H C Hornback of Portland, Oregon

[Uncle Buddy]

H C Hornback of Portland, Oregon

I would like to straighten up an honest mistake which is now being copied from tree to tree. Harry C. Hornback of Portland, Oregon and Charles Henry Hornback of Albany, Oregon are two different people.

Harry C.'s first wife was Lillian Josephine Baldwin. He--or someone with a very similar name--then married someone named Bessie. When Harry & Lillian appear to split up, H. C. and Bessie appear to get together. Could be two different H. C. Hornbacks but I don't think so. We don't know for sure who Harry of Harry & Lillian was, but if you keep reading I'll develop a theory that he was from Kentucky by way of Colorado. As "Mrs. H. C. Hornback" we also have a woman who fits Lillian's profile (railroad widow) living in Denver, Colorado a few blocks from the railroad station.

Like Harry C. Hornback, Charles H. Hornback wasn't from Oregon but most of his adult life was spent in Albany, Oregon both before and after the lone reference we have to his living in Portland. Charles had at least two and maybe three wives so it's hard to fit Lillian in too. He was a fisherman and farmer.

Harry, on the other hand, was an engineer who worked for the railroad. He's hard to find because he lived on trains and in hotels and boarding houses, and never really settled down anywhere. Lillian can be found living with and without him, mostly without. She finally left him or was abandoned; in 1915 we find the two of them living in Portland separately. By then (maybe earlier) Harry had a new wife named Bessie. Lillian's first husband Frank Gannon was a stationary engineer and a fireman.

In 1916 Lillian starts calling herself a widow, but Charles lived until the 1960s.

Knowing that he died around 1915, Harry C. turns out to be, theoretically, a Henry Clay Hornback who died in San Francisco on May 3, 1915. He was found nearly dead on the kitchen floor by his wife "B. Hornback" who had to get a neighbor to break down the door when her husband wouldn't let her in. He'd lit two burners and one did not ignite so he died of asphyxiation. Henry Clay Hornback was born in Kentucky or Australia, and it's just these sorts of people--the obscure ones who didn't leave an obvious paper trail--that generally get combined into one person by genealogists.

Henry Clay Hornback lived at 811 Turk Street when he died. This is less than two miles from the Ferry Building at the port where train companies transported their passengers from the Union Station in Oakland to San Francisco. There was no Union Station in SF because only one train company went there. A few of the other relevant addresses I've found in this search were within a half mile of 811 Turk Street.

By 1919, a Bessie/Elizabeth Hornback (a widow) had started working in a San Francisco hospital where she also lived. She worked her way up to practical nurse by 1940 and died in Alameda County, California on May 6, 1961. Apparently she never remarried. There is no proof (yet) that Henry Clay Hornback and his wife "B. Hornback" are the same as the Harry C. Hornback (janitor) and his wife Bessie who lived in Portland in 1915, or the H. A. Hornback (mechanic) and his wife Bessie who lived there in 1914, or the Bessie (Cullen?) Hornback who worked in San Francisco and San Leandro hospitals from 1919 till at least 1940. I am sure they're the same people but it remains to be proven.

Bessie's maiden name is probably Bessie Cullen, daughter of Thomas Cullen and Katherine Beatty. She was from Columbus Junction, Iowa and Kansas City, Missouri where some of her brothers worked on the railroad. Bessie has also been combined into a composite genealogical fiction with a Bessie A. Cullen McGee who died in 1970. As an obscure individual with no home address who apparently raised no children and lived in the hospitals where she worked, Nurse Bessie has become another victim of combining.

On August 19, 1915, a Henry C. Hornback was born in San Francisco to a woman whose maiden name was Cullen. This is no doubt the son of the man who died in SF in May. It's also near proof that his wife "B. Hornback" is Bessie Cullen. It's not absolute proof but it's 4.5 out of 5 for value as evidence. The question is, what happened to the child? Bessie is not hard to find but she is not seen raising a child. Possibly the death of her husband when she was pregnant dis-spirited her and she gave the child up for adoption. I wouldn't be surprised to find little Henry living with one of her Cullen relatives or at a nearby orphanage, but it's also possible the baby did not survive long.

