Part III · OHIO, IOWA, OREGON · Chapter 11

Ten Faces, Circa 1890

Iowa · a photographer's studio, about 1890

In the record Lewis S. Krewson (1843–1910) · Phoebe Ellen Stickler (1843–1910) · Charles Franklyn Krewson (1873–1935) · Alexander Deniston Krewson (1816–1879) · Julia Ann Storms (c.1810–1887) · John Julien Krewson (1788–1827) · Earl W. Krewson

Ten people sat for a photographer around 1890 — four standing, six seated, a baby on one knee and a toddler holding on to another. The print survived. And then, decades later, somebody turned it over and wrote all ten names on the back.

That somebody was Earl W. Krewson, of 4644 S.E. 85th Avenue, Portland, Oregon. He signed it, dated it "Nov 3" without a year, added "circa 1890" in a different pen, and left his telephone number [1]. The names are not listed but positioned — each one written where its person stands — which is what makes them usable, once you know the trick: the back of a print is a mirror of the front, so the name at the back's right belongs to the face at the front's left. Read that way, every name lands on exactly one face with none left over. "Sylvester Krewson 16 yrs" falls on the youngest man in the back row, in a soft hat. "Charlie (Boy)" falls on the infant. "Oliver (Boy)" on the toddler. And "Lewis Edward Krewson" on the white-bearded man seated at the far right with his hat resting on his knee — Michael's great-great-grandfather, and until the print was turned over, a name on a chart with no face [1].

That is the document this part of the book has, and it is almost the only one. For the hundred and fifty years between Simon and this print the family left nothing in its own hand — no will that anyone has found, no deed, no church book, no letter. What survives is what other people's family trees carry: names, dates, a county here and there. This chapter is honest about that. It says what the record holds, it reads the photograph as carefully as the earlier chapters read the wills, and it says where the rest is.

Three generations on a chart

Simon Krewson died in November 1844, at eighty-nine, in the corner of Pennsylvania where he had been born. His son John Julien had died before him, in 1827, at thirty-nine — a man who came of age in the War of 1812 and about whom nothing else is known but his wife's name, which two sources give as Amy Herron and a third as something like Hevener [2]. John Julien's son is where the line finally turns west.

Alexander Deniston Krewson was born in Pennsylvania on 17 May 1816. On Annette Maichen's Ancestry tree — the pedigree chart that gave this family back most of its nineteenth century — his birth surname is entered as "Kreuso," displayed as Krewson: a clerk's ear at work again, the same drift that had produced Cruson and Kruson and Krovesseen in Bucks County, now in a Pennsylvania register nobody has yet seen [3]. And on 6 November 1836, at twenty, he married Julia Ann Storms in Hamilton County, Ohio [3]. That single line is the end of a hundred and twenty-six years in Pennsylvania. Hamilton County is Cincinnati — in 1836 the fastest-growing city in the West, "Porkopolis," the river port through which everything the Ohio Valley grew went south to New Orleans. How Alexander got there, with whom, and why, no document in the family's hands says. He was the son of a man who died young and the grandson of a man who lived to eighty-nine on a farm that had been divided among eleven children; the arithmetic of chapter 10 is the likeliest reason a twenty-year-old Krewson was in Cincinnati in 1836, and the National Road and the Ohio River are the likeliest way. Julia's people are a guess: a "Johann Sturm / Storme, 1771–1862" and a "C. Neukirich Catrout, 1773–1852" sit near her on the same chart and may be her parents, which would make the family's first westward marriage a marriage into the German Ohio that was pouring into Cincinnati in those years [4]. The Dutch family that Uncle Al remembered as "posing as Germans" among the Pennsylvania Dutch had, if so, married the real thing.

