The Northwest Iowa Genealogical Society will meet Saturday, April 15 at 1:30 PM at the fourth-floor study hall of the Plymouth County Historical Museum, 335 1st Avenue SW in Le Mars. Following a brief business meeting, guest speaker Ray Scott from Darlington, Wisconsin will give a presentation on the Shade family of Kingsley. Refreshments will follow. The public is welcome to attend, and there is no charge for admission.
Saturday’s program will be Scott’s second to the group. In 2021, he shared his findings on a farm in Marion County that once belonged to his great grandfather, Silas Scott. At the time, he was seeking a book published in 1984 by Chloris Shade Ruble, a distant relative of his from Kingsley. Since then, he acquired a copy of it at the Kingsley Public Library.
Titled “Span The Years With Me; From Pioneers To Shadeland,” it contains pictures and stories about the family of Julius Shade, who died in 1949 at the age of 81 after living most of his adult life in Kingsley. A 1984 story in the Kingsley Times relates that the “Shade ranch directly north of Kingsley on C-66 was a showplace of Hereford, Duroc and Jersey livestock.” His business partner was Edward Edmonds, who was Ray Scott’s great grandmother’s brother.
Scott’s journey to the discovery of the Shade connection to his family began when he became acquainted with a third cousin on ancestry.com. That cousin shared a photo of a family gathering in the forefront of a stately home. Coincidentally, a second cousin happened to have the same picture, but none of the cousins knew the identity of the people in that vintage photograph. Finally, Scott’s digging yielded a Le Mars Sentinel article that solved the mystery: It was taken during a wedding gathering at the Edmonds home in Marcus, Iowa.
Among the people shown in the photo are Edward Edmonds, Julius Shade and Silas Scott. That finding led to Ray Scott’s pursuit of further information about his extended family. He learned that Edmonds’ wife Frances was Julius Shade’s sister. Also, the house in the background was built by Edmonds in 1898 and still stands today. Happily, it is now undergoing reconstruction.
Scott’s talk on Saturday will include more surprising discoveries relating to his own family’s connections to the Shades, including the ownership of a family farm. Moreover, he will relate details about Le Mars history that tie in with his studies. As with all research, his work is ongoing. His message to other family historians is that information about their ancestors can be gleaned through archives of other, somehow connected, families. And to not discard old photos of people yet to be identified.