Caroline Elizabeth Milleman, Alfred and Sarah’s daughter, married Calvin Blakely, in Swansea on the 2nd
May 1856, when she was just 16. Calvin is “of full age”, a mariner, and says his father is Samuel Blakely,
farmer.
Calvin Blakely first appears in the British records as an inmate of the Dreadnought Seamen’s Hospital at
Greenwich; suffering from an abcess he was admitted on the 9th January 1854 and discharged two weeks
later. His age is given as 20, and he is 5’ 9”; born in Picton in Canada, he has served five years in the
merchant service, sailing out of Quebec, serving on board the Coronet. The Coronet, with master
Blennerhasset was a regular trans-Atlantic trader bringing cargoes of wood into the London docks, and
also into the Welsh ports.
It would have been in Wales that he met Caroline, as her family had moved there from Greenwich before
1851, and where her father was working as a merchant seaman. As the Coronet appears to have been a
regular visitor to the area bringing in timber after 1856, Calvin would have been able to come home to
Caroline in Swansea.
Caroline appears as a witness at her grandmother’s third marriage in Camberwell in 1859. Was this area
their home at this time? Calvin may have been sailing out of the Thames, but it seems more likely that he
had abandoned the sea to follow a new career which was to take him and Caroline two thirds of the way
around the world.
For Calvin next enters the record books in Williamstown in Victoria, Australia - Melbourne’s first port
settlement. Here he is working as a cabinet maker, the career he would follow for the rest of his working
life and on the 5th September 1865, aged 31, he joins the Excelsior Lodge, “from Caledonia” (was that
another Lodge?).
On the 9th March 1866 he set sail with Caroline on board the Anna bound for San Francisco. An image of
the passenger list is available on FamilySearch courtesy of the Public Record Office Victoria. Calvin gives his
age as 32 and his nationality as American, while Caroline is 26 and English. So it no surprise that they
appear in the 1870 US census in San Francisco, and now with a son, Alfred, just two months old.
Tracking them through the censuses and city directories, they remained in San Francisco for nearly thirty
years, adding another son, William Thornton Blakely to their family in 1874, and moving in later life to
Cucamonga township in San Bernardino County, near Los Angeles. Calvin worked as a carpenter for
various companies, including Excelsior Mills where he was a sash and blind maker. At one time - in 1877 -
he even appears to have had his own venture, Blakely, Murray & Co. By 1878 they are diversifying into the
grocery business, and Caroline appears in the directories in her own right on several occasions, most
notably in 1887 when she is credited with “bakery and notions”. Calvin meanwhile continues his carpentry
but combines it with “groceries and liquors SW cor Powell and California Aves B.H.” He made a foray down
to Los Angeles in 1888 when he is listed in the directory as a foreman at the Alta Planing Mills, but is back
in San Francisco for the 1891 directory, along with his son Alfred, both listed as carpenters.
Calvin and Caroline probably left San Francisco the next year, as they no longer appear in any directories.
By the time of the 1900 census they are in Cucamonga, and Calvin is a farmer. Although Alfred seems to
have worked occasionally in Los Angeles, he appears in the San Francisco directories in the late 1890s as a
tilesetter, and is settled in San Francisco in 1900 with his wife Mary, whom he had married in 1894. William
Thornton Blakely also stayed in San Francisco through this decade; he appears as a clerk and then as a
collector with H.H. Lowenthal in 1892 and 1893, and as an attorney-at-law in 1899. He married Martha
Wilkinson in 1901, but he appears on the 1900 census in Cucamonga with his parents, stating his
occupation as Lawyer, and that he has been married for two years, but there is no wife living with him on
the census return.
By 1910 Calvin had died, but Caroline is still living in Cucamonga, now with her son Alfred and his wife -
and Alfred is now the farmer. Caroline died before the 1920 census, and in that census both Alfred and
William and their families are living in South Pasadena: Alfred is a Automobile Insurance Investigator, and
William is a Lawyer.
I know it’s obvious, but following up Calvin Blakely it dawned on me that we normally only know the things
about our ancestors that they chose to put down on official documents like marriage certificates and
censuses, unless their activities were reported by some third party such as a newspaper, and we know
how reliable they can be. So if that ancestor chose to be economical with the truth or to embroider it in
some way how do we know what was the truth? Here’s a brief outline of what Calvin says about himself in
various documents.
9 January 1854. Dreadnought Seaman’s Hospital, Greenwich. Age 20 [born 1834]. Born in Picton in
Canada.
14 July 1866. Voters registration. San Francisco. Age 34 [born 1832]. Carpenter. Country of nativity New
York.
1870 census, taken on 1st June. San Francisco. Age 36 [born 1834]. House carpenter. Born Canada, both
parents of foreign origin.
1880 census, taken on 1st June. San Francisco. Age 44 [born 1836]. Retail grocer. Canada is his place of
birth and also his parents'.
1900 census, taken on 1st June. Cucamonga Township, San Bernardino. Age 68. Born Feb 1832. Farmer.
He and his father have Canada as birthplace. His mother is born in Pennsylvania. He gives 1850 as his year
of immigration into US, so resident for 50 years. 'A' in naturalisation column, presumably Alien? as others
have 'Na' for naturalised? Married 46 years, Caroline's age of 46 is obviously wrong. She has had 3 children
of whom 2 are living.