Their son Lewis was born in Ohio in March 1843. The chart calls him Lewis S.; the back of the photograph calls him Lewis Edward; a WikiTree profile calls him Lewis Sylvester; and the family's record keeps all three, because nothing settles it and a death record would [5]. He married Phoebe Ellen Stickler, born the same year, and by the time of the photograph they had at least six children: George, William, Charles, Mary, Sylvester, and the Lotta who sits beside William with the two small boys and is his wife, not his sister [1]. Charles Franklyn Krewson — Michael's great-grandfather, Al's grandfather, the "Franklyn Charles" of Al's 2005 email — was born in 1873, and the back of the print brackets his name with "Aunt Mary" and one word: Twins [1]. Alexander died on 20 August 1879, and one of the two sources that name him gives the place: Bloomfield, Davis County, Iowa [3].

So between 1843 and 1879 the family moved again — Ohio to southern Iowa — and the record cannot say when or how. What it can say is where they ended up. Uncle Al, asked in 2005 by a stranger named Marcia Shaw about a possible relative, wrote back: "My particular line of the family hails from the Centerville, Iowa area. I had a chance to visit there in 1970 and met some more relatives" [6]. Centerville is the seat of Appanoose County, on the Missouri line; Bloomfield, where Alexander died, is the next county east; and Seymour, where Charles had his portrait taken by a photographer named S. E. James in 1893, at about twenty, is the next county west [7]. Three adjacent counties along Iowa's southern border, coal and corn country, sixty miles from anywhere. That is the family's Iowa. Galen Vane Krewson, Charles's son and Michael's grandfather, was born there in 1897 and photographed there at fourteen in 1911 [8].

Reading the print

The photograph is a studio group of the kind every prosperous farm family in the Midwest sat for once: the parents seated in front, the children arranged around them by height and marriage, the grandchildren on knees. What it shows, read the way the wills were read, is this.

Lewis is about forty-seven, white-bearded already, in a dark suit, his hat on his knee — the pose of a man who has been told to sit still and is doing it. Phoebe is beside him, hair centre-parted and swept low over the ears, the long straight nose and deep-set eyes that carry, aged twenty-five years, into the only other portrait of her the family has [1]. Behind them stand the sons: George, in the annotator's "Uncle George"; Charles, "Uncle Charles," in a bowler hat and wire-rimmed glasses, about seventeen — the narrow face and long neck and prominent ears that carry, three years on, into the Seymour cabinet card, the two set side by side in the family's archive so that a reader can judge for himself, and the record calling it "a strong probability, not a confirmed identification" [7]; Sylvester, sixteen, in the soft hat, the youngest adult. "Aunt Mary," the twin. And at the left, seated, "Uncle William" with Lotta and their two boys — Oliver, the toddler, and Charlie, the baby — "a family inside the family," which is what a photograph like this is for: to show that the line goes on [1].

And then there is the hand that named them. Earl W. Krewson wrote "Uncle" before George and Charles and William, and "Aunt" before Mary, and nothing before Sylvester — which is the ordinary sign of a man labelling his father's brothers and sister, and his father plainly. Sylvester, sixteen in the picture, was very probably Earl's father; and Earl was in Portland, Oregon, when he wrote, with a telephone number. Which means the photograph records two things at once. It records a Krewson family in Iowa around 1890. And its annotation records that by the time anyone thought to write the names down, one of the boys in it had a son in Oregon — a second Krewson migration to Oregon, separate from the branch of Simon's brother Derrick that had gone earlier and left its name on a creek near Eugene, and the same city where Uncle Al would settle after the Army, without, as far as anyone knows, ever meeting Earl [9].

The family's own reading of the print carries one trap that this book repeats because it is exactly the kind of trap the whole record is full of: "Lotta is not Lottie." Charles's wife, whom the family called Lottie, was L. Michele Marshall, and she married him years after this sitting; the Lotta in the front row is William's wife, a mother of two in 1890, while Charles stands behind her at seventeen [1]. Two women, two spellings, one generation apart, and a family tree that would have merged them without the back of a photograph.

