A Christmas Wish
On this Christmas Day, we wish you moments of peace, warmth, and connection, whether shared with family, friends, memories, or quiet reflection.
May the spirit of the season remind us that kindness, community, and remembrance are gifts that never fade.
Thank you for supporting history, preservation, and community throughout the year.
Merry Christmas!
We’re not entirely sure what he’s driving this year…
All we know is he’s making his rounds......🎄✨
If you spot him, let us know...and don’t forget to get to bed early tonight. 😉
I hear NORAD knows where he is.......NORAD Santa Tracker
Long before radios, recordings, or streaming playlists, Christmas carols were shared the old-fashioned way by singing together.
In territorial communities, families gathered in homes, churches, and sometimes outdoors to sing familiar hymns and folk carols. Many songs were passed down orally or sung from hymnals, with simple accompaniment like a fiddle, organ, or nothing at all.
Caroling wasn’t about performance. It was about connection. Voices carried comfort, faith, and a sense of togetherness during long winter nights on the frontier.
For many families, these shared songs were the celebration.
Check out "Christmas Carols and MidSummer Songs" at Project Gutenberg:
Amelia Kleinlogel was born about 1856 in Ohio to Talla Kleinlogel who had been born in France. She was the second oldest of five children which included Charles, Theodore, Louisa and Albert. Her father had died sometime between 1864 and 1870, which may have been why the family moved from Ohio to Michigan.
In 1870, the Kleinlogels were living in Solon, Kent County, Michigan, in the same household with several other people, among them 23-year-old Henry Geiges, an immigrant from Germany. Geiges was a sawyer in a local sawmill, as was Amelia’s older brother Charles.
Henry Geiges had been born 1849 in Schleswig-Holstein. He and Amelia were married on August 17, 1875, in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Their first child, Lillian, was born about 1880 in Michigan. Daughter Minnie was born February 1, 1884, in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
Amelia eventually contracted tuberculosis, which was rife at that time. Around 1896, the family moved to Phoenix, Arizona, for her health. However, on December 28, 1898, she died at the family home at 235 East Taylor Street. With Woodmen’s Circle paying for the interment, she was originally buried in Rosedale Cemetery. Sometime later, possibly in the 1920s or 1930s, her remains were moved to Greenwood Cemetery.
Henry and their two daughters moved soon afterward to Los Angeles, where Lillian eventually married Guy Hidden Lawrence. Henry Geiges died August 2, 1905, in Los Angeles, only a few months after his daughter’s wedding.
Daughter Minnie married Robinson P. Kane, a Seventh Day Adventist, in Los Angeles on June 30, 1908. Unfortunately, he died just a few years later, in 1911.
Lillian later returned to Phoenix with her husband. In 1929, they built a house at 6234 North Central which is on the National Register of Historic Places today.
- by Donna L. Carr
Families gathered by lamplight or the fire to:
Books were precious, so stories were often read aloud and shared across generations. In many homes, storytelling was the entertainment—bringing comfort, faith, and connection during long winter nights.
Have a favorite Christmas or Holiday story? Tell us in the comments!
Photos: Library of Congress, 1861
Henry Wilky began life as Heinrich Wilke. He was born on January 8, 1838, in Duchy of
Brunswick (Braunschweig), Germany, to a farm family.
Germany saw much political turmoil in the following years, as a revolution in 1848 failed and Prussia became the most powerful of Germany’s many duchies. Europe was also undergoing an industrial revolution, as farms with mechanized equipment were soon outcompeting small farms that depended on hand labor. Prussia’s imperial ambitions also led to the conscription of young men into the military. Wilke may have left Braunschweig for any of these reasons.
He arrived in New Orleans in 1855 and made his way up the Mississippi River to Burton, Adams County, Illinois, where he found employment on the farm of Peter Rump. The Rumps were originally from Hanover--only 40 miles from Braunschweig.
Henry obviously intended to remain in the United States, as he filed a naturalization petition in 1860. By 1861, he had a farm of his own and, on April 2nd, he married Sophia Lutgerding, a neighbor. She was the daughter of George Lutgerding and Elizabeth Rump (possibly a relative of Peter Rump) of Adams County, Illinois.
The Wilkys had six children: George L., born 1862; William H., born 1865; Frederick Daniel, born 1867; John Adolph, born 1870; Clara Ellen, born 1877: and Lena Madelia, born 1880. The family very likely spoke German at home. By 1870, they had moved to Marion County, Missouri, where the census recorded them as Wilkys.
