Heir To Millions

 

I have somewhat tracked down the answers to the questions I posed at the end of my previous post on the orphan William W. Taylor who was adopted by my 3rd great grandparents Stephen B. and Frances M. Hubbard Cogswell from a New York orphan train. 

Willie's mother died in 1876 at the age of 31 and I have been unable to turn up anything at all about his father. Willie and his two fellow orphan brothers were put on an orphan train which made it's way west until they were adopted by three farm families who all attended the same small church with the thought that they could visit each other on Sunday. Eventually Willie and younger brother Richard would emigrate to Iowa along with their adoptive families.

In another instance of a small world, Willie would apprentice as a leather smith in another 3rd great grandfather John Kuck's leather shop. Dates are a bit iffy on the apprenticeship so by then, it could have been run by John's brother Frederick or even John's son George Kuck. Either way, it was in the family. I could trace Willie through to the mid 1900's and his marriage to a woman by the name of May Shanks. After that, his trail goes somewhat cold. Newspaper articles write that he went out to Washington state where he took up studying and practicing law and eventually moved to Brooklyn, New York. He lived there at the time of Ida Flagler's passing.

Ida Flagler was born Ida Shourds, daughter to a minister and blacksmith. When she reached adulthood, she became a nurse to Henry Flagler's first wife who was dying. Henry Flagler was one of the principle founders of Standard Oil and a huge railroad and hotel empire. When Henry and nurse Ida saw his first wife off to the great beyond, Henry quickly married Ida. However, Ida had mental issues and eventually she was committed to a sanitorium and divorced by Henry who married his third wife within a couple weeks. He wasn't all bad because he left her a $2 million dollar sum of money to care for her needs. Evidently Ida's needs were few because when she died nearly 30 years later and 15 years after Henry's death, it had grown to the princely sum of $15 million. 

That set off a frenzy of people looking to claim part of her fortune, including Willie's wife May who remembered the name of Flagler in some of his papers he had at the time of his adoption. Lawyers were involved and soon it was proven that Willie was the son of Ida's younger sister Mary Emma Shourds who had married Edward Taylor, the former died young as previously mentioned and the latter disappears from records.

While the battle for the estate ground on in courts, articles state that Will was eventually getting a "living stipend" from it to the tune of $2500 per year. That is equivalent to about $50,000 per year in today's dollars. Eventually though the estate was settles and Willie, his surviving brother George and another niece of Ida's, eventually split the estate 3 ways which after lawyer fees, came to a little over $4.4 million each or about $83 million in today's dollars. Not to shabby for an orphan.

Ironically, I read about some of this several years back when I read a book called "Last Train to Paradise" by Les Standiford. Back then, I didn't know I had a connection, via adoption, to all of that.