood the couple are to marry,” the paper reported. In fact, the case was heard on Feb. 21 and that same day, Solomon and Ella married. In April, their son Stewart L. Woodford Keim was born.

     In time, Bird moved on, too. In February 1900 he remarried to Olladine “Ollie” Shafer. She was divorced and brought two children into the marriage, a 10-year old son and 13-year old daughter. In June when they were enumerated on the census, Bird, Ollie and the kids lived with Bird’s parents, Asa More and Louisa. Sadly, Ollie died of cancer in 1906 when she was only 39. 

     Things get interesting- and confusing -  in the 1910 census. Ella was enumerated twice - once living with Bird and once living with Solomon. Remember the foundling baby on Bird’s doorstep in 1894? Daughter Iona Suttenfield was living with Bird and Ella. The enumerator marked “M2” for Bird and Ella’s marital status. “M2” was to be marked whenever a couple had two or more marriages. They were reported to have been married for five years, which would have counted their previous time together. That year, the census asked women how many children they had given birth to, and how many were still living. On the census with Bird, Ella reported two babies delivered and two alive. The Ella V. on the census with Solomon reported one birth and one living child.

     How to explain this? Could there be two Ella V. Hummels both born in the same year living in Fort Wayne at the same time? Or could Ella mistakenly be listed twice? It happened. But why would she say she was married to both men? Surely they wouldn’t put up with such an arrangement. What about Iona? Was she the little foundling left on the doorstep? Or did Ella and Bird have a biological child together, who happened to be born the same year as the foundling? 

     In 1914, Miss Iona Suttenfield was working as a stenographer in Cleveland, Ohio. When Bird’s sister Mary Ora Bair was widowed, she moved there at the turn of the century to live with her adult daughter Lulu. Did Iona join them? Or was it just a coincidence that she moved to Cleveland? 

     In 1916, Iona married attorney Charles Brenner in Cleveland. Bird Suttenfield and Ella V. Hummel were listed on her marriage certificate as her parents. Yet when Bird’s parents died, only two grandchildren were listed as survivors – not Iona, although she was alive. Did Bird’s parents or the family member supplying the information for the obituaries not consider Iona a true member of the family? Attitudes on adoption were different, and an adoptee could be considered as not really “one of us.”

     Bird died a year after Iona married. He had a horrible death no one deserves. “Bird Suttenfield Mangled By Nickel Plate Train Saturday,” read the headline December 10, 1917. Newspapers in the past did not hold back on gory details. The article reported that he was dragged for at least a block, as one arm was found a block away from the rest of his body. The word “mangled” was used several times. Going by the date on his gravestone, Bird was only 52 when he died. He was still working as a teamster, still living on Washington Street where he lived with a roommate, and was said to be walking home from work at the time of the accident. He was buried beside his father in Lindenwood Cemetery in Fort Wayne. 

     On the 1920 census, Ella V. Keim is living with Solomon. Her married son Stewart lived next door. Iona lived in Cleveland with her husband, and was no longer working. Is it possible that Ella divorced Solomon and remarried Bird for a third time when they were enumerated on the 1910 census together, then remarried Solomon after Bird’s death? What happened to Iona? She and her husband Charles divorced sometime after the 1920 census, and there Iona’s trail runs cold.

     More records or newspaper items would help. There are “brick walls” and unanswered questions in every family tree.

Note: Bird was the nephew of my third great-grandparents, Myron and Jane (Suttenfield) Barbour. Jane’s brother was Asa More Suttenfield. (Bird was my great-great grandfather’s cousin.) I don’t have proof, but I believe Iona Suttenfield was the adopted daughter of Bird and Ella, the little foundling left in a basket on their doorstep. I also believe there was just one Ella Viola Hummel living in Fort Wayne, born in 1876 with parents born in Ohio. Why she would be enumerated with two different men on one census is a mystery I can’t explain. 

Sources:

"In a Basket. A Baby Was Left on a Westside Doorstep," Fort Wayne News, 17 Sept. 1894, p. 1.

"On the Doorstep," Fort Wayne Sentinel, 17 Sept. 1894, p. 1.

Copyright Andrea Auclair © 2023