The war the record does not mention

Lewis Krewson was born in March 1843. In April 1861 he was eighteen. Ohio sent more than three hundred thousand men into the Union armies, and Iowa, if the family was there by then, seventy-five thousand — the highest proportion of its men of any state. Whether Lewis was one of them, the family's record cannot say: no regiment, no muster, no pension, no G.A.R. post, no gravestone with a shield on it, nothing. It is not that the family's researchers looked and found nothing; it is that no one has looked. The Cruise volume stops at the third generation. Anne Raike's files stop in Bucks County. Uncle Al, who traced the family in the 1960s and visited Centerville in 1970, wrote in 2005 that he was "not too clear on our lineage beyond Lewis as there appears to be a couple of possibilities" [6]. A man who was eighteen when the war began, on either side of the Ohio–Iowa line, is more likely than not to have served in some capacity, and the sources that would say — the Ohio and Iowa rosters, the 1890 special census of Union veterans and widows, the pension index — are all indexed by name and all online behind a login the next edition of this chapter should have used. Until it has, Lewis's war is the largest single blank in four centuries of this family's record, and this book leaves it blank rather than guess.

There is one more thing in the sources about Lewis, and it is strange enough to record. The WikiTree profile that gives his birth in Ohio in March 1843 gives his death as 1910, "reportedly in Arkansas" [5]. Phoebe died the same year. And the emails in which Uncle Al set out what he knew of Lewis, in January 2005, carry his nephew's signature block at the foot of each: "Michael Krewson, Bella Vista, AR" [6]. The great-great-grandson was living in Arkansas, asking about the great-great-grandfather who had died there, and neither of them knew it. If the Arkansas death is right — it is one profile's word — then Lewis, like Simon and Derrick and Garret before him, ended somewhere further along the same line, and a Krewson grave in Arkansas is another thing to look for.

What this part of the book is

Parts I and II of this book were written from a shelf: a five-hundred-page genealogy, church books transcribed to the letter, wills copied by hand in the 1930s. Part III has no shelf. It has a chart photographed off a cousin's screen, two public trees that happen to agree, four photographs, and an uncle's emails. That is an honest description of most American families' nineteenth century, and the temptation in writing it is to fill the space with the history of Ohio and Iowa — the canals, the railroads, the Homestead Act — and let the reader assume the family was there for all of it. This book will not do that. What it will do is set down the frame the family's own documents give and mark, plainly, where the frame is empty:

Pennsylvania to Hamilton County, Ohio, by 1836. A son born in Ohio in 1843. Southern Iowa by 1879 at the latest — Davis, Appanoose and Wayne counties. A photograph of ten people about 1890. A cabinet card from Seymour in 1893. A boy born in 1897. And, in the next chapter, that boy grown up, and a break in the family that his sons would spend their lives trying to understand, and that Uncle Al would trace, in one sentence, "all the way back to the 1600s."

Where the rest is

For the next edition, or for anyone in the family with an afternoon and a subscription: the federal census of 1850 for Hamilton County, Ohio, which should show Alexander, Julia and a seven-year-old Lewis and give Alexander's birthplace and occupation; 1860, which will say whether they were still in Ohio or already in Iowa; 1870 and 1880 for Appanoose, Davis and Wayne counties, Iowa, which should show Lewis and Phoebe and name every child in the photograph with an age; the Roster and Record of Iowa Soldiers and the Official Roster of the Soldiers of the State of Ohio, both indexed, for a Lewis Krewson, Kruson or Cruson born 1843; the 1890 veterans' schedule for southern Iowa; the Civil War pension index; Iowa county marriage and death registers for Lewis, Phoebe and Charles; and a death record for Lewis in Arkansas in 1910, which would settle his middle name and say what he was doing there. Every one of these exists. None of them is in the family's hands. The chapter that could be written from them is the one this chapter is standing in for.

