What I Know Now

I never knew Henry MacLennan. He was born on February 17, 1875 and he died on April 14, 1924, long before my birth in 1958. He was only forty-nine years old. My mother was told that he died of a stroke. My grandmother, his eldest daughter, would have been twenty-one at the time, and the youngest of her three sisters, my great-aunt Faith, would have been nine or ten.

Above is a photo of him, and my great-grandmother, Dimies "Camilla" Knaggs MacLennan. My mother always says I look like her, and even I can see the resemblance in our profiles. I've been unable to find a marriage record for them, but we think they were married in 1900, three years before my grandmother's birth. My mother thinks that this is a Spanish-American war photo.  It's much more likely that this is his military photo from WWI, since it was joined with hers and they were married then. He should have been in medical school during the Spanish-American war.

Henry was a physician who studied at Detroit Medical College, now Wayne State University College of Medicine, and graduated circa 1900. This coincides with the year we think he married and makes sense to me. Based on my current research, the school began requiring four, rather than two, years of study at around that time, which would have him graduating at age twenty-five.

Address records put him and Camilla in Battle Creek, Michigan after graduation. Mom says he was a doctor for a lumber mill, and then a country doctor in Bellevue, Michigan. Bellevue is just outside of Battle Creek. My great-aunt Helen, his second daughter, in her bio, listed living in Battle Creek, Hickory Corners, Three Rivers, and then Bellevue, where she graduated from high school. Now that I think about it, when I went to Helen's funeral, she was buried in a cemetery way out in the country, near Olivet, so she may have been buried with her parents, and it may have been in Bellevue. I'm not sure, because I followed the funeral procession, and it was winter in Michigan so it was really frickin' cold.

Anyway, those are the facts I have at the moment, before I go through his papers, with just a tiny bit of internet research thrown in. Family legend has it that he lost an arm in France when he was a military doctor in WWI, and that he was an inventor. They say he invented a flush toilet. I'm sure it wasn't THE flush toilet, or somebody in my family would be rich right now, maybe even me. This is not the case.

In the next edition of "Finding Henry", I'll be sorting the postcards he sent Camilla from France by date and scanning in the first one or two. The address I've seen so far is to Mrs. H. E. MacLennan, Bellevue, Michigan, so we know they were there while he was deployed.