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Mooseheart and the Branchide Household, 1916 to 1952

Mooseheart, 1916 to 1923

David James Davis had been a founding, charter member of Moose Lodge No. 1453, and after his death it was the Lodge, not either family, that supported his children. The handwritten history states plainly that “there is no evidence of any support from either the Davis or Parish family”. By the family’s account, a Kate Weisner took the children in at times between 1916 and 1918. Three plans were weighed. The boy could go to the Hershey School and the girls to a state institution; the boy could go to Girard College, with the girls placed the same way; or the whole family, Harriet included, could go to Mooseheart, the Loyal Order of Moose’s home in Illinois. The family chose Mooseheart, but the move was delayed, because the home, opened only in 1913, could not yet take more children. Harriet herself was reportedly offered a job living and working at Mooseheart, and she turned it down.

On 20 May 1918 a doctor, whose name reads Bredt or Biedt, examined the whole family for the transfer. On 4 and 5 August 1918 the five children left Mahanoy City for Mooseheart. Two months later their mother married William J. Branchide.

Mooseheart had been dedicated on 27 July 1913, on the Fox River near Aurora, about forty miles west of Chicago, as the Moose fraternity’s home and school for the children of deceased members. Its children lived in residence halls and were given schooling, vocational training and farm work. The census of January 1920, at Batavia Township, Kane County, lists Thelma A. Davis, 7, Winifred A. Davis, 5, and David Davis, 9, all born in Pennsylvania, as wards of the institution. The child entered as “Halis E. Davis,” 4, is probably Gladys Elsie, whose age matches. In May 1919 David James’s sisters Ann, Elizabeth and Ethel visited the children at Mooseheart, so the Davis family kept in touch with them.

Robert, the youngest, died there, almost certainly on 11 November 1919. That day he had an operation for his tonsils, adenoids and circumcision, and he died of bleeding at 11:40 that night, aged three. Elizabeth D. Hollis of Chicago gave the information for his Illinois certificate, which names him Robert Matthew Davis, born on 22 February 1916 to David F. Davis and Harriet Adelaide Parrish. The Mooseheart physician signed it on 12 November, the date the family’s records give. The family’s records call him Robert George. His body was brought back to Mahanoy City and buried beside his father on 15 December 1919.

The Branchide Household, 1918 to 1952

On Wednesday, 2 October 1918, William J. Branchide, a machinist, married Harriet Adelaide Davis by license in Schuylkill County. The record names his parents as Jacob Branchide and Mary Houser, and hers as Charles Parrish and Eliz. Collins. In January 1920 the couple lived in Schuylkill County with William’s children Clifford, 19, Walter, 17, William, 12, and Verda, 6. William, Clifford and Walter all worked as coal-mine laborers. Clifford was also counted that month in his grandmother Mary’s household in Philadelphia.

Pearl Zoe Branchide was born on Wednesday, 3 November 1920, at Samaritan Hospital, Philadelphia, when her mother was 40. Her birth certificate gives her father, 44, as an engineer living at 3457 N. 3rd Street, and her mother’s occupation as housekeeper. It gives five as the number of her mother’s children, which fits Pearl and the four Davis children then living. Dr. Bottomly of the hospital attended, and the birth was filed on 12 November 1920. A certified copy made in 1929, most likely of the same certificate, gives Harriet’s birthplace as England. Samaritan Hospital, at Broad and Ontario Streets in North Philadelphia, had been founded in 1892 by Russell Conwell’s Baptist Temple congregation, and became Temple University Hospital in 1929. Pearl’s Social Security record also names her parents as William J. Branchide and Harriet A. Parrish.

The family kept its births and marriages in a German Luther Bible (“Die Bibel … Martin Luthers”), with English register pages headed “FAMILY RECORD,” written in several hands, with dates from the 1870s on.

On 23 August 1923 the four Davis children came from Mooseheart to the Branchide house at 3463 N. 3rd Street, Philadelphia, and to their half-sister Pearl, who was not yet three. David, the only boy, was soon at work. In October 1925 he had a work certificate (no. 10533A, dated 1 October) as a delivery boy for the Kee Lox Manufacturing Company, 1012 Chestnut Street, six days a week except Wednesdays, when he went to school at the J. B. Hart school on Wishart Street. He received a tenth-grade school certificate dated 1 October 1926, and from 11 October 1926, at sixteen, he worked at the John B. Stetson hat factory, where George Washington Wesemann, Pearl’s future father-in-law, was a hatter for much of his life. On 7 October 1927, at seventeen, a court made David an “Emancipated Minor” so that he could enlist in the U.S. Army. Nothing is known of him after that.

In April 1930 the family rented 200 Erie Avenue, Philadelphia, for $90 a month. William, 56, was a laborer in a steel mill. With him were Harriet, 50, born in England; his son William Burton, entered as “B. William,” 22; Pearl, 9; and three boarders, Thelma, 17, Winifred, 16, and Gladys, 15, Davis. No relationship to Harriet is written for the girls, but their ages fit, and they were probably her daughters. Gladys married Edward H. Smith and died on 14 August 1933, aged 18. She was buried in the German Protestant Cemetery at Mahanoy City.

In 1940 William, Harriet and Pearl were still together in Philadelphia. William was a fireman engineer in an office building, Harriet an ironer in the laundry of a city hospital, and Pearl, at nineteen, an inspector in ball-bearing manufacturing. On 22 June 1940 Pearl married Elmer Fredrick Wesemann; their life together is told in the George and Fredericka's Family, 1860 to 1907 section.

Harriet died at Doctors Hospital, Philadelphia, on 19 October 1944, of cancer of the colon. Her home was then 3946 North 5th Street, the address Elmer gave when he came home from the war in 1945. The informant, of the same address, was entered as Pearl Neumann, a doubtful reading, and gave Harriet’s parents as “not known.” Harriet was buried on 24 October 1944 in the German Protestant Cemetery at Mahanoy City, the burial ground of her first husband, her daughter Gladys, her son Robert, her second husband and his first wife.

In 1950 William, 76, was living with his son Walter’s family in Philadelphia. He died at Norristown, Montgomery County, on 9 April 1952, aged 78, and was buried at Mahanoy City. His death record names his father as Jacob Branchide, and his memorial names both his wives. One stone in the German Protestant Cemetery marks the family plot. “BRANCHIDE” runs across the top, and below it are “WILLIAM J. 1874 – 1952,” “HARRIET A. 1880 – 1944,” “GLADYS E. SMITH 1915 – 1933” and “ROBERT G. DAVIS 1916 – 1920.” The names are clear; the years on the lower lines are weathered and are probably as given here. No relationships are written, but the stone probably puts Harriet’s Davis children Gladys and Robert in one plot with William and Harriet.