By 1882, the oldest Wilky sons were adults and needed farms of their own. Henry and Sophia sold their property in Missouri and came by train to Maricopa in November. From Maricopa, they traveled by wagon to Phoenix. At first, they homesteaded in the area of 99th Ave and Indian School but, due to lack of water, they had to move to about 67th Ave and Indian School.
The Wilkys’ last years were marked by the loss of close relatives. Their son John Adolph died in 1886 and son Frederick Daniel in 1900. Henry Wilky himself died on December 22, 1900, of septicemia. He was buried in the family plot in City Loosley Cemetery. Sophia followed him in 1908.
The Wilkys’ descendants prospered in Arizona. More than a century after their arrival in the Valley of the Sun, they generously donated funds for a wrought iron arch for Rosedale Cemetery.
- by Donna L. Carr
Christmas cards didn’t become common on the American
frontier until the late 1800s. Before that, sending a holiday greeting was a
luxury. Paper was expensive, printing was limited, and mail service could be
unreliable.
When cards did appear in territorial towns, they were often:
Many people still preferred handwritten letters, postcards, or notes tucked into packages. Receiving a Christmas card wasn’t just festive. It was proof that someone, somewhere far away, was thinking of you.
On the frontier, a small card could mean connection, comfort, and hope during a lonely season.
George Washington DeGroot was born on January 3, 1842, in New York City. His parents were Edward DeGroot and Hannah West. The surname ‘DeGroot’ suggests Dutch origins.
In 1850, George’s father was listed on the federal census as a ‘clothier, someone who made and sold good-quality men’s clothing. He might have had a small shop. Living on the same street near the DeGroots were a shoemaker and a tailor.
Between 1855 and 1860, Edward DeGroot moved his family to Adams County, Illinois, where he became quite a well-to-do farmer. Although George registered for the Civil War draft in 1863, no evidence of Civil War service has been found to date. George was working on his father’s farm in 1870.
On December 11, 1878, George married Laura F. Garner in Illinois. Over the years, they had five children: Eugene Dawe, 1879; William Clyde, born 1881; Edith and Harry Lester (twins), born 1886; and Robert Stanley, born 1889.
Instead of continuing as a farmer, George DeGroot became a railroad employee, possibly for the famous Rock Island Line. For some years between 1886 and 1890, the DeGroots were in St. Louis, Missouri. By 1900, they were back in Rock Island County, Illinois, and George and his son Clyde were working as a baggage handlers.
In 1901, after 23 years of marriage, Laura DeGroot divorced George on the grounds of cruelty and infidelity. Not long thereafter, DeGroot seems to have come alone to Arizona.
He was living at 4th Avenue and Jackson near the railroad tracks when on December 13, 1903, he died of pulmonary tuberculosis. He was buried in Rosedale North, where he has a grave marker.
- by Donna L. Carr
Louise was the only child of Walter T. Gregory and his wife, Augusta Frances “Gussie” Russell. She was born around July or August and died in Yuma on December 20, 1903, of “stomach and kidney trouble”. Her parents brought her little casket to Phoenix for burial, because that had been Mrs. Gregory’s home and her parents were still living there.
By the time of Louise’s birth, her father Walter had already had a rather colorful life. The son of a hotelier, he had been born in frontier Cheyenne, Wyoming, in 1873 and had grown up in California, Tombstone and Tempe, Arizona. Walter was working as a newspaper reporter in Phoenix when the Spanish American War began, and he enlisted immediately in Company B, 1st U. S. Volunteer Cavalry, otherwise known as the “Rough Riders”.
That short war had scarcely concluded when Gregory reenlisted in Company K, 4th U. S. Cavalry to serve in the Philippines. Although generally in good health, he suffered recurrent bouts of malaria from his military service in the tropics. Upon his discharge, he went to New York for a brief period but returned to Arizona when his father died in Tucson.
Thereafter, Walter moved back to Phoenix where he met and married Augusta Frances “Gussie” Russell. In 1903, Walter’s former military commander, Alexander O. Brodie , by then territorial governor of Arizona, appointed Walter secretary of the territorial prison in Yuma. It was there that little Louise was born and died. Walter and Gussie divorced within the next few years.
Disillusioned with life out West, Walter moved back to New York, where he found work with his brother Will’s theatrical booking agency. Unfortunately, he succumbed to pneumonia on April 16, 1909. Because of his military service, he was interred in Arlington National Cemetery outside of Washington, D. C.
