The Cup and Ball Trick is the oldest in the book. You show a player the ball and place it under a cup. You surround that cup with two empty ones and proceed to move the cups about in some chaotic, obscuring fashion. The objective is to mix them up so much the player has no idea which one holds the ball. Usually at this point money exchanges hands and my analogy breaks down, but the reason the trick works is it feeds the player, showing them what they think is enough information to make a decision. The moving of the hands is merely a distraction, useless data. In fact, all sleight of hand tricks involve confusion to be successful.
What’s the best ways to lie? One way is to tell the truth and the whole truth, but tell it so unconvincingly the listener discounts it. Another is to give them a lie wrapped in some of the truth, but only enough to sell the lie. This is the one I think my Grandfather used. He fed us names that were mostly correct, but ultimately misleading. In fact they were just effective enough to confound any search for that time. He drew from his experiences in different places to smooth out any bumps. Want to know more about his mother? Sorry, she’s dead. Other relatives? Sorry, they don’t like me anymore. But mostly he just stayed quiet.
When I was growing up, no one spoke of my grandparents much. They were gone before most of us turned 10, leaving no lasting mark on later generations. Their own children loved them, but knew very little about them. During holiday gatherings we’d swap stories from over the years; talking about Clyde was a perennial favorite.
Was he really in the Merchant Marines?
Did he really have a sister?
What was her name again?
One thing grew clearer with every year; a hole existed. There existed a hole at the top of our family tree out of which dropped Clyde Francis Morgan Senior. It was beginning to look as if Clyde wasn’t who he claimed to be.
The Internet turned out to be a godsend. As more and more databases came online, new services cropped up. They sold access to vast amounts of digitized public records, making it finally possible to rebuild a lost history for a family. Our search went back a decade and even more as my mother made her own trips to Asheville in search of gravestones.
Early in 2003 we made an attempt, only to be thwarted. No matter how hard we tried we couldn’t find George Henry Morgan living in Port Arthur, TX. Confusingly we found an Honorine Moreau who lived in New Orleans, but she wasn’t married to George Henry Morgan. Her last name was Muller. Honorine must be a more common name than we thought.
As time went on, the tools got better and the amount of information grew. It became almost too easy to search passenger lists from boats in the 1920s. You could even read the phone book as far back as they had phones. If your family mingled amongst the social elites of their time then you could read about who came to visit your Great-Great Aunt Sally for the weekend in the summer of 1875 in the gossip pages of the local rag. Hell, you’re able to see the hand-written notes on a prison profile card describing the moles on a man’s back, all from the 1927 roster of prisoners in the Louisiana State Penitentiary.
Fate or luck changed our direction in 2013. My brother was given a Y-DNA test as a gift. A Y-DNA test traces the Y chromosome, which is handed down from the father. With some interest he sent it off, hoping to discover at least the country or region we’re from. The name wasn’t much of a thought. It’ll either say Morgan or someone we can trace to a Morgan. The path should be easy if we know where to start.
But what came back hit like a wet noodle. At first it was more of a curiosity. There were no familiar names and no familiar countries. My brother almost discounted it as an oddity but in the end it spawned weeks of fevered searching online, multiple chat sessions with my brother over possible leads, and tantalizing clues to the real story behind Clyde Francis Morgan Senior.
First, the test told him our family was not English or Australian or Italian or Jewish, all things the children remembered. Instead it told us we’re almost completely German. German…German?
The company reached into it’s database and compared us to others and spit out two names with a likely ancestor in common. It doesn’t tell you to call up Joe Smith in Houston, but it can indicate families who share common strands of DNA. This is possible because someone from that family did the same as us and had a DNA test done. In this case the two names placed us within the last 20 generations of a common ancestor named Miller or Mueller.
Interesting, we thought, but twenty generations is a long time. A really long time. The question was how useful is this information?
Turning back to Ancestry, we made a new attempt to find George Henry Morgan. Like all search engines, sometimes you can tease them to give you more results by offering it more options. We’d always tried searching for him and Texas, that being the simplest way to find him and no one else. This time we combined George with Honorine Moreau. We were starting over so start with the basic. We’d be on the lookout for anything German or with those names like Miller. Surprised is hardly adequate to describe our emotions after what came up. And it was hard to ignore. Out popped George and Honorine Muller. And Honorine was from New Orleans with a husband was named George Muller, not Morgan. Unlike the last time when we found this Honorine, a light went off. This time the name clicked.
