This photographic postcard is another “from the purged files at the Annie Wittenmyer Home.”
The photographer’s stamp, not visible in this reproduction, reads “Trompter, 520 Edmond St., St. Joseph, MO.”
The list of children at the Iowa Soldiers’ Orphans’ Home in the 1910 US Census for Davenport, Iowa (all of the postcards in the collection are marked “1904-1918”) includes only one brother-sister pair born in Missouri: George Francis, age 7, and May Frances Cyphers, age 12.
We have met May Frances “Mamie” Cyphers before. She was the recipient of a photo postcard sent to the “S.O. Home” by Emma Harper in May 1914 and the subject of an earlier blog post about this collection. Could she be the girl on the right in this postcard? Does she look to be about 5 years older than the boy on the left?
Whether or not the children in the image are Mamie and George Francis “Frank” Cyphers, we have learned more about the Cyphers family, as follows:
Mamie and Frank were the youngest of the four children born to George Walter and Marie Harriet (Donahoo) Cyphers. In the summer of 1906, all four children were ordered placed in the Orphans’ Home due to their parents’ neglect.
The family had returned to Davenport after living in Kansas City for about five years (they appear in the 1900 US and the 1905 Kansas state censuses for Wyandotte County). Apparently, they were found “living out under the trees in Camp McClellan” by the authorities. In December 1906, Harriet Cyphers allegedly abducted her “youngest offspring,” which would have been Frank, from the Home. [1]
Both parents perhaps struggled with alcohol addiction, as this newspaper item suggests:
Some part of the family may have reunited within the next year.
Harriet Cyphers passed away in September 1909, at the age of 37, after a long illness. She had endured much, including the death of her 18-year-old son, Walter Henry, just the year before. At his funeral, “six little boys from the Orphan’s Home were pallbearers.” [2]
Harriet and Walter had also lost their second child, Clarence Henry, at only 2 months of age. [3] The youngest, Frank (George Francis) would be sent to the Institution for the Feeble Minded Children in Glenwood, Iowa, (he is there in the 1915 Iowa state census) where he died at the age of 27. [4] Mamie and Eugene were the longest-lived of the Cyphers children, she passing in 1938 at age 40, and he in 1941 at age 48. Eugene served in the Infantry in the First World War and is buried at Rock Island National Cemetery. It appears that only Mamie carried on the family line through her son Harold Whitaker.
Father George Walter lived the longest. He died in 1933 at the age of 68.
(posted by Katie)
Sources: [1] Daily Times (Davenport, Iowa), December 7, 1906, page 11; [2] Daily Times (Davenport, Iowa), April 27, 1908, page 6; [3] Davenport Sunday Democrat, August 30, 1896, page 1; [4] Iowa, U.S., Death Records, 1880-1968, via AncestryLibrary.
