Second Great-Uncle Sherman S. Foutz

Sherman Foutz Family: Latest Blogs Recap

It’s been a revealing two weeks as we took a closer look at the lives of great-great uncle Sherman Foutz and his descendants.

We’ve answered a few long-standing questions, and uncovered aspects we didn’t even know to wonder about.

Here, a quick recap of the revelations revealed in the latest newsletter series, mainly through new research on newspapers.com, verified and deepened with ancestry.com digging.

1. We revealed the job opportunities that brought Sherman, wife Lizzie, and children Oscar and Grace from Reading to Harrisburg, Pa.
2. We uncovered the death announcement that preceded Sherman Foutz’s 1915 obituary, our first inkling that Oscar Foutz outlived his father — and spent time in faraway Arizona.
3. A 1969 newspaper feature on daughter Grace (Foutz) Chaney, a year before she died, chronicled her teaching career and revealed new details about how she met husband Fred, and that Oscar may have lived until 1945, 30 years after father Sherman’s death.
4. The circumstances of Grace and Fred’s meeting, as well as her fishy habit of lying about her birth year to the point of it being erroneously carved in her gravestone, led to additional research, and new evidence about why she remained childless: she and Fred may have been related — first cousins once removed.
5. We traced what we could of Lizzie Foutz’s long and apparently lonely life without Sherman, to the point where she vanishes in the 1940 census some five years before her death. She is not found in the homes of her surviving children or grandchildren.
6. We followed Oscar Foutz’s wayward path further than ever before, discovering his athletic pursuits and continued service in the National Guard, noting his divorce from wife Florence in 1917, and her remarriage, new motherhood and possible residence in the Pennsylvania State Lunatic Hospital, as well as her 1938 death and Oscar’s possible surviving past his mother’s death in 1945, when he may have resided in Charlotte, North Carolina.
7. Finally, we learned more about the fates of Oscar and Florence’s sons, Ralph and Sherman, as they made the local papers in Harrisburg, Reading and Hagerstown, Maryland for a series of youthful indiscretions that ran the gamut from petty theft to armed stickups to robbing the homes of their grandparents and aunt — and serving time for it.