Now for the fun part. I got on this track because of a great article I have in my collection of air engine inventors. I research family histories of compressed air car inventors who made extraordinary claims. In late 1909, a man named H. C. Hornback who said he was a railroad engineer and had just lived in Colorado for 15 years appeared in a hotel in Portland, Oregon where he was building an air engine in a back room. He made no mention of a wife or family (typical for the H. C. whose wife Lillian rarely lived with him.) In fact we find a Mrs. H. C. Hornback living in Denver Colorado in 1907, a few blocks from the train station, but no idea what her first name was. This was around the time that Lillian married Harry. In 1911 we find an H. C. (engineer) living in Denver.

I'd been looking for H. C. (the inventor and railroad engineer) for years and had decided long ago on the wrong guy (a Charles H. Hornbeck who turned out to be a gardener) but then one day I decided to open my mind and look at the vague possibility that the newspaper reporter had actually spelled his name right: "H. C. Hornback". Miracles do happen, know what I mean? That's when the right guy popped out of the city directories at me, never to be found on any census. This all made sense when it turned out he was (?) from Australia. So I have a picture, a newspaper article or two, and a spreadsheet in case anyone wants to see it which proves, at least, that Harry C. Hornback and Charles Henry Hornback are not the same person.

Not that it has to mean something, but it might: Lillian J. Baldwin's parents lived 15 miles away from Bessie Cullen's parents back in Iowa, before Lillian was born in California. What are the odds of Harry the engineer coincidentally marrying two women from the same neck of the woods 1500 miles away from where any of them can be found living? Maybe I should be looking for Australian-born Henry Clay Hornback with American parents from Iowa? It doesn't make sense that Australian parents would name their child after the famous American statesman Henry Clay. But a lot of the Hornbacks in the US descend from the Hornbacks of Kentucky, where the statesman was from, so there are several people named Henry Clay Hornback.

[Uncle Buddy]

The son of Henry Clay Hornback and Bessie Cullen, Henry C. Hornback, born August 19, 1915 in San Francisco, didn't just disappear. His name disappeared, which makes us suspect he was adopted, especially under the circumstances. Mother and son having different surnames makes it even less likely that their relationship is that of biological mother and son.

Between 1920 and 1930, Henry Jr. was fostered or adopted by a German immigrant, a young widow named Lucille Gretchen Hutchinson. She renamed him Morgan Joseph Hornback and they were mother and son for life. She was living alone in 1920 so it's apparent that Morgan was adopted or fostered by her. Morgan was called Morgan H. Hornback in the 1930 census but Morgan Joseph in the other records. Morgan Joseph and Henry C. Hornback were both born on the same day in San Francisco, so there should be two birth records. Since there's only one birth record, no death record for Henry, and no child raised by Bessie, it's a safe bet that Lucille Gretchen Hutchinson adopted Henry and changed his name to Morgan.

Mrs. L. G. Hutchinson was a practical nurse who, like Bessie Hornback, lived in San Francisco and Oakland. I'd guess that she met Bessie or already knew her and helped her out of a bad situation when the pregnant Bessie's husband died. I would venture to say that Mrs. Hutchinson could have helped Bessie get work in a hospital where Bessie started as a pantry maid by 1919. This is partly speculation but reasonable, in general.

Mrs. Hutchinson later married a John H. McBride.

Morgan J. Hornback married Muriel Ann McColley in San Francisco in 1953. He enlisted in the Army in 1942 and was discharged in 1945. He died in 2002 and is buried at a military cemetery in North Carolina where he was living. During his life he worked as a stenographer, typist, machinist, and dispatcher for Greyhound Bus.

The proof of a relationship between Lucille Gretchen Hutchinson and Bessie Hornback came long after I should have quit looking and gone to bed, as these things tend to do.

In the 1921 city directory, Lucille is found living at 309 Moultrie Street, not far from San Francisco General Hospital. In 1922 Bessie Hornback's voter registration has her living at 309 Moultrie Street with Lucille.

Case closed: Henry C. Hornback, born Aug. 19, 1915, and Morgan Joseph Hornback, born Aug. 19, 1915 are the same person.

I can't find anything about Lucille Gretchen Hutchinson's first husband Ludwig.

