For years, I believed my great-great-grandparents were William and Phebe Randall. They married on December 26, 1875, in Oneida, Eaton County, Michigan. Phebe was just seventeen, William twenty-three. Phebe's childhood had been marked by loss—her mother, Sophronia, died when she was eleven, and her father, Orison Mosher, passed away five years later from injuries sustained in the Civil War, just months before her wedding. The skies may have been clear on their wedding day, but the temperature hovered near zero—perhaps a chilling foreshadowing of the marriage that was to come.
William and Phebe had three children: Claude Walter (my great-grandfather) and his sisters, Frantie and Lena. As a young man, Claude left home to attend college, later moving west to Phoenix and then to Ontario, California, where he became a school administrator. My grandfather and his sister Dolly grew up in Ontario, more than 2,000 miles from their grandparents' home in Michigan. Travel was arduous in the early 1900s, yet the family did manage to visit their Michigan relatives on at least one occasion. When I interviewed my grandfather and Aunt Dolly in the 1990s, their childhood memories had faded, but one thing remained clear to both of them: Grandma Phebe was a warmhearted woman who treated everyone with love and kindness.
So imagine my shock when I received an email from a fellow genealogist, informing me that my great-great-grandmother, Phebe Mosher, was actually his great-great-grandmother, Phebe Mosher. And that her married name wasn’t Phebe Randall, but Phebe VanNortrick!
According to his research, Phebe Mosher had married Almiron VanNortrick in 1887 and had three children with him in Ionia County, Michigan. He had a copy of a death certificate for a Phebe Van Nortrick, daughter of Orison and Sophronia Mosher, who had died in 1894 at the young age of 35. This made no sense as I had documentation showing that Phebe Randall, daughter of Orison and Sophronia Mosher, had lived until 1933, passing away at age 71.
Could there have actually been two Phebes born in 1858, in Michigan, each to a different Orison and Sophronia Mosher? Somehow that seemed unlikely!
I turned to my grandfather and Aunt Dolly for clarification. When I mentioned the possibility that Grandma Phebe had once left her family, my great aunt suddenly recalled something she had heard her parents talk about many years before. "I remember my father talking about how his mother just up and left one day." Grandpa nodded, visibly uncomfortable. "The children could do nothing but watch as their mother stormed across the cornfields, never to be seen again."
"But," I reminded them, "she was seen again—you visited her as children."
They hesitated., then recalled with smiles, "that certainly was a wonderful summer. She was such a sweet woman."
Something certainly didn’t add up. Could it be possible that Grandma Phebe had abandoned William and the children, remarried, had three more children, and then somehow returned to her original family years later? It was a bizarre scenario, but at this point, I was ready to believe almost anything.
My next move was to contact the Eaton County Courthouse. The response came quickly. Fascinated by the mystery, the clerk journeyed to the basement archives and found something remarkable: Phebe had filed for divorce from William not once, but twice! For reasons unknown, the first attempt, just two years into the marriage, didn’t go through, but the second was finalized ten years later, in 1887, leaving William with three children ages 3, 6, and 8. She married Almiron VanNortrick just two days after the divorce was finalized.
So did she die at 35 or 71? The answer is both!
In 1900, William married his second wife, whose name just happened to also be named Phebe—a divorced woman with four children of her own. This was the woman my grandfather and Aunt Dolly knew as "Grandma Phebe" and remembered so fondly.
For years, the two Phebes had been conflated into one. One Phebe had fled an unhappy marriage, remarried, and died young. The other stepped into her place and raised a family that never questioned her identity. The truth had been buried beneath mistaken assumptions and the peculiar coincidence of identical names.
May this story of the two Phebes serve is a reminder that just when you think you have everything figured out, the past has ways of surprising you.
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