Ancestors

Coe Finch Young Jr.

Coe Finch Young Jr. was born on 12 June 1884 in Wayne County, Pennsylvania. He was the son of Coe Finch Young and Adaline Adelia Sweezy, and he carried his father's name. His parents had come down the Delaware from Sullivan County, New York, and settled on a farm in Manchester Township, the corner of Wayne County around the hamlets of Braman, Kellam and Stalker. His sister Jennie Dusenbery Young was fifteen years older than he was. She married Louis Rauner, and her family lived nearby.

The census taker George W. Ford came to the Young farm on 7 June 1900. Coe was fifteen and single, and he had been at school seven months of the past year. His mother told the enumerator she had borne four children and that two were living. Also in the house were Sarah L. Beech, 65, listed as the head's sister-in-law, and a servant, William Tucker.

On 15 May 1907 he married Margaret M. Maudsley. She was the eldest daughter of John Richard Maudsley and Amanda Lorella Rhodes, who farmed near Lookout, a few miles up the river. Margaret had spent four winters in Honesdale studying music, and she had taught it for about eight years. She was the organist of the Methodist Episcopal church at Lookout until she married and moved to Braman. Their daughter, Ada Sweezy Young, was born at Braman on 25 July 1908. Her middle name was her grandmother Young's maiden name.

In November 1909 Margaret gave birth to a son. Dr. F. C. Frisbie of Equinunk attended her from the 17th to the 21st. She died at 11:30 on the night of 21 November, at their home near Braman. The doctor wrote the cause as puerperal eclampsia, with nephritis contributing. Eclampsia is the convulsions that can come on around childbirth when the kidneys and blood pressure fail. The Honesdale paper called it Bright's disease, the old name for kidney disease. She was twenty-eight. Her brother Henry Maudsley gave the particulars for her death certificate.

The baby lived six days. He died on Tuesday, 23 November. The next day his mother's funeral was held at the Braman Methodist Episcopal church, with the Rev. W. S. Empleton officiating, and the infant was buried in the casket with her. Find a Grave names him John Corwin Young. Coe was twenty-five, a widower with a daughter of fifteen months.

He went home to his parents. When the census was taken in April 1910 he was listed in his father's household as "Coe F Jr, Son, 25", widowed, a farmer working the home farm for wages. Ada, one year old, was with him. So were Hattie Swezey, a boarder of 61 born in Michigan, and two hired hands, Hattie A. Knapp and Wilbur Tyler. His father died at Kellam that same month, on 17 April 1910.

On Thursday, 8 May 1913, he married again. The bride was Clara Elizabeth Minckler, known as Lizzie. She was born at Braman on 18 April 1892, the only daughter of James Henry Minckler and Mary Jane Wood, and she had grown up among brothers. In 1910 the Minckler house held Roy, George, Elmer, Abraham and Frank. In the summer of 1910, at eighteen, she went with Abbie Rauner and Sophie Blum to work at a boarding house at Lake Huntington, New York, that took about 185 boarders. The couple crossed the river to be married at Hancock, in Delaware County, New York. On the license affidavit Coe gave his age as 29, his occupation as farmer and his home as Stalker. He swore it was his second marriage and that his former wife was dead. His niece and nephew, Edna and Leslie Rauner, stood up with them. The local paper called him "a prosperous farmer". Nine days before the wedding the same paper had reported that he was having a milking machine put in his barn. His mother, Adaline, died that same year.

On 12 September 1918 he registered for the draft at the Wayne County board in Honesdale. That day was the third and last registration of the First World War, and it took in every man from 18 to 45. His card gives his home as Stalker and his work as "Dairyman & Gardener". The registrar described him as tall and slender, with blue eyes and dark brown hair. He named his wife, Elizabeth Young of Stalker, as his nearest relative, and signed "C F Young". The war ended two months later. The 1930 census records him as not a veteran.

Their son, Horace Coe Young, was born at Stalker on 3 March 1919. When the enumerator Arthur Parsons reached the farm on 14 January 1920, Coe owned it free of mortgage. He ran it as a dairy farm and employed hired help. The household was Coe, 36; Elizabeth, 27; Ada, 11; "Horrace C", 1; and a boarder, Edward H. Young, 67, born in New York.

Lizzie died at the farm at six in the evening on 9 November 1920. She was twenty-eight, the same age Margaret had been. Dr. Frisbie of Equinunk signed her certificate, and Coe gave the particulars himself. The cause reads as chronic leptomeningitis, an inflammation of the membranes that cover the brain and spinal cord. She was buried at Braman on 12 November. Coe was thirty-six and twice widowed, with a daughter of twelve and a son of twenty months.

On 23 January 1925 he married for the third time, again at Hancock. The bride was Dorothy Pearl Layton of Equinunk, the eldest daughter of Earl C. Layton and Maggie Kemp. She was twenty-one. The clergyman Harry Williams of West Main Street, Hancock, married them, and Jennie Williams and Mary Williams signed as witnesses. Dorothy raised Ada and Horace. Both of their obituaries, decades later, name her as their stepmother.

Coe and Dorothy had six children, all of whom lived to adulthood: Dorothy Mae in 1926, Vera Ellen in 1927, Everett in 1928, Margaret Jean on the last day of 1930, Madelyn Adele in 1934 and Charles Edgar in 1937. The Hancock Herald announced the first of them on 20 May 1926: "Born, to Mr. and Mrs. Coe Young, a daughter, May 14th. Mrs. Young before her marriage was Dorothy Layton, daughter of Earl Layton."

On 10 May 1930 the census found a full house. Coe was 46 and owned the farm, a general farm now, and still employed help. With him were Dorothy, 27; Ada, 21; Horace, 11; Dorothy, 4; Vera, 2; Everett, 1; and a lodger, Joseph Reo, 24, a farm laborer born in Michigan. A few houses along the same road lived his sister Jennie and her husband Louis Rauner. That August Ada married Raymond Bauer at the Methodist parsonage in Equinunk.

By 1940 the family was at Equinunk, still in Manchester Township. The enumerator Edwin H. Hiller took down the household on 14 and 15 May. Coe was 56 and owned a house valued at $800. He had gone as far as the eighth grade. He was farming on his own account and had worked 60 hours the week before. Horace was 21, and the younger children were Dorothy 14, Vera 12, Everett 11, Margaret 9, Madelyn 5 and Charles 2.

He died seven months later, on 23 December 1940, in the Town of Rockland in Sullivan County, New York, which takes in the village of Roscoe. The family remembers that he died in the hospital at Roscoe. He was 56. His youngest child was three, and Margaret Jean was eight days short of her tenth birthday. He was buried at Braman.

His children scattered only a little. Ada wrote the Braman news for the Wayne County Independent and the Hancock Herald for years and died at Braman in 1962. Horace served in the Navy in the European theater in the Second World War, ran heavy equipment for the Pennsylvania Department of Highways, and died in 1976. Dorothy Mae married Samuel Amos Hathaway and died at Sidney Center, New York, in 2008. Vera married Albert K. Hoover and died in Bradford County in 2020. Everett served with the Army in Germany and came back to Equinunk, where he died in 2009. Margaret Jean married C. Lynn Snyder and died at Honesdale in 2020. Madelyn and her husband Gordon Houghtaling kept Gordon's Store at Equinunk for more than twenty years, and she died in 2012. Charles Edgar served in the Army after high school, settled at Conyngham, and died in 1985.

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Cite: Heirology, "Coe Finch Young Jr. (1884-1940)", https://heirology.com/ancestors/coe-finch-young-jr-1884-1940-040af8.