The parents of Walter’s ex-wife had by this time relocated to southern California, and she had joined them there. Gussie, or Frances as she was now calling herself, met and married Edmund J. Mulvihill, Jr., a railroad telegrapher. However, she died still relatively young in Los Angeles on May 31, 1927.
Martha Tannehill Evans was born in September, 1846, in Logan County, Ohio, the daughter of James Tannehill and Ruth Patterson. The Tannehills’ first two children were born in Ohio but, around 1847, the family had moved to Davis County, Iowa, where their last six children were born.
Possibly it was the promise of abundant farmland that attracted the Tannehills to Iowa, as James was a farmer and his sons became farmers.
On November 30, 1876, Martha married John Robert Evans in Davis County, Iowa. Surprisingly, she was thirty years old by then and probably would have been considered a ‘spinster’. However, since Martha’s younger sister Lovena was blind, perhaps she was needed at home until then
John Robert Evans was a farmer, like the Tannehills. A widower, he was twenty years older than Martha and had been married previously to Louisa Adeline Miller, who died in 1875. John Robert often appears in the public record as J. R. Evans.
Martha very likely raised J. R.’s two youngest children, and they did have a ‘late in life’ son of their own, Robert James, born in 1885 when J. R. was nearly sixty.
The Evanses farmed near Bloomfield, Iowa, until November 22, 1898, when they moved to Phoenix, Arizona. Martha’s younger brother Joseph Edgar Tannehill had moved there around 1896, and perhaps the Evanses found the idea of a warmer climate appealing as they grew older. Nor were they alone in that, as Martha’s widowed father and four more of her Tannehill siblings either accompanied them or joined them soon afterward in Arizona.
The Evanses were Presbyterian and Martha was active in church work during the last years of her life.
Martha died of pneumonia on December 15, 1903 at the family home about a mile west of the Indian School. She was buried in the family plot in City Loosley Cemetery, Block 6, Lot 5, next to her little step-grandson, Otto Evans.
- - by Donna L. Carr
Born April 14 1835 in Carroll County, Tennessee, Andrew Jackson Brawley was one of eight children fathered by Milton Braley (sic). His mother was Milton’s first wife, name unknown. Around 1840, the Braley family moved to Franklin County, Arkansas, and took up land there. After the first Mrs. Braley died sometime after 1843 (her last child was born then), Milton married a widow, Mary Catherine Green Moffett, in 1847. They had two more children.
The second Mrs. Braley seems to have brought a considerable amount of property to her new marriage. But Milton fell ill and died, probably early in 1852. His estate consisted of 320 acres of farmland, farm implements, quite a number of cattle and one male slave. Settling Milton’s financial affairs took years as lawyers worked out how to divide the assets between Milton’s heirs and Mary Catherine and the children of her first marriage to Mr. Moffett.
A guardian was initially appointed for Andrew and his younger brother Dennis but, by the time they reached the age of 21, they were living with their older brother Ephraim’s family.
Of the Braly siblings, only Andrew moved west, before the beginning of the Civil War. By 1865, Andrew—or A. J. Brawley, as he had taken to calling himself--was in Fresno, California, where he married Arza Jane Stroud on September 10th. Arza was the daughter of Ira Stroud and Rebecca Williams.
Brawley evidently knew cattle, as he became a successful rancher. When the 1870 federal census was taken, he was a stock raiser worth $2000. He and Arza had seven children in quick succession. Late in 1878, the Brawley family moved to Phoenix, Arizona, and it appears that the Strouds came with them.
Once in Phoenix, Brawley opened a general store and became a butcher. By 1882, he was supplementing his income by acting as night watchman and special constable. Mrs. Brawley was busy, too; early in 1884, she and her oldest daughter Alice had opened an ice cream parlor on Washington Street across from the Phoenix Hotel.
By 1884, Brawley was the proprietor of the Dublin Corral, where he boarded and rented horses. A little after 6 AM on December 5th, he was going about his work when he was stricken by a sudden heart attack and died at the age of 49. He was buried in City/Loosley Cemetery.
Brawley’s widow was left with several young children to raise. Fortunately, her parents were also in Phoenix and she could count on their support. In 1886, she married Eugene Bridgeman.
Arza died in Los Angeles on July 3, 1910, while visiting her adult children. Her remains were returned to Phoenix for burial next to her first husband in City/Loosley Cemetery.
- - by Donna L. Carr.
George Fremont Parks was born in California in 1856. His parents were Charles Parks and Irene Taylor, and he had a younger brother named Charles.