[Uncle Buddy]

As for the theory that Henry Clay Hornback's parents were from Iowa, there is a Henry Clay Hornback b. 1848 from Derry, Pike County, Illinois who had his family in Taylor County, Iowa with his wife Eva Whitney. I think he will turn out to be the brother of Stephen D. Hornback in which case he might have been buried in Pueblo, Colorado in 1878. Eva remarried William McLeod on Oct 3, 1880. This could be a good fit with H. C. Hornback the inventor, who said he worked for a Southern railroad and lived in Colorado from 1894-1909.

The father of Stephen D. and Henry Clay Hornback of Illinois was Joseph Hornback of Kentucky. The statesman Henry Clay was from Kentucky, and a lot of Americans named their sons after this famous statesman.

That southern rail line mentioned by H. C. Hornback the inventor could possibly be the Frisco Line, a.k.a. the St. Louis-San Francisco line, which never made it to San Francisco. The Frisco line employed an H. C. Hornback as a brakeman according to the Monett, Missouri Times of April 17, 1914.

The other possibility I'm entertaining for H. C.'s parents is Solomon Henry Hornback and Eliza Pearlie Edmonston. Henry Sr.--a.k.a. Solomon--is the only Union soldier buried in Rocky Ford, Otero County, Colorado, according to an old article I have. There was a man named Clay in the same town who is probably their son and is supposed to be the same age as Harry C. and Henry Clay, but no one knows anything about him. His middle initial is supposed to be "T" but Eliza had a brother name Henry Clay so that's just as likely since there seems to be no source for the "T" but a vague memory. There are some good photos of Clay's sister and the family resemblance is strong in my opinion. The other sister lived in Denver and was married to a boilermaker. I found another reference to H. C. (RR engineer) and the mysterious "Mrs. H. C. Hornback" living separately, still right across the street from the cable car company in Denver. So it all fits but still looking for stronger evidence.

The evidence so far, for Clay to be the Henry Clay and/or Harry C who is the subject of this thread:

--Clay worked as a cook. H. C. worked as a cook.

--Clay worked as a brakemen on the railroad. So did H. C. The inventor was obsessed with compressed air, which is what brakemen use to stop trains.

--Clay lived in Colorado from at least 1893-1898. H. C. lived in Colorado from about 1894 to 1909.

--Clay's mother had a brother named Henry Clay.

--Clay and H. C. are the same age.

--H. C. bears a family resemblance to Clay's sister Katie.

--Henry Clay was born in Australia around 1878. Solomon and family can't be found living in the U.S. in the 1880 census.

--Nothing wrong with farmers, but the well-educated inventor fits this Colorado family. Solomon was a U.S. Detective--like a U.S. Marshall? Eliza was socially active, participating in sewing machine contests. Her daughters threw big birthday parties for her that made the news. They were not a stereotypical rural family with 3rd grade educations.

--Clay and H. C. seem to be equally obscure and hard to find. We know H. C. left Colorado in 1909 and it seems he'd moved to Colorado in 1894 not long after Solomon Hornback died. So there's nothing standing in the way of this theory, no contradictions.

In terms of genealogy proof, none of that is very good evidence, but something more will turn up soon.

Attachments:

[shadowlander]

Hello!! My name is Patti Mobley (Patricia Elizabeth Hornback Mobley). My father was Morgan Joseph Hornback and my mother Muriel Ann Hornback. I have always known my father was raised by a woman other than his mother but have not been able to find ANY information on his side of the family. I read with intense interest the information you provided here. Thank you so much!! How can I find out more about my father's family? Are you per chance a Hornback? I would love to be in touch with someone from his family. 

[shadowlander]

Also, thank you so much for posting a picture of my paternal grandfather. It is quite moving to me as I have never before seen his face nor did I know who he was. I am grateful.

[mdh]

(Hi Patti ) 

My name is Michael Hornback and Morgan Hornback was my father.  I also thank you for the information you provided.  We have known very little about my dad's side of the family so what has been shared here is much appreciated!

Anything more you find out would be awesome!

[Uncle Buddy]

Patti, Emily and Michael,

Let me just quickly say, before I start trying to answer questions, that it is a huge thrill to hear back from you folks. It gives me chills up and down my back, to say the least, to know that someone else cares about this stuff besides me.

