I started with a Google search for Helen DeGraff Ukers. I found out more about the Tea and Coffee Trade Journal<\/a>. I found out that Helen was William Ukers’s secretary. And futhermore a New York Times article revealed he had a first wife and a daughter along with a child support dispute<\/a>. In an interesting twist, there are two Helens. Helen DeGraff Ukers and Helen Ukers the daughter who was the point of contention between William and his first wife. While I was at the NYT site, I ran a search for Helen Ukers to see if anything interesting came up.<\/p>\n What I found was an article announcing the daughter Helen Ukers’s marriage. Not impressive by itself, it is what follows that shocked me!<\/p>\n I had no reason to scroll through the whole list of announcements, but I did look just below the Ukers announcement because a name caught my eye. “Wilhelm.” I recognized the surname as it was my grandmother’s maiden name. I kept reading. Hum, Henry Theodore Wilhelm…I sat up a bit straighter. Phillips Carlin! OMG, I KNOW THIS FAMILY! Henry was my 2nd great-granduncle! He was part owner of several china shops in New York City, one called Wilhelm & Graef on Broadway. Phillips Carlin married my distant cousin and was a radio announcer and television executive! He was the radio announcer for several World Series games, the host of several radio shows, and the President of NBC.<\/p>\n What are the chances that while investigating a family totally unrelated to mine — which began with a couple in Arizona — would lead to the discovery that relatives of this random family and my own were in a New York City newspaper article one above the other!<\/p>\n Once I calmed down, I knew I still had more to answer about Helen DeGraff Ukers. But that was exciting! Back to where I was going in the first place.<\/p>\n I located Helen on the 1910 census living in New York City as Helen Morehouse — a widow (darn, no easy answer to who her husband was). However, I figured that a death of a young husband would be in the papers back home, so back to Fulton History I went. I tried several searches and couldn’t find an article on Helen’s first marriage or the death of her husband. Now it was getting personal because it shouldn’t have been this hard.<\/p>\n The search that finally worked was one for Helen DeGraff. It turned up an article about Helen DeGraff McMillan’s <\/a>service as a flower girl. At this point, I was willing to try anything — even names of distant members of the family, and up turns an article about Helen Scholefield DeGraff’s marriage to Charles Emmon Morehouse <\/a>of Connecticut! (Sometimes it it handy when families name their children after other family members!)<\/p>\n Okay! I now know that Helen began life as Helen Scholefield DeGraff and married a man named Morehouse followed by a man named Ukers. Still wanting to finish my sidetrip, I searched for his name — only to find out that he apparently didn’t die! He was getting married to another woman four years after Helen reported that she was a widow!<\/p>\n What I learned from this:<\/p>\n Scholefield Family Tree Ye gads! This is either cool or just plain spooky. I guess I should start at the beginning. I got sidetracked. (It happens to the best of us.) As I was looking for Alonzo’s children, I ran across a very short 1912 marriage announcement that named one of his daughters “Mrs. Helen … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[46,110,125,145,151],"class_list":["post-959","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-newspaper-findings","tag-degraff","tag-morehouse","tag-scholefield","tag-ukers","tag-wilhelm"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/findyourdead.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/959","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/findyourdead.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/findyourdead.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/findyourdead.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/findyourdead.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=959"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/findyourdead.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/959\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/findyourdead.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=959"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/findyourdead.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=959"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/findyourdead.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=959"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"Ukers](\"http:\/\/www.findyourdead.com\/wp\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/01\/Ukers-and-Wilhelm-300x129.jpg\")
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\nI know you don’t share my shock yet. Let me explain…<\/p>\n\n