Doing genealogy research, you never know what information on your family you will find or where you will find it. This is one of those pieces of information I found in a place I would not have thought to look.
For eleven years, I have been looking for Alfred Hampton Dodge. He was born November 25, 1877 in Gardiner, Maine, the second child of Nathaniel T. Dodge & Fannie Harris Stevens. In 1880, he went to Buena Vista, Colorado with his family and grew up there. He is listed in the 1880 U.S. Census, the 1885 Colorado Census and the 1900 U.S. Census. In the 1900 U.S. Census, his occupation is listed as mining ore. After 1900, the trail went cold. The only thing I found is that he was living in California in 1919, according to his mother's obituary. Following that lead didn't turn up any records and left me back where I started.
A few years ago, I found out that his brother Sherman was sentenced to prison in 1909. When I received a copy of Sherman's prison record, there was a health form that asked about the general state of health of his siblings. The form only listed the ages of Sherman's siblings. For the age that corresponds to Alfred, Sherman answers 'Do not know.'
I then decided to go back and look at the 1910 Census. The 1910 Census lists the number of living children that were born to Fannie. When I first found the 1910 Census, I wasn't sure if it said that she had eight or nine living children. If it had said she had eight living children, I thought this was in error. After looking more closely at the 1910 Census, I found that this was no error. Fannie was listed as having only eight living children.
When I had found Sherman, I realized that I had now found Fannie's eight living children listed in the 1910 Census. Now the question was: 'What happened to Alfred?' 'Where did he go?' 'Why aren't there nine living children?'
I now have found some light to shed on these questions. These answers have come from a place I would not have thought to look: newspapers from Salida, Colorado. I recently took a trip to Salida and decided to look through some of the newspapers there. While there, I was told that the Salida newspapers through 1916 were now online. I took the opportunity to look through the Salida newspapers that have been published online and found these two articles from March of 1902.
Article from The Salida Mail, March 14, 1902
Article from The Salida Record, March 21, 1902
The article from The Salida Mail lays out the timeline leading up to his disappearance. He was last seen on the morning of Monday, March 10, 1902, having arrived from the town of Tin Cup the evening before. A search for Alfred was conducted without any results. The Salida Record references an article that was published in The Buena Vista Democrat; however, this particular publication of The Buena Vista Democrat does not exist.
Although these newspaper articles finally shed some light on what happened to Alfred and explain why there is no record of him after 1900, they still leave a number of unanswered questions, such as: 'Where did he disappear to?' 'Why did he leave?' 'What happened to him?' 'Did he leave and suffer an unfortunate accident - or deliberately take his own life?'
***DECEMBER 2022 UPDATE*** I just found another newspaper article for Alfred's disappearance. This newspaper article was published in The Rocky Mountain News, one of the Denver newspapers, on March 13, 1902. This newspaper was just published on the Colorado Historical Newspapers website. The newspaper article, although brief, states that his father, N.T. Dodge, went to St. Elmo to help search for his missing son. Again, it is unknown if he was ever found.
The Rocky Mountain News; March 13, 1902
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