The ground it happened on

As always, what follows is what the period's own sources say about the places, not a record of these people. Hamilton County in 1836 was Cincinnati and its farms — a city of forty thousand, doubling every decade, the pork-packing and steamboat capital of the Ohio, and the destination of the National Road and the river for every Pennsylvanian going west who did not go by way of Pittsburgh. Southern Iowa in the 1870s and 1880s was the last of the state to fill: the railroads reached the Missouri line in the late 1860s, and towns like Seymour were laid out on the track in 1871, on land that had been prairie; Appanoose County's coal seams were opened in the same decade, and Centerville, its seat, was a mining and farming town of a few thousand [7]. A cabinet card — the format of the Seymour portrait — was a photograph mounted on a stiff card about four inches by six, the standard studio product of the 1880s and 1890s, with the photographer's name printed on the mount; S. E. James of Seymour was one of thousands of small-town operators who sat every family in the county in front of the same painted backdrop. The group portrait of about 1890 is the same trade's larger product, and its back — where a later hand wrote ten names — is the family's only document of that generation in its own words.

1. The c. 1890 photograph, its annotation by Earl W. Krewson of 4644 S.E. 85th Ave., Portland, Oregon, the mirror-reading that assigns the ten names, the twin bracket, "Lotta is not Lottie," and the face comparisons: the family record's story "Ten Faces, Circa 1890" and the cards for Lewis S. Krewson, Phoebe E. Stickler, Charles F. Krewson and Sylvester Krewson, all from a photographic print Michael photographed on 20 August 2026 (both sides); the annotated key is krewson-family-c1890-key.jpg in the family archive.
2. Simon Krewson (1755–1844), John Julien Krewson (1788–1827), and John Julien's wife (Amy Herron / "Hevener-Herron"): the family record's cards, from Annette Maichen's Ancestry pedigree and the WikiTree and MyHeritage records found on 22 August 2026; the record's own note that the "Herron" reading rests on a single mention and is deliberately not adopted.
3. Alexander Deniston Krewson — born 17 May 1816 in Pennsylvania, entered as "Kreuso" on Annette Maichen's Ancestry tree, married Julia Ann Storms on 6 November 1836 in Hamilton County, Ohio, died 20 August 1879, one source giving Bloomfield, Davis County, Iowa: the family record's card, from the Ancestry pedigree photographed 4 August 2026 and two independent public profiles (WikiTree "Julia Ann (Storms) Krewson (abt. 1811–1887)" and a MyHeritage-aggregated record) found 22 August 2026. The record notes these are secondary public trees, not primary documents.
4. Johanna J. A. Storme (1810–1887) and the possible parents "Johann Sturm/Storme 1771–1862" and "C. Neukirich Catrout 1773–1852": the family record's card, from the same pedigree chart; the parents are marked there as unconfirmed.
5. Lewis Krewson — "Lewis S." on the Ancestry tree, "Lewis Edward" on the photograph's back, "Lewis Sylvester" on a WikiTree profile giving birth in March 1843 in Ohio and death in 1910 "reportedly in Arkansas"; Phoebe Ellen (Stickler) Krewson, 1843–1910, on a WikiTree profile: the family record's cards, which keep all three names and mark the WikiTree dates as not independently verified.
6. Uncle Al's emails: to Marcia Shaw, cc. Michael, 20 January 2005 ("My particular line of the family hails from the Centerville, Iowa area … I'm not too clear on our lineage beyond Lewis"); and the 2002 and 2005 exchanges with Michael, whose signature block gives Bella Vista, Arkansas: family archive, info-on-krewson-fathers-names-and-iowa-2005-01-20.htm and more-rifts-in-the-family-2005-01-20.htm.
7. The Seymour, Iowa, cabinet card of 1893 by S. E. James, and the 1930 portrait: the family record's card for Charles F. Krewson and the photographs charles-krewson-iowa-1893.jpg and charles-krewson-iowa-1930.jpg. Seymour's founding on the railroad in 1871 and Appanoose County's coal are from the standard county histories.
8. Galen Vane Krewson, born 1897 in Iowa, photographed at fourteen in 1911: the family record's card and galen-v-krewson-iowa-age-14-1911.jpg; his birth year is corroborated by the 1943 Los Angeles County birth certificate of his son.
9. The Oregon branch descending from Derrick⁵ (b. 1753) and Krewson Creek near Eugene: the family record's places list and the photographed Oregon-cousins tree; Al's settling in Portland: the family record's card for Alfred G. M. Krewson.