By Gordon Berg

In the April issue of Freshwater Reporter, (https://freshwater-reporter.com/mystery-girl/), this writer made a plea to the community to help identify the infant girl who shares a gravesite with my great-grandmother. It felt like placing a note in a bottle and tossing it into the ocean. Hopeless.

A few days later, the outpouring of love from friends and strangers was like glancing up at the horizon and seeing an armada of ships coming to the rescue. It was overwhelming. Genealogists from Onekama to Grand Rapids to Omaha combed websites like Ancestry.com for clues. The folks at Oak Grove Cemetery pitched in. The community, itself, engaged with the search, offering valuable anecdotal breadcrumbs leading us forward.

That said, the closer we got to an answer, the more elusive it became. We may never know precisely why 7-month-old Amanda A. Anderson was buried in my great-grandmother’s unmarked gravesite in the spring of 1895. But thanks to so many sleuths, two scenarios seem most likely. Both involve two men named John Anderson. Both were Scandinavian immigrants who attended the Messiah Lutheran Church in Maxwelltown. Either one could have been Amanda’s father. Both stories are tragic and speak to the hardships of life back then.

John Anderson #1, The Widower

Little is known about this man, but in the world of genealogical sleuthing, he must be considered as a possibility. His specifics are few because the U.S. Census records from 1890 burned in a fire in Washington, D.C. years ago. By the 1900 census, we know that he died of typhoid in 1895 as a widower. His wife may have died months earlier while giving birth to a child, possibly Amanda. During those times, one child in five never made it to their second birthday. Infant mortality was so common back then that people seldom celebrated a child’s first birthday. There was simply too much uncertainty about any infant’s survival.

John Anderson #2, The Neighbor

John was born in 1868 in Finland to Anders Anderson and Liza Jacobsen. He married Amanda Mattson on Dec. 23, 1893, in the Messiah Lutheran Church in Manistee. She was the daughter of Mat(hias?) Jacobson and Lina Matson. She, too, was born in Finland. When they were married, he was 25, she was 19. He was a “laborer.” She was a “domestic.”
John and his wife, Amanda, rented a house on Kosciusko Street, in the heart of Manistee’s Maxwelltown. Even today, the folks in Maxwelltown are as genuine as they come. Real salt of the earth. Maxwelltown is a neighborhood in every best sense. Neighbors work together, look out for one another, and at the end of the day, they share a few beers and swap a few stories at the Painted Lady Saloon … just like they did back in the 1890s.

Only five houses away from the Andersons, on “K” Street, were Nels and Anna Martinson, my great-grandparents. Anna died tragically in March 1894, suddenly leaving Nels to care for their four young children. I know from oral family history that he made an emotional appeal to the members of the Lutheran church. He asked for four families to each take one of his four children into their care while he continued working as a blacksmith and until he found a new wife to help with the children.

I want to believe one of those couples was John and Amanda Anderson, who would have been about three months’ pregnant at the time. An act of such generosity and selflessness has a way of deepening friendships. It creates bonds that beg to be repaid if an opportunity presents itself.

Nels remarried on Sept. 5, 1894. Together, he and his new bride went to each of the homes fostering Nels’ children to bring them home. If one of those homes was John and Amanda’s, they were likely ready to be on their own again as she was ready to give birth to a child of her own. Amanda Elvira Anderson was born Sept. 9, 1894. She was baptized Nov. 18 at the Messiah Lutheran Church.

Amanda A. Anderson died of meningitis and was buried in my great- grandmother’s gravesite on April 25, 1895. Age 7 months. Just like the burial records.

But wait. The infant in my great-grandmother’s grave is Amanda “A.” Anderson. Not Amanda “E.” Anderson. Heather Schram even dug out Oak Grove Cemetery’s original burial ledger from April 1895. There is no ambiguity about the middle initial. It is clearly written as an “A,” not an “E.” I’ve seen it for myself.

So, what happened? Could Amanda “A.” and Amanda “E.” be the same person? Could the cemetery recordkeeper in 1895 have heard the name “Elvira” as “Alvira” and entered the middle name beginning with the letter A?
That missing 1890 Census would have illuminated this, too. The only other clue we have is from the 1900 Census. John and Amanda noted that they had five children, but only four were living. They didn’t give the name of the deceased child. Could Amanda be the unnamed child?

If, and this may be a BIG if, both Amandas are the same person, it may be that “Amanda A.” is the daughter of John and Amanda (the mother) Anderson.

No doubt infant Amanda’s death hit “K” Street hard. Amanda’s parents were likely distraught that they had no means to bury their daughter. And I’d like to believe that the close ties among the neighbors of Maxwelltown moved Nels and his new bride to offer the space in my great-grandmother’s gravesite to welcome Amanda. It would have been a fitting way of repaying John and Amanda’s act of selfless generosity just a few months earlier.

The full details of the Mystery Girl may never be known. I do know this: I owe Amanda a debt of gratitude. She rekindled old friendships and created new ones. And she deepened my appreciation of our ancestral home of Manistee and the heart that still shines brightly in Maxwelltown today.
Amanda, your gravestone is coming soon. With love. From all of us.

Gordon Berg is a descendant of Manistee’s Bergs, Swansons and Martinsons. His debut book “Harry and the Hurricane” is about his father’s life as a young boy and how he survived the Miami Hurricane of 1926. harryandthehurricane.com