The Silver Fox Farmer and the Inexperienced Housekeeper
What I've learned so far about Helen (Keith) Douglas
This is the first in a series of posts where I’ll be introducing some of the people who wrote the letters that make up Dear Mister Ward. I’ve been researching them for awhile now and have had some successes. I’ve managed to connect with a few relatives of Gentry McCorkle and Nellie Manley Buck and even connected with someone mentioned in a letter.
But for most of the letters I’ve been able to find a few pieces of info at best but no living relatives. I’ve decided to take the search public and see if I can make any new connections that way. In addition to these posts I will be sending out press releases to some regional and local papers in the places from where the letters were sent. I’ve added a page to the Dear Mister Ward website about the research. If you’d like to share it with anyone who doesn’t read the newsletter I would greatly appreciate it. https://dearmisterward.com/research
I have also set up a Facebook group for Dear Mister Ward research. I’ll share tidbits occasionally in there but don’t worry, everything will eventually make it into the newsletter. If you have photos of the places the letters came from or anything related to Montgomery Ward in the 1930s and 1940s please don’t hesitate to share. It’s a private group to cut down on spam but everyone is welcome.
It only seems fitting that the first post in this series should be about the first letter I found. That would of course be the letter from Helen Franklyn Keith (soon to be Helen Douglas).
This letter is more of a shopping list than a complaint letter. In it Helen is requesting supplies for setting up house with her soon to be husband. She admits to not knowing “much about housekeeping” and rattles off all sorts of items, some generic, some very specific. The letter was sent from St Paul Park, MN on February 2nd, 1939 and tells of her intention to marry a silver fox farmer by the name of William Douglas who lived in “Fort Henry, Prince Edward Island, Canada.”
This was the first confusing thing because, as I then found out, Fort Henry is nowhere near Prince Edward Island but is actually in Ontario, just north of Prince Edward County. At first I thought maybe that was a mistake by my grandma, but I think the copy of the letter on onion skin paper might be the original from Helen. So I decided to check into both. I started with Fort Henry but I didn’t have any luck finding her or William Douglas there so I tried closer to Prince Edward Island. I also expanded the search to anyone with the last name Douglas with a wife named Helen in Canada around the time the letter was sent. That’s how I found the marriage record of Helen to a James Roy Douglas in Petticodiac, New Brunswick, Canada. Not quite Prince Edward Island but a heck of a lot closer. This area apparently was also well known for their fox farming trade. I may do a post on that at some point but it sounds pretty depressing and gruesome so maybe not.
Upon further investigation I found that James had an older brother named Frederick William Douglas who was already married to a woman named Armeda Keith. So, maybe she just got the names mixed up? Or maybe family just called James William for some reason. Either way I hope her order didn’t get lost in the mail.
The question still remained why Helen was marrying someone so far away. There was obviously some connection between the Douglas’s and the Keiths and who wouldn’t want to marry a silver fox farmer. But it’s quite a way to go for a husband. Now that I had Helen’s middle name Franklyn I was able to find some more details. I found that she had been born in Canada and had only moved to St Paul Park in 1932. This was proven by her Declaration of Intent to become a US citizen. In it she declares that she is a school teacher and her most recent residence before St Paul Park was Medicine Hat, Alberta. It also provided a photo of her.
I also discovered that her mother’s maiden name was…wait for it…Douglas. So she and James were cousins. You become kind of immune to finding out that people married their cousins if you do genealogical research long enough but the late 1930s is a little late for that but hey, who am I to judge?
They didn’t stay all that long in Petticodiac. By 1950 they were back in St Paul and remained there until sometime before between 1960 and 1980. James passed way in St Petersburg Florida in 1980 and Helen lived for another 20+ years dying in 2004.
It doesn’t appear that they had any children but maybe there are some nieces, nephews or cousins who remember them. I sent a message to someone with the last name Keith on Family Search but haven’t heard back.
If you haven’t already you can read this letter in the first part of the Story Behind Dear Mister Ward. But why read it for yourself when you have an actor read it to you?
Here is a video of Lori Holmes Clark reading it at the Shea Theater in my town of Turners Falls, Massachusetts in December of last year. The only catch is that you need to be a paid subscriber to view it. It’s only a couple bucks a month and it will get you access to all future videos and other fun stuff. Mostly I’m putting it behind a paywall because I still hope to take the show on the road at some point and don’t want too many spoiler videos out there.