Ancestors

Joseph F. Terry

Joseph F. Terry was born on 30 August 1885, the eldest child of Walter J. Terry, a young man from Warren, New Hampshire, and Elizabeth Robinson of Kaukauna. He grew up at Kaukauna, a paper-mill town on the Fox River in Outagamie County, Wisconsin, in a family that grew to eleven children. His father was one of the first men hired at the Thilmany Paper and Pulp company there. In the 1900 census Joseph was at home with his parents and his brothers and sisters Anna, Edward, David, William, Walter and Julius. He was still there, written "Joe", in the state census of 1905.

His brothers and sisters were Edward F. Terry, Rachel Anna Terry Hahnemann, Enough Terry, who died as a small child in 1898, Walter Terry Jr., who died in 1917, Julius Nickolas Terry, Ezra J. Terry, Emma Terry Humphrey, and Leona Terry Kappell, who died in 1932.

His wife was Ada Graves, born at Wrightstown in Brown County on 13 January 1879, about six years older than he was. She came to live at Kaukauna about 1908. Their son Steven Leo Terry was born on 19 April 1909. In the census of 1910 Joseph, 25, was living in the town of Buchanan, just outside Kaukauna, with Ada, the baby Stephen, and Ada's ten-year-old daughter, written Viola Tuttle and listed as his stepdaughter.

The spring of 1911 was the worst of his life. Joe Terry worked at the Outagamie mill in Kaukauna. On Thursday, 4 May, the Kaukauna Sun ran an item headed "Disappeared Sunday" about him, and the next day the Kaukauna Times followed with "Almost Drowned." Three weeks later both papers carried his name again, the Sun under "Shot Himself" on 25 May and the Times under "Tries to Suicide" on 26 May. The story went out to the state papers. The Wausau Pilot printed it on 6 June: after "sending three bullets from a revolver through his neck in an attempt to commit suicide, Joseph Terry of Kaukauna was prevented from wasting any more ammunition by neighbors. He will live." Arrangements had been made, the item said, to take him to the Northern Hospital for the Insane. That was the state hospital for northeastern Wisconsin, on Lake Winnebago north of Oshkosh.

The newspapers name only "Joseph Terry of Kaukauna" and "Joe Terry" of the Outagamie mill. Joseph F. Terry, then 25, is the only man of that name found at Kaukauna in the censuses of those years, so the man in the reports was very probably him.

He lived. By 1920 Joseph was at home in Outagamie County with Ada and Stephen, and the censuses of 1930, 1940 and 1950 find the couple at Kaukauna. In 1942, at 56, he filled in the draft registration required of older men in the Second World War as Joseph Francis Terry of Kaukauna, born 30 August 1885. In 1944 the Kaukauna Times listed Mr. and Mrs. Joseph Terry among the couples marking their wedding anniversaries that June. Joseph and Ada were Catholics, members of St. Mary's parish at Kaukauna, though his father's funeral was Methodist.

Joseph F. Terry died on Thursday, 31 May 1956, at New London, after a long illness. He was 70. His funeral was held at ten on Saturday morning at St. Mary Catholic church in Kaukauna, with the rosary said the night before at the Greenwood Funeral Home. He is buried in the parish cemetery, Saint Marys Cemetery. His stone, which he shares with Ada, carries the words "The Lord is my shepherd" beside a carving of the Good Shepherd with a lamb.

He left his wife; his father, Walter Terry, then 92; his son, Steve; his brothers Ezra, Edward and David; his sisters Mrs. Emma Humphery and Mrs. Anna Hahnemann; seven grandchildren and five great-grandchildren. His father outlived him by two and a half years.

If Joseph F. Terry is in your family, start your own tree.

Cite: Heirology, "Joseph F. Terry (1885-1956)", https://heirology.com/ancestors/joseph-f-terry-1885-1956-84bc30.