Calvin’s death was announced in the San Francisco Call of the 4th September 1903:
Apart from begging the question of just what he was doing in Ontario at the age of nearly 70, this sets his
birthday (as believed by whoever put the announcement in the paper) on about the 23rd February 1834,
which tallies with the Dreadnought record. So he probably was born in 1834 in Cherry Valley (near Picton),
Prince Edward, Ontario, with a father called Samuel, who was a farmer. I can’t help feeling that saying he
had been born in New York was probably to enable him to register to vote, but had he really entered the
US in 1850 as stated in the 1900 census? That was six years before he married Caroline in Swansea, and
seventeen years before he appears for the first time in a San Francisco directory in 1867 at the same
address, 31 Everett, where he registered to vote. Caroline died at the age of 79 on the 14th January 1920 in
Los Angeles.
So there are some clues as to Calvin’s origins. However an internet search a few years ago brought up an
interesting detail from an adoption tracing site that is no longer extant but from which I saved the text:
Clara Bernice Blakely from Cherry Valley, Ontario, Canada went to LA in Nov. 1917 and stayed
until May 1918. She gave birth to a child in April or May 1918, who was given up for adoption to
relatives, possibly surnamed Blakely or Ogden. She visited Wm. T. Blakely, a lawyer in Pasadena
and his brother Arthur Blakely a detective for the FBI who were sons of Carrie and Calvin Blakely
of San Bernadino County. She also visited her Uncle Norman and Aunt Lodema (Rice) Ogden's
son, William B. Ogden, a lawyer from Colorado.
Clara Blakely completed the immigration form to enter the United States on the 27th October 1917. She is
aged 20, and a teacher, and her last permanent residence was Picton. Her nearest relative is her mother
Theresa and her destination is Los Angeles where she is going to join her aunt Mrs Louise Story of 1700
1/2 - 4th Avenue, and stay for six months. Incidentally she is five foot tall with a fair complexion and blue
eyes, and she states her place of birth to be Cherry Valley, Canada. Her mother’s maiden name was Story,
and Louise was the wife of her uncle Harry Story; her maternal grandmother’s maiden name was Ogden.
So her visit to Calvin’s sons wasn’t a random act of picking a surname out of the directory and there must
be a family connection of some sort. Clara was the daughter of Benjamin Franklin Blakely, who was in turn
the grandson of Samuel Blakely who was born in about 1773 in New York to James Blakely and Ann Keogh.
As a Loyalist James, originally from Dumfries in Scotland, had been granted land in Ontario in Cramahe
and Murray, Northumberland Co. and in Hallowell, Prince Edward Co. Samuel married Ann Caroline Smith
in 1805, and there’s a very thorough family history on RootsWeb, but the more you look into the various
versions of the family trees on Ancestry and elsewhere, the more confusing it gets.
It should be easy enough in this day and age to pinpoint the Samuel Blakely who was Calvin’s father
(according to his marriage certificate) through the records that are available online. There are two possible
candidates; one is Samuel, the son of James, born in 1773 apparently in New York. His wife Ann Caroline
Smith was born in 1788 also in New York, but as she would have been about 47 years old when Calvin was
born, this is looking more unlikely. Samuel and Anna Caroline had a son called Samuel born in 1807 in
Marysburgh, Prince Edward County, Ontario. According to some records this Samuel married twice. His
first wife who seems only to be known by her first name, Fern (or Hannah?) was born in 1806 in the United
States, and they had a son Samuel born in 1825 in Hallowell. By 1833 Samuel senior was married to
Phoebe Cole (or Benson?) and they produced a string of children with no gap available for our Calvin.
Which of course doesn’t rule out his being either a son born to Fern (or Hannah) who must have died
before 1833, or else one of the first born children of Phoebe. This fits in with Calvin’s own claim of his birth
being in February 1832 in the 1900 census.
Samuel and Phoebe appear on the 1851 census with their children. Calvin of course isn’t with them, and
it’s clear from the Dreadnought Hospital records that he was already away at sea. The children of Samuel
and Phoebe were the cousins of Benjamin Franklin Blakely, the father of the above mentioned Clara.
Another Calvin Blakely was born in Ontario in about 1869. His parents were David and Amelia, and they
moved shortly afterwards to Taunton in Massachusetts, where young Calvin died at the tender age of 4.
On his death record it says his father was born in Picton, Prince Edward, Ontario. David, according to the
1871 Canadian census and the 1880 US census was a cabinetmaker, and when he died on the 16th July
1912 in Cranston, RI at the age of 82 (so born in 1830), his parents are named as Samuel and Caroline
Blakely. While it sometimes seems that every Blakely claims to have Samuel and Caroline as their parents,
David could possibly fit into the later group of their children, born ten years after their tenth child was
born in 1819. Were perhaps these later ones adopted nephews and nieces or orphaned grandchildren, or
even offspring from a second marriage? Then again this doesn’t exclude my Calvin from fitting in here too!
There are three coincidences here: the name Calvin, the father Samuel and the woodworking occupation.
Perhaps my Calvin had originally been a ship’s carpenter; and this would also make his sons first or second
cousins once (or twice ...) removed to poor Clara and her unwanted child.
I wonder how much Calvin and Caroline’s sons knew of their rich heritage? From Dutch weavers and
Deptford shipwrights and mariners on their mother’s side to Scottish-born kilt-wearing Canadian United
Empire Loyalists on their father’s!
Thanks to Tammy for finding Calvin’s death announcement, and also tracking down the date of Caroline’s death.
Murrays families: the Millemans
Caroline Elizabeth Milleman & Calvin Blakely