I have to point out that the connection to the inventor (the man in the picture) is not yet proven. The man in the picture is where I started, and Morgan J. Hornback is where I ended up. As for the proof of Morgan's parentage, I consider the evidence to be quite overwhelming. This falls short of formal proof that Bessie was Morgan's mother, but to find Lucille and Bessie actually living together is proof enough for me, since Morgan J and Henry C were born on the same day and then Henry C disappears into thin air and Morgan appears out of nowhere. Finding Lucille and Bessie living together was better than I expected, it really knocked me for a loop.

Emily has emailed me and I will also be answering her questions in this forum so all can participate and get the same material. If there's anything too private to put in this public forum then there's always email and there are private messages in the forum also. However I'm not making grabs at anyone's privacy or seeking out sensationalism, I just love to make the connections. In my eventual memorial to H. C. Hornback the inventor, I will not be mentioning any living people unless they ask me to.

Thanks so much for your acknowledgments and for joining the discussion. I will proceed to try and answer your questions and Emily's in future posts.

[Uncle Buddy]

As far as I know, I'm not related to the Hornback family, although my direct ancestor Samuel Robertson lived in Wapello County, Iowa where the inventor H. C. Hornback's first wife Lillian's parents once lived. Bessie Cullen, the mother of Morgan Hornback, lived 15 miles away in Columbus Junction, so it's possible that our ancestors knew each other. Also likely that Harry Hornback's two wives knew each other.

Bessie Cullen was married to Henry Clay Hornback who died in San Francisco in 1915. These are definitely Morgan's parents. A Bessie somebody was married to an H. C. Hornback in Portland and theoretically this is the same Bessie and the same guy as the railroad engineer and inventor in the article. Harry C. Hornback and his first wife Lillian Josephine Baldwin apparently didn't hit it off, as we find them living separately in Portland and in Denver. Lillian probably considered herself a railroad widow long before her husband actually died, and inventors' wives have the same problem. A lot of inventors are literally married to their own minds, all they want to do is think and design things and do research. But Harry & Lillian do first appear in Portland at the time the article states, and on top of that, Lillian starts to call herself a widow in 1916. I will add the articles to this post so everyone can have them. I'll also add a picture of Bessie's home. The only record we have of her living anywhere other than in the hospitals where she worked is with Lucille, Morgan's adoptive mother.

There's no record of Lillian and Harry living together in 1914 & 1915 when we find him living with Bessie, so I think it's the same H. C. Hornback but haven't proven it.

Emily asked how I got onto this research. I started rebuilding player pianos when I was 13 years old in 1969, and got interested in things that run on air. I began trying to invent an air powered car in 1979. A year later a real air car inventor set me on the course I've been on ever since by telling me that you can put low pressure air into a high pressure tank, resulting in a car that can go long distances on air. He'd driven such cars across the country in 1949, which he helped someone else build. I ended up compiling a lot of books which I used to sell, full of research on air cars and related topics. This is solar energy since air engines run on ambient heat which is the end product of the sun's radiation. There were hundreds of inventors working on this, especially during the 1920s and 1930s. You'd enjoy taking a look at the book of Hem & Amy cartoons I compiled, wherein a well-known cartoonist devoted a year of his daily cartoon strip to an air car inventor just like H. C. Hornback.

I eventually gave my books away by posting them at archive.org:
archive.org/search.php?query=pneumatic%20options%20compressed%20air

Since 2002 I've owned a website called aircaraccess.com which is currently offline but will be back in about a month or less if all goes well. In a few years when I finish my genealogy software I hope to revamp the website, making it something called Air Car Hall of Fame which will memorialize inventors such as Mr. Hornback who tried to get the world to notice that our atmosphere is a gigantic air tank heated and pressurized by the sun and gravity. If you put air into a tank the easy way, you get compressed air nearly for free because the air contains heat from the sun. The inventor's problem is to figure out how air works and thus find out what the easy way is to compress it, i.e. not pushing it into the tank by brute force. For example, the existing pressure in the tank could be borrowed and/or moved out of the way to create a suction inside the tank. I have an old forum on this topic at aircaraccess.proboards.com but the technical research was taken over by an engineer in 2011.