A quick Internet search showed Muller as another form of the name Mueller, one of the results from my brother’s DNA test. Using that tidbit we covered a lot of ground quickly, building a portrait of a family we never knew. We thrilled at the search, spending countless hours pouring over fuzzy archives looking for names. We felt sure of our path, but we wanted to be thorough. Some rules must be followed:
- Account for what we know, but don’t stretch the facts
- Don’t assume everything he told was a lie
- Don’t assume everything he told was true
- Don’t assume something we find is related
- Don’t assume something we see is irrelevant
There were times it got hard and times when we had tons of data pouring in about the man. It makes for a compelling story I think, but I have to warn you. It’s not yet proven. However, to the best of our ability, using data available today, this is who we think we are.
We began by listing everything we knew about him based on what he told us:
- Born 10/17/1900 in Port Arthur, Texas (written on death certificate)
- Mother and Father: George and Honorine Morgan (written on death certificate)
- Mother died between 1910 – 1920
- Sister Annette Morgan died between 1910-1918
- Fought in WW1 by lying on his draft card
- Was shot/hit with shrapnel
- Joined Merchant Marines and contracted malaria
- Was disowned by an Aunt named Frances for joining Merchant Marines
- He or his father George worked for Standard Oil at some point
- Attended Columbia University school of Journalism for 2 years (1940 Census mentions some college, but this is self-reported)
- Became ill with malaria again and traveled to Duke in North Carolina for treatment
- Met Adele Cahal at the Salvation Army and married (documented with wedding photo)
This is actually a lot to go on with juicy tidbits ripe for research. We had names and dates on various documents left in his wake. The first thing to do was take this and flesh out their lives tod see where any of it overlaps.
Honorine Moreau’s the only match in Louisiana at the right time and married to a George. In fact, Honorine isn’t a common name at all, which made it easier to spot her. Using her as the jumping off point we pieced together her family. We began to notice the pattern of how Clyde changed only the smallest of details. Her father, Honore Moreau, went by the name Henry, supposedly George’s middle name. That’s the only reference to Henry we could find.
By 1910 her family was comprised of seven children:
- Elise Muller
- George Muller
- Eugenia Muller
- Blanche Muller
- Honorine Muller
- Adrienne Muller
- Charles Muller
Where was Clyde Francis Muller? Where was Annette, the dead sister? Frances was nowhere to be found. Still, it was enough to search again because Charles was born in 1900, same as Clyde.
It wasn’t until we found each birth notice that we discovered Charles’ full name; Charles Francis Muller born July 10th, 1900. Clyde was born October 17, 1900. When read as numbers it gets interesting:
07/10/1900 Charles Muller
10/17/1900 Clyde Morgan
Swapping the month and the day would produce a date you could easily remember. Not conclusive but close. Knowing their birth dates almost lined up and their names were almost the same, we knew the search was on! Next we compared the life of Charles Muller to Clyde Morgan, just to see if any of the facts lined up.
We completed the family tree with dates and names for Charles and the Muller family. The names of the parents are critical because they only appear as George and Honorine if you change the last name to Muller. And Moreau is a very distinctive name when paired with Honorine, making it more likely she’s the right one. Coupled with the fact Honorine Moreau was supposed to be from New Orleans and you discover there’s only one that fits.
Just to be fair we searched diligently for the name Morgan, but no Honorine Moreau was ever connected to a Morgan. There are plenty of George and George Henry Morgans, but none with a wife named Honorine and a son named Clyde born around 1900 in Texas or New York. Only George Muller has that honor.
You might wonder why we place so much faith in Ancestry’s content. What’s so special about it?
In America you leave a trail throughout your life, even as you die. You can’t help it. Every public mark you made along the way is eventually digitized and made available. The oldest records are the hardest to search due to their age and condition and the difficulty of converting handwritten data. They have to be transcribed, which takes time. New records get added every year. As that happens we unfold the layers and find everything from phonebook entries to property deeds to newspaper articles. If you have any money at all you leave a trail. The census data alone tells you so much it’s not even funny. Due to law they only run through 1940 but unless a citizen makes a concerted effort to remain off the grid there’s a record.
