Searching for ABW

First and Broadway, Los Angeles, 1906 - USC Digital Archives

Recently [The Man I Love] has been researching his ancestry. I have mixed feelings about this. My mother has been an avid genealogist; painstakingly researched my father's family for many years, tracking down obscure distaff relatives in distant county courthouses across the south. She's gone off it recently, but in years past it wasn't unusual for her to buttonhole you, going on at length about someone whose birth certificate had been recorded as being located Here, but it turned out that it was another relative entirely and the real record was actually discovered There. This kind of immersion in detail is - as I have said before - a family disorder.

So I was a little alarmed when [The Man I Love] got into this. But - so far - it's been fun

Mom was always an Old-School genealogist, working without a computer. [The Man I Love] has been using Ancestry.com. And he's gathered a lot of information about his grandfather, who he did not know well, having never met him.

His grandfather, who I'll call ABW, was born in Iowa in 1873. Working in the newspaper business was in his blood - at the age of five, he began playing with movable type in his father's shop. In the summer of 1887, he started typesetting during summer break, and then his dad bought the paper and he continued working. He traveled around the region, working for local newspapers.

In 1895, at 22, he married an Iowa girl, Oro Cooper, and five years later they set out for Colorado Springs. They stayed there for 12 years, then ABW took a job with the Santa Barbara Independent newspaper in California. By this time, there were two kids - [The Man I Love's] father, and his aunt.

In 1915 he went into the printing business for himself in Los Angeles. But in August 1918, he moved the family to Hilo, Hawaii to work for the Hilo Tribune. He stayed there until 1921, when he returned to Los Angeles.

Near the end of his life, he wrote an essay about his life, and sent it to a genealogist for inclusion in a volume about the W family.

But one thing he doesn't talk about in his essay is the fact that he split with his wife and kids.

When ABW returned to California in 1921, he returned alone. Oro and the kids made their own journey, moving back to Santa Barbara, while ABW moved to Los Angeles - and lived in several locations until he died in 1946 at the age of 73.

Because the family split up, we don't have much personal information about ABW. No pictures. Not many stories. So as we tour of the places he lived in Los Angeles, we can look for our own stories. Come join us.