Around that time I more or less stopped doing the technical research and got hooked on genealogy by studying these inventors. I kinda wanted to prove to myself that they weren't all a bunch of con artists and kooks. Now for the past one or two years I've spent most of my time working on a computer program for keeping track of my genealogical research since I don't care for the existing programs that do this. Writing a computer program is about the most fun I've ever had, even more enjoyable than doing genealogy except for when amazing connections like the Morgan find come up, nothing beats that sort of thing.

I also have a collection of inventors' memorials at findagrave.com and some old family trees at rootsweb that I stopped updating years ago.

I was born in Trinidad, Colorado, not far from the Hornback family I'm studying now, where a Clay Hornback is a perfect candidate for the inventor who says he moved to Portland from Colorado. Since this Clay and his whole family seem to be missing from the record in 1880, I hope to find them in Australia around that time. I could be dreaming but maybe this whole thing will come together. As for Emily's question--why do I do this? Well it's a treasure hunt. It can be seen as a compulsive quest to collect trivia or a fun hobby or a fascination with the background of air car inventors, whatever, but it boils down to a treasure hunt.

I live in the Philippines with my wife and our 13-year-old son who we adopted 8 months before he was born.

If there are any documents I have that can't be found on ancestry.com or familysearch.org or chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/#tab=tab_advanced_search etc., let me know and I can provide them. For now I just want to say there's no proof yet that H. C. Hornback of Portland (the inventor) is Morgan's father, but I anticipate being able to eventually prove it.

Attachments:

Oregonian 1909-12-19 p13 HC HORNBACK.pdf (48.59 KB)

Oregonian 1909-12-05 p8 HORNBACK.pdf (104.77 KB)

[Uncle Buddy]

One more post for today. I have many dozens of documents in my Hornback file, all of which are available online, but I wanted to start sharing them so here are the ones which prove that Bessie Cullen is Morgan's mother.

I would love to have a photo of Morgan Hornback and if he doesn't look anything like the inventor I'll be disappointed but not discouraged. The photo in the newspaper article shows the inventor in his 20s or 30s.

The first document is copied here from ancestry.com. If someone wouldn't mind ordering a birth certificate from vitalcheck, I'd treasure a copy of it but I don't do research that isn't free and you'd probably have to be related anyway.

The same goes for Henry Clay Hornback's death certificate which should also be available to relatives. It might mention his occupation, city of birth, parents' names, whatever Bessie knew.

The other documents are too big to attach to the forum message so I'll upload them to dropbox.com and send Emily a download link by email.

search.ancestry.com/cgi-bin/sse.dll?indiv=1&dbid=5247&h=512949&tid=&pid=&usePUB=true&_phsrc=Atk1739&_phstart=successSource

Henry C Hornback

in the California Birth Index, 1905-1995

Report issue

Name: Henry C Hornback
Birth Date: 19 Aug 1915
Gender: Male
Mother's Maiden Name: Cullen
Birth County: San Francisco
Source Citation

Birthdate: 19 Aug 1915; Birth County: San Francisco
Source Information

Ancestry.com. California Birth Index, 1905-1995 [database on-line]. Provo, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations Inc, 2005.

Original data: State of California. California Birth Index, 1905-1995. Sacramento, CA, USA: State of California Department of Health Services, Center for Health Statistics.

[shadowlander]

I am just so incredibly excited. This information gives me chills!! My (probable) grandfather was an inventor!! I have only ever known my father as Morgan Joseph Hornback so when we have tried to find his ancestry (since he had no siblings or other relatives as far as we knew) we kept hitting a brick wall. UNTIL one day while going through some of my parents things, I found a copy of his birth certificate (I will attach it here). It lists Henry C. Hornback as the father (from Kentucky), Mary E Cullen as his mother (from Ohio). They lived at 811 Turk. I can make out what my grandmother listed as her occupation (housewife) but can't quite decipher my grandfather's occupation (maybe....Teamster??). 

I can't thank you enough for this information. ANY information is helpful as we would love to connect with any of his living relatives (be they aunts, cousins, etc.). 

[Uncle Buddy]

Awesome find! Now we can look in Kentucky for Henry. His death certificate might give the same info but is likely to list parents' names if Bessie knew anything.