For the Mullers, almost to the day their boat docked, you can follow this family. They left church records, regularly appeared in the Society pages of the time, and even owned land in New Orleans. That’s what makes it hard to believe we could find so much on George and Honorine Muller and nothing for George Henry Morgan from Port Arthur, Texas married to Honorine Moreau. We did find a reference to Port Arthur, Texas though. August J Brodtman Sr. married Honorine Claire Muller, one of Honorine’s daughters. He was a machinist for Jefferson Shipping. In 1935 they lived in Beaumont, Texas, a suburb of Port Arthur. He died of a heart attack and she moved back to New Orleans.
One thing kept bothering us as we found more information. Where was the sister named Annette? The name here is subject to debate among the relatives, but it came up more than once. Perhaps Annette did exist, but like the name change there’s a warped piece of data. What one thing did Clyde change to erase the real Annette?
After some searching we found it. Referenced on the Hancock Mississippi Historical Society’s web page, Annette Adelaide Claire Muller born November 21st, 1898. After her baptism on December 4, 1898 at Our Lady of the Gulf she never again appears in the records. It took us another two weeks to find a small reference to her passing less than a year later. Why lie about her dying at an older age? We don’t know. Perhaps with Annette dying young he could invent whole narratives about her.
Clyde’s military history was more challenging. Draft cards are an interesting source of information. Ancestry has a ton of them. With them you learn where they lived, next of kin, and how old they claim to be. Believe it or not young men considered it a badge of honor to lie about your age in order to fight in a war. The prestige of serving once figured strongly in our culture.
Using these cards we found a Clyde Francis Morgan from California who was born in Texas, but not Port Arthur. He was born in 1895, but he is not our Clyde. We know because we followed his life past 1934 when our Clyde was married in North Carolina.
Supposedly Clyde lied to get in the fight of WWI, but if he did we never found military records to prove it. Not even a draft card, which everyone filled out. On Charles’ side we found cards for all the men in his family, including the husbands of Muller daughters. While Charles did fill a card out for WWI he never served. I can prove Charles didn’t fight by following his records but found no proof Clyde ever did.
One thing became glaringly obvious to us. Clyde simply didn’t show up in the public record until just before he meets Adele Cahal in 1934. But Charles Muller? He has the opposite problem.
In 1922 Charles married Mathilda Mitchell, per a note on the Hancock Society’s web site. We have phone records showing their life in New Orleans, including a realty business. By 1929 he’s in Baton Rouge working for the Louisiana State Penitentiary as a clerk. Charles has no kids that we can tell after six years of marriage. In fact we don’t find much more about him until the 1930 Census. He’s listed as a boarder in a hotel in Baton Rouge. It says he’s married but Mathilde’s name isn’t among the other guests. It shows him as a salesman for the state.
And then he disappears. Gone from the public record. And it gets even stranger. Mathilde vanishes too. Divorce was possible, but frowned upon. To follow this possibility through we tried finding Mathilde under her old name, but nothing. We thought up scenarios to explain their demise. Strange to have them simply vanish. Did it involve foul play or natural occurrence? It seemed as if we’d never learn the truth or would have to wait for the next release of census data.
And then we got a lucky break, learning the final truth of what happened to Charles and Mathilda Muller.
Desperate for something new we posted in an Ancestry message board asking for any local Mullers that knew the family. I explained as much as I could without sounding too desperate and within 24 hours there was a response. A kind soul named Terry sent us newspaper articles about the entire episode. A simple search of newspaper archives resulted in a trove of gossip and intrigue.
After the realty business, Charles went to work for the Mortgage and Securities Company, a lender in New Orleans. According to articles at the time, he embezzled over $38,000, the equivalent of nearly $500,000 today. Ultimately convicted of only 1 count of forgery he’s sentenced to 6-10 years in the Louisiana State Penitentiary. True to what is said of my grandfather, he’s described as a fine and useful prisoner, educated and mild mannered. He is assigned to the warden to handle records management, earning him a pardon after 18 months.
Things were looking up it seemed.