Following the death of George’s father, the Parks family moved to Phoenix, Arizona. In 1879, Mrs. Parks married George Patterson, an immigrant from Norway.
Young George Parks worked as a waiter at the Commercial Hotel in Phoenix during the winter months. During the summers, when there were fewer travelers lodging at the hotel, he would go up to Prescott to work. Like many local men, he was a member of the volunteer Phoenix Fire Department, Hose Company.
On October 12, 1882, George married Mary Agnes Thompson Lucas, but the marriage may have been of short duration, as nothing more is known about her.
On the
evening of December 10, 1888, after serving supper to the hotel’s guests,
George and three other waiters sat down to enjoy their own meal in the dining
room of the Commercial Hotel. They were
apparently talking and joking among themselves when the hotel’s Chinese cook,
Wong Lee, passed by. Thinking that they
were making fun of him, he made some profane remarks, to which George took
exception.
George and the cook took their dispute outdoors, where they probably exchanged a blow or two. Evidently George considered the incident resolved, for he came back to the dining room and resumed his seat. But the cook’s anger had not been appeased, for he followed George and, drawing a knife, stabbed him.
George exclaimed, “He’s knifed me; look out for him!” and ran into the bar where he seized a pistol and went after his assailant. However, Constable McDonald caught George as he collapsed and carried him back to the dining room. Dr. McGlasson was summoned, but the knife had penetrated to the heart. George lingered for two or three hours, remaining conscious long enough to bid farewell to his grief-stricken mother.
Wong Lee, George’s assailant, was swiftly apprehended and jailed amid muttered threats of lynching. Nevertheless, he stood trial in early February before Judge DeForest Porter and was adjudged guilty of manslaughter. Late in May, 1889, Wong Lee was conveyed to the penitentiary in Yuma to serve a six-year sentence.
George F. Parks was initially buried in City Loosley Cemetery. Scarcely a year later, his mother passed away and was buried next to him. In 1918, their remains, as well as those of George Patterson, were removed to Greenwood Cemetery.
- by Donna L. Carr
Amos Randal was born in Cattaraugus County, New York state,
about 1828. In 1849 he caught gold fever
and journeyed overland to California. However,
he seems not to have had much luck at mining and so turned to other
occupations.
In 1860, he was a single man living in Marysville, Yuba
County, California, and running a stationery store with two Lassiter
brothers. While there, he met and
married Clara Jane McGrew on July 14, 1862.
Their first child, Norina Katherine, was born in March, 1864.
During the Civil War, Randal supplemented his income from
the stationery store by serving in the militia as a recruiting officer. In June, 1863, he was commissioned a sergeant
major in the 2nd Battalion, 4th Brigade, California Militia. On April 22, 1865, with the war drawing to a
close, Randal enlisted in Company A, 4th California Infantry at the Presidio in
San Francisco. He went in as a 2nd
lieutenant and soon rose to the rank of captain. His military career turned out to be very
short, however, as his unit mustered out on November 30, 1865.
The California Great Register of 1867 recorded the Randals
living in Oakland, California. Son
Ernest Grant born in 1868. Another
daughter, Margaret “Daisy”, was born 1874 in Tulare, California. The federal census of 1880 found the Randals
living in Hills Ferry, Stanislaus County, California, where Randal was working
as a carpenter.
Around 1882, the family moved to Prescott, Arizona, and
Randal went into the undertaking business.
In April 1886, the Randals’ last child, Theodore, was born.
Moving to Phoenix in 1892, Randal became associated with the
undertaking firm of Mr. W. A. Davis.
Amos Randal then applied for an invalid pension, citing health issues,
but his application was rejected because his service had not begun until after
the Civil War had ended.
Around 1894, Randal contracted blood poisoning when he
stabbed his finger with an embalming needle.
He had several relapses which caused him much suffering. Due to his ongoing health problems, his
application for an invalid pension was finally approved in 1896.
On December 1, 1897, Randal was in Porter Cemetery,
assisting with the burial of Gustavus A. Kirtley, a Confederate veteran. As the mourners were leaving the grave,
Randal walked to his buggy, then suddenly fell to his knees, pitched forward on
his face and expired.
Dr. Wylie was summoned, but Randal was beyond help. A coroner’s jury decided that he had died of heart trouble, brought on by his bout of blood poisoning. Randal was interred two days later in Porter Cemetery, after services conducted by the local GAR post. Randal’s widow Clara Jane applied for and received a widow’s pension.
-by Donna L. Carr