It does in fact say he was a teamster.

The occupations listed by H. C. the husband of Bessie in Portland were janitor and mechanic. The occupations listed by Harry C. the husband of Lillian in Portland were engineer and cook. Clay in Colorado has been cited for being a cook and a brakeman on the railroad. An H. C. in Missouri is a brakeman. An H. C. in Denver is an engineer. The inventor H. C. in Portland is an engineer. I'm sure they're all the same person but with the Kentucky birthplace the chances of finding him are much greater. I also expect to find a trace of the family in Australia but don't know when, it could take a long time.

Kentucky seems to be the place where most Hornback families came from so this is good news because if they were a prominent family back there, more records will be available including possibly local history books which are free at archive.org. The family in Derry, Pike County, Illinois is from Kentucky and some of them ended up in Colorado. In fact I'm pretty sure a Henry Clay Hornback was buried in Pueblo, Colorado in 1878, around the time our H. C. was born. I have an obscure reference to Stephen D. Hornback, a merchant from Illinois, who moved to Colorado and then Texas. The reference has him "burying his brother in Pueblo and then going back to Texas". Knowing where his other brothers are buried, this one kinda has to be Henry Clay, one of the possible fathers of our H. C.

Mary E. Cullen is no doubt Bessie. I do have one reference to Bessie where she calls herself Elizabeth. She was living in Columbus Junction, Iowa at the age of 1 and 5 but when she was 5 her brother Frank had already moved to Kansas City and the whole family followed him there. We find Bessie there by 1900 at least. Her father was Irish and her mother was Canadian. Why her child's birth certificate says she was from Ohio I don't know, but if she's anything like me, her knowledge of the eastern states is vague at best. Especially in regards to Ohio, Iowa, and Illinois, I have to look at a map every time I need to know where they're situated. We know this is Bessie because Henry's death report lists our Mary E. as "B. Hornback" and we have Morgan's foster mother and Bessie living together, and both are nurses. In fact Bessie started her nursing career in the same hospital where Morgan was born. The main evidence that "Ohio" is not correct is that Bessie the nurse gives her parents' correct birth places in every census. In those same censuses, she gives her own birth place as Iowa.

I want to make sure that you have all these documents so if any are hard to find or if no one is able to use ancestry.com right now, let me know and I'll get them uploaded to dropbox.com bit by bit. I sent Emily the dropbox link and if anyone didn't get it, let me know so I can send it to you in a private message here on the forum.

Thanks so much for sending the birth certificate.

[mdh]

Thanks again for all the information you have provided.  I believe you indicated you were interested in a picture of Morgan.

I have attached a picture of him along with his wife (my mother) Muriel (Ann) Hornback.

Mike

[shadowlander]

Thank you so so so so much for all this! I don't know how much ancestry.com access Emily has but I have none and would love a dropbox link or ANY info on my father. I forgot that you asked for a pic. Next time I am able to go through my parent's pictures, I will be happy to send a pic of my dad at a younger age. This is the only one I have right now and I'm guessing he would be about in his mid-50s here (would you agree Mike?). He was 19 years older than my mother, 39 years older than me and I guess I am 16 or so in this pic. Does this help?

[shadowlander]

Mike beat me to it with a better pic!! Yay brother mine!!

[Uncle Buddy]

Patti and Mike, thanks for the great photos of Morgan. I'd love to find a better picture of the inventor although I suppose the Portland Oregonian doesn't save all its original photos from that far back. It'd be worth a try though, because they might save some of them. I am neutral as to whether there is a family resemblance but there is nothing against it so far.

I'll send you each a dropbox link in a private forum message. You can share this with other interested family members. Probably shouldn't post it publicly. What's in there so far is in a folder called Proof of Morgan's Parents. I will be adding more and will drop a note on this thread when I do. If anyone needs to subscribe to this thread in order to get email notifications, there are instructions in another thread. Basically, you go to your profile and edit it at the notifications tab. There is a mechanism for putting notifications just on the forum which you get by clicking a button that says "Participated". There is also a selection box for email notification, how often you want to get them for various things.

I'll post something in a few minutes with the death certificate number but can't read some of the document so it will take a few minutes to figure it out.