♂Turner H. Sampson

Turner H. Sampson (22 September 1870 – 30 March 1914) was a Kansas-born son of a Lawrence hotel family who, at twenty-one, took his stepfather to court over the handling of his mother’s estate. He later married in Chicago, is placed in Montana by an index of the 1910 census, and has a death record at Los Angeles. He was the only child of Sybil A. Webster (1833–1890) and a nephew of her sister Eldora M. Webster (1846–1913), the great-grandmother of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006).

Early life

He was born in Kansas on 22 September 1870, while the family was living at Lawrence, Douglas County. He was the only child of Turner Sampson (1814–1880), a New Hampshire-born hotel and livery keeper who had been the first treasurer of Douglas County, and his wife Sybil A. Webster, a Maine woman from Kingfield. According to his father’s obituary, his parents had also adopted and raised two girls: Julia, who died soon after her marriage, and Florance, who was still in the household in 1880. His father died on 21 January 1880, and the obituary named among the mourners “H. Turner Sampson, now about nine years old”. That June the census found him as “Henry T. Sampson”, aged nine, in his widowed mother’s household at the Lawrence House, the hotel she carried on after her husband’s death. His own papers are signed “Turner H. Sampson”, and his death record gives his name in full as Turner Henry Sampson.

In January 1882 his mother married T. A. Stanley, and the family moved to Stanley’s farm at Osawatomie, in Miami County, Kansas.

The guardianship and the lawsuit

His mother died on 9 January 1890, without a will. Her husband, as administrator, swore that her only heirs were himself and “Henry T Sampson, son, aged 19 years”. The son, still a minor, petitioned the probate court of Miami County in February 1890 to appoint A. A. Cooper of Lawrence as his guardian, stating that he had been 19 on 22 September 1889. The petition put the estate of the minor at “supposed to be $1,500.00”. Among the assets, the administrator’s first annual account lists a $500 note of J. C. Webster, which it records as turned over to the guardian. The guardian’s final account, dated 12 October 1894, charges himself $786.42 in all, lists $18 for a monument, and shows payments “to Turner” in installments.

On 31 August 1892, less than a year after he came of age, he applied to the court through his attorneys, as “son and heir at law”, for a citation requiring T. A. Stanley to show why he had not returned a true inventory of the estate’s personal property. The matter was heard on four days that autumn, with Stanley examined as a witness, and was continued to 29 December 1892 for argument. The court file does not record the outcome. Stanley’s final account shows that he paid his own lawyer’s fee “on hearing of application on motion of Turner H Sampson”.

Marriage and later life

On 15 September 1897 a Chicago newspaper listed a marriage licence issued to Turner H. Sampson, 27, and Carrie Raines, 26. The Cook County marriage record dates the marriage itself to 30 December 1897, at Chicago. Carrie Raines (1869–1960) was born in Indiana. His uncle’s family memorial, published in 1904, says only that he “resides in Kansas”. No census of 1900 has been found for the couple.

An index of the 1910 census places him at Corvallis, Ravalli County, Montana, aged 41 and married, one of eleven people listed as employees in the household of Clyde and Salinda Slagle. Carrie, 41, was with him, and so was an Edwin Sampson, 15, born in Indiana. Edwin was born about 1895, two years before the marriage, and no record found names his parents; no child of Turner H. Sampson is named in any record.

An indexed California death record gives his death at Los Angeles on 30 March 1914, aged 43, and a Find a Grave memorial places his burial in Inglewood Park Cemetery^W. The death record names his parents as Turner H. Sampson and Sybel Webster, which ties the Chicago bridegroom and the Los Angeles death to the Kansas boy of the census and the court papers.

Notes

A memorial compilation for Carrie says that she was married three times, that she had been widowed, and that she married Percival Stuter at Los Angeles on 17 November 1910. That does not sit with the census of April 1910, which shows her married and living with Turner, nor with his death in 1914. The records found do not show whether the couple divorced. In 1940 she was living in Los Angeles as the mother-in-law of a widowed Mrs. M. H. Taylor, which points to a son from a marriage before Turner. She died in Orange County on 9 February 1960 and is also buried at Inglewood Park.

An online family tree gives his birth as 1862; his own sworn statement, the census of 1880 and his father’s obituary